PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
If you're looking for a good book to help while away the dark days of winter, I suggest When the Women Come Out To Dance (William Morrow, $24.95), a new collection of short stories by Elmore Leonard, the Detroit-based crime writer. You can find fancier stylists, but no American writing today does a better job of evoking the tacky demimonde populated by drifters, scam artists, mobsters, gamblers, whores, and all the marginally respectable citizens who are their customers -- or prey.
Leonard is one of those man's-man writers whose bare-bones style is influenced by old-fashioned (out-of-fashion, actually) male storytellers such as Ernest Hemingway, John O'Hara, and John Steinbeck. In an article for The New York Times last year, Leonard laid out 10 rules of good writing that could easily have been penned by Papa Hemingway himself. Every one was about what NOT to include in a story. Among them: Avoid prologues, use exclamation points sparingly, never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue, never use an adverb to modify the verb "said." At the end, Leonard added an 11th rule that summed up the other 10: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
CLOONEY AND J. LO. Leonard's hard-boiled tales have long been a cult favorite of smart-set novelists and hip young Hollywood auteurs. Quentin Tarantino's 1997 movie Jackie Brown was based on the Leonard novel Rum Punch, and 1998's Out of Sight, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was adapted from the Leonard novel of the same name. (The latter film is worth seeing for the loopy love affair between George Clooney, who plays a smooth-talking bank robber, and Jennifer Lopez, who plays cop Karen Sisco. J. Lo's character makes another appearance in the new story collection.) The English novelist Martin Amis has gone so far as to declare Leonard "a literary genius."
One reason for such high praise is that anyone who has ever aspired to write a novel (about three-quarters of the population, as far as I can tell) will be thrilled by the skill with which Leonard constructs stories. Nobody writes dialogue better. He uses very little description in his stories and none of the windy exposition you'll sometimes find in works by other great crime writers, such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Leonard's plots unfold almost entirely through dialogue, which is no small feat considering some of the semiliterate lowlifes who populate his stories.
For instance, in a story called Tenkiller from the new collection, a Hollywood stuntman returns to his family's pecan farm to discover that the caretaker he left in charge has become senile. A cabal of criminals has taken over, and the patriarch of the criminal family gets arrested. Most writers would simply tell the reader it happened. Leonard reveals the arrest almost incidentally in a snippet of tough-guy talk over the phone between the man's two nasty sons:
First son: "They got the headlight beams on the house, lightnin' it up. The deputies are wearing vests and shotguns, like they expect we're armed. Daddy's saying, 'I never detained nobody. The hell you talking about.'" Second son: "Don't even know he's wanted. Been for five years." First son: "You coming?" Second son: "For what, kiss him goodbye?"
YEARNING. As is obvious in that exchange, Leonard is devoid of sentimentality. Another distinguishing characteristic of his writing is the way it describes today's media-saturated world, where every character -- be they in casinos, trailer parks, or even Wal-Mart stores -- seems to be trying to emulate a movie star, and conversation is peppered with brand names and references to TV shows. Characters often yearn for wealth and fame.
Leonard "understands the postmodern world -- the world of wised-up rabble and zero authenticity," wrote Amis in his collection The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2002. Amis wrote further of Leonard: "His characters are equipped not with obligingly suggestive childhoods or case histories, but with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies, talk shows, and advertising jingles, their dreams and dreads mediated and secondhand."
Leonard also has a sly sense of humor and a keen eye for the creepy. For instance, Tishomingo Blues, the best-selling crime novel that came out last year, is about a daredevil performer who dives from an 80-foot ladder into a nine-foot-deep swimming pool in the parking lot of a Mississippi casino. One day, while standing at the top of the ladder preparing to practice his dives, he witnesses a murder, and then listens -- alone, completely vulnerable and clad only in a bathing suit -- while two murderous thugs discuss whether or not to shoot him, too.
First thug: "Shit, I bet I can hit him on the fly." Second thug: "How much?" First thug: "Ten dollars. Hey boy" -- the one with his hair slicked back raising his voice -- "let's see you dive." Second thug: "Would you dive offa there?"
(Talking together again.) "I'd jump."
One reason Leonard is so good is that he has been honing his skills for nearly six decades. Now 77, he started out writing Western novels while working as an advertising copywriter in Detroit. Hombre, one of these early books, was made into a 1966 movie starring Paul Newman. It also has the distinction of being named one of the best Westerns of all time by the Western Writers of America.
BEYOND CRIME. Leonard turned to crime writing after Westerns became passé. He eventually quit his advertising job and supported himself by writing novels and Hollywood screenplays. Lately, he has dropped the movie work to focus entirely on his novels and stories. He has written some three dozen books, and since the mid-1980s, every one has been a best-seller.
Gradually, Leonard moved beyond traditional crime writing. Hanging Out at the Buena Vista, the second story in the new collection, is clearly modeled on Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants, one of the greatest very short stories ever written, and one that Leonard deeply admires. It's about a quick, matter-of-fact courtship between two terminally ill octogenarians who (in the space of four pages) meet and decide to live together. I hate to ruin it, but I love the ending so much I can't resist quoting the last few lines of dialogue:
"You want to get out of here?" Vincent said.
It surprised her. "What do you mean?"
"Take off? Go somewhere?"
Natalie said, "I suppose we could," nodding her head.
"Or," she said after a moment, "you could get your pills and move in with me. What do you think?"
Now Vincent was nodding in the same thoughtful way.
"Would we sleep together?"
Natalie took a moment before saying, "Well, not the first night."
Of course, you can't usually count on Leonard to find a spark of hope in the smoldering rubble of blighted lives, as he does here. But that just makes it all the more thrilling when he does. If you don't know his work -- or have only read his novels -- check out the short stories. Nothing like them is coming from any other writer.
Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.
Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.
To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.
Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
