Glitz
Page 33
Amis:In a famous essay, Tom Wolfe said that the writers were missing all the real stories that were out there. And that they spent too much time searching for inspiration and should spend ninety-five percent of their time sweating over research. The result was a tremendously readable book, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now you, sir, have a full-time researcher.
Leonard:Yes, Gregg Sutter. He can answer any of your questions that I don’t know.
Amis:Were you inspired by the research he put into this book?
Leonard:He got me everything I needed to know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from Arizona to East Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had been in business over 100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger book and copied it and faxed it to me.
Amis:Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?
Leonard:No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in Valdez Is Coming, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.
Amis:And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?
Leonard:I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.
Amis:The really bad guys.
Leonard:Yeah, the really bad guys. . . .
Amis:Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?
Leonard:It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.
Amis:Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]
[Applause]
Editor’s note: Martin Amis is the author of many novels — including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train — and many works of nonfiction, including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.
About the Author
Elmore Leonard has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Be Cool. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Valdez Is Coming, and Rum Punch (as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan, with his wife.
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Praise and Acclaim
ELMORE LEONARD
GLITZ
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
“Smashing and satisfying . . . After finishing Glitz, I went out and bought everything by Elmore Leonard I could find. . . . [Leonard] moves from low comedy to high action to a couple of surprisingly tender love scenes with a pro’s unobtrusive ease and the impeccable rhythms of a born entertainer.”
Stephen King, New York Times Book Review
“Very good indeed . . . No one else working the suspense genre quite so fleshes out each and every character, and no one else is such a master of street dialogue.”
Chicago Tribune
“Leonard’s cinematic grasp of scene and setting, his ability to arouse within us a helpless sympathy for even the lowest of his characters, his quirky pacing and plot twists, and his sly humor and artfully oddball prose sear our eyeballs and keep the pages turning.”
Miami Herald
“A giant among writers of crime fiction.”
Columbus Dispatch
“The hottest thriller writer in the U.S.”
Time
“Elmore Leonard’s pen is meatier than the sword--as sudden and stark as a rabbit punch, a slug in the gut. . . . In Glitz, as in his other books, there is a street wit, a cutting edge of authenticity, but little glamour. . . . It is the mark of the author’s craft that his characters do not seem to be created, ‘written.’ They simply are there, stalking, posturing, playing, loving, scheming, and we watch and listen and are fascinated. And appalled, yes, or approving, but always absorbed. They never let us off the hook.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Elmore Leonard is the Alexander the Great of crime fiction.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“His books defy classification. . . . What Leonard does is write fully realized novels, using elements of the classic American crime novel and populating them with characters so true and believable you want to read their lines aloud to someone you really like.”
Dallas Morning News
“What a trip . . . Leonard makes all the right moves in Glitz. . . . We are swept inevitably toward a satisfying conclusion.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“When Elmore Leonard’s people start talking, I can’t help myself, I have to listen.”
Lawrence Block
“First-rate . . . By any standard, ‘Dutch’ Leonard is a rare find. . . . Elmore Leonard’s world is like no other in literature, and there’s no better example than Glitz.”
Bergen Record
“Leonard has learned a thing or two about getting the reader’s full attention. . . . You almost have to read it twice--the first time fast to find out what happens, the second time to savor it. . . . So smooth is the weld between action, character, and dialogue that one hesitates to try to crack it open with analysis. The talk is so true and tough and dirty that it sounds as if it had been wiretapped; the people are bizarre in a way that is absolutely inarguable; the action gathers speed because it almost invariably surprises us, and when we do anticipate a confrontation, it’s always better than we imagined it. . . . Though every tough-guy writer from Ernest Hemingway to George V. Higgins has helped to blaze the trail Mr. Leonard travels, he’s brought the sound of the American vernacular to a place it’s never been before.”
New York Times
“The prose
[is] fresh and true.”
Washington Post Book World
“A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”
The New Yorker
“Entertaining . . . More action than Riders of the Purple Sage . . . Leonard’s star is still rising. . . . The complex Glitz plot works itself out to the satisfaction of just about everyone except the losers. . . . Elmore Leonard grinds out books at an accelerating pace by following a complex and demanding formula. It is called good writing.”
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“Glitz is nasty. . . . And yet there is a sweetness and rightness about Leonard’s touch and timing. And his women are great. . . . Read it carefully, and you will come away knowing something about . . . Leonard’s craft. His strongest hand is comedy. The humor is in ‘what they talk like’ and in situations that involve a nice blend of the improbable and the inevitable.”
Christian Science Monitor
“The guy keeps turning these things out, and damned if everyone doesn’t read better than the last.”
New York Daily News
“The King Daddy of crime novelists.”
Seattle Times
“Leonard gets better and better and better. He makes the rest of us mystery writers green with envy.”
Tony Hillerman
“Elmore Leonard is one of the best active writers of suspense fiction. . . . Glitz will be welcomed by his fans, and would be a good introduction to Leonard for those unfortunates who have not yet made his acquaintance. . . . As usual, Leonard’s characters are expertly drawn, if sparingly portrayed, but he can capture a person’s essence in a few words and his ability to write dialogue that captures the way people speak is matched only by George V. Higgins.”
United Press International
“The finest thriller writer alive.”
Village Voice
“Elmore Leonard is the best crud and crime writer going. . . . His strengths are lively incident, sense of place and milieu, and dirty demonic talk.”
Boston Globe
“No one writes better dialogue. No one conveys society’s seedier or marginal characters more convincingly. . . . Leonard’s sardonic view of the world proves immensely entertaining, and not a little thought-provoking.”
Detroit Free Press
Books by Elmore Leonard
The Bounty Hunters
The Law at Randado
Escape from Five Shadows
Last Stand at Saber River
Hombre
The Big Bounce
The Moonshine War
Valdez Is Coming
Forty Lashes Less One
Mr. Majestyk
52 Pickup
Swag
Unknown Man #89
The Hunted
The Switch
Gunsights
Gold Coast
City Primeval
Split Images
Cat Chaster
Stick
LaBrava
Glitz
Bandits
Touch
Freaky Deaky
Killshot
Get Shorty
Maximum Bob
Rum Punch
Pronto
Riding the Rap
Out of Sight
Cuba Libre
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories
Be Cool
Pagan Babies
Tishomingo Blues
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
GLITZ. Copyright © 1985 by Elmore Leonard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2002 ISBN: 9780061841811
First HarperTorch paperback printing: October 2002
First HarperCollins trade paperback printing: May 1998
First William Morrow hardcover printing: March 1983
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