NBMQ: Are there any recurring themes that run through your fiction?
Leonard: There might be, but I’m never aware of it. I don’t begin with a theme. If someone were to ask me what is the theme of Glitz, I’d have to stop and think, or re-read it to determine if I’m unconsciously doing anything beyond telling a story. Is there a theme? I don’t know. The New York Times headline for the review of Unknown Man #89 was “Decent Men in Trouble.” That’s probably as close as I would venture to describing my approach. Ordinary people who get into some kind of a scrape. How do they get out of it? I never know. I never have any idea how my book is going to end. I even think of Stick, in Swag, as a decent guy, even though he’s into that life. In Switch, I certainly didn’t know how it was going to end. I knew in Swag that they were going to be arrested, that they were going to fail, but I wasn’t sure how. In Switch, it was kind of a tricky ending. I come up with tricky endings here and there, but I never see them coming until I get there. In LaBrava, when I was about thirty pages from the end, I said to my wife, Joan, “Okay, here are the three ways this book can end. These are the three things that could happen to Jean Shaw. She could be arrested; she could die; she could get away with it.” It had to be one of those. My wife said, “What if...” and gave me a fourth option. I thought, Oh, my God. That’s perfect. And it was the one I used.
NBMQ: You’ve said that you write to be read. You write to entertain. Do you have any image of your reader, the person you are writing for while you are writing?
Leonard: No, I don’t. Because I don’t picture a particular reader. I think by now I have nearly as many women as men who read my work. At least more than half the letters are from women, though I do think my books appeal more to men. When I’m interviewed one day by George Will and by Pete Hamill the next — who would appear to be poles apart in their attitudes, and yet both enjoy my work — I think: This is wonderful that I can appeal to a wide range of readers. Ideally the author wants to sell books, expand his readership, without getting caught up in the actual business of selling them. I’m happy to see Glitz on best-seller lists, but I hope to God I never take it too seriously. The whole idea of how I work is to be very relaxed in telling the story, to do it my own way. I certainly can’t aim this book at a list — picking details that would make it more popular, appeal to more people. That’s the worst thing I could do. I’ve got to tell my own story in my own relaxed way, with the primary purpose of pleasing myself, then hope that there are other people who enjoy it too. And that does seem to be happening now. But if I had no more readers than before, I’d still write. It’s what I do.
Elmore Leonard
Excerpt from LaBrava
Reviewing LaBrava, Alan Cheuse wrote: “the sleazy, decadent beach-front façades, mental health stations, go-go clubs and water-soaked immoralities of contemporary south Miami Beach, where antique widows cross paths with young hustlers fresh out of Cuban prisons... Elmore Leonard has the feel of it; he makes us feel it — and the characters, whom we know as much by their dialogue as their actions...”
In the second chapter from LaBrava that follows, Leonard demonstrates this basic element of his talent.
“I’m going to tell you a secret I never told anybody around here,” Maurice said, his glasses, his clean tan scalp shining beneath the streetlight. “I don’t just manage the hotel I own it. I bought it, paid cash for it in 1951. Right after Kefauver.”
Joe LaBrava said, “I thought a woman in Boca owned it. Isn’t that what you tell everybody?”
“Actually the lady in Boca owns a piece of it. Fifty-eight she was looking for an investment.” Maurice Zola paused. “Fifty-eight or it might’ve been ’59. I remember they were making a movie down here at the time. Frank Sinatra.”
They had come out of the hotel, the porch lined with empty metal chairs, walked through the lines of slow-moving traffic to the beach side of the street where Maurice’s car was parked. LaBrava was patient with the old man, but waiting, holding the car door open, he hoped this wasn’t going to be a long story. They could be walking along the street, the old man always stopped when he wanted to tell something important. He’d stop in the doorway of Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue and people behind them would have to wait and hear about bustout joints where you could get rolled in the old days, or how you could tell a bookie when everybody on the beach was wearing resort outfits. “You know how?” The people behind them would be waiting and somebody would say, “How?” Maurice would say, “Everybody wore their sport shirts open usually except bookies. A bookie always had the top button buttoned. It was like a trademark.” He would repeat it a few more times waiting for a table. “Yeah, they always had that top button buttoned, the bookies.
“Edward G. Robinson was in the picture they were making. Very dapper guy.” Maurice pinched the knot of his tie, brought his hand down in a smoothing gesture over his pale blue, tropical sports jacket. “You’d see ’em at the Cardozo, the whole crew, all these Hollywood people, and at the dog track used to be down by the pier, right on First Street. No, it was between Biscayne and Harley.”
“I know... You gonna get in the car?”
“See, I tell the old ladies I only manage the place so they don’t bug me. They got nothing to do, sit out front but complain. Use to be the colored guys, now it’s the Cubans, the Haitians, making noise on the street, grabbing their purses. Graubers, they call ’em, momzers, loomps. ‘Run the loomps off, Morris. Keep them away from here, and the nabkas!’ That’s the hookers. I’m starting to sound like ’em, these almoonas with the dyed hair. I call ’em my bluebirds, they love it.”
“Let me ask you,” LaBrava said, leaving himself open but curious about something. “The woman we’re going to see, she’s your partner?”
“The lady we’re gonna rescue, who I think’s got a problem,” Maurice said, looking up at the hotel, one hand on the car that was an old-model Mercedes with vertical twin headlights, the car once cream-colored but now without lustre. “That’s why I mention it. She starts talking about the hotel you’ll know what she’s talking about. I owned the one next door, too, but I sold it in ’68. Somebody should’ve tied me to a toilet, wait for the real estate boom.”
“What, the Andrea? You owned that, too?”
“It used to be the Esther, I changed the name of both of ’em. Come here.” Maurice took LaBrava by the arm, away from the car. “The streetlight, you can’t see it good. All right, see the two names up there? Read ’em so they go together. What’s it say?”
There were lighted windows along the block of three — and four-story hotels, pale stucco in faded pastels, streamlined moderne facing the Atlantic from a time past: each hotel expressing its own tropical deco image in speed lines, wraparound corners, accents in glass brick, bas relief palm trees and mermaids.
“It says the Andrea,” LaBrava said, “and the Delia Robbia.”
“No, it don’t say the Andrea and the Delia Robbia.” Maurice held onto LaBrava’s arm, pointing now. “Read it.”