I have been granted an audience with Detroit's most famous crime family. The
father, at 82, remains the capo di tutti capi, the undisputed boss: he has
wiped out so many people in the course of his career, he lost count long
ago. But now his 56-year-old son is joining the family business, and has
just completed his first job: five dead, including two by means of a bow and
arrow, and a cop, blasted into hamburger meat with a pump-action shot gun.
The old man is pleased.
Elmore Leonard, the “Dickens of Detroit”, is America's greatest living crime
novelist. For more than half a century, he has turned out books at the rate
of almost one a year: westerns, mystery fiction, but most importantly crime
thrillers. He is the master of the genre, the inventor of a distinct
fictional universe that is spare, violent, grittily humorous and set, for
the most part, in Detroit.
Next month, however, Quiver, the first book written by his son, Peter, is
published: it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a spare, violent and grittily
humorous crime novel set, for the most part, in Detroit.
Father and son are sitting in Peter's neat and comfortable living room in
suburban Detroit. Elmore has walked here from his own home, just a few
streets away. Both are smiling, yet tense, for it is an odd situation, this
passing of the literary baton from one generation to the next.
Elmore has a thin, almost gaunt, face with wispy beard and sharp eyes behind
round spectacles; Peter's, by contrast, is genial and rounded with a small,
fair moustache. There is little obvious family resemblance in the flesh, but
plenty on the page: the older Leonard's writing echoes throughout Quiver, in
the almost complete absence of adjectives, plot told through dialogue, the
slang and the contemporary cultural references.
“There is certainly a Leonard sound, started by Elmore,” says Peter, glancing
sideways to where his father is lighting up a Virginia Slim cigarette. “We
look at the world with a similar point of view. It's sarcastic at times.
It's an attitude about life.”
Quiver is dedicated “to Elmore” (he addresses his father by his first name,
never “Dad”) and Peter is disarmingly frank in acknowledging his debt.
“Reading Elmore's books, I thought they're so good I can't ever imagine
writing something like this...”
“Peter's book is good, it's really very good,” interposes Elmore. And Quiver
is good. It's really very good - with some cracking dialogue, clever
plotting and an enjoyably bloody climax. It is just not as good as anything
Elmore Leonard might have written, and both of them know it.
It is the unstated but inevitable comparison that hangs over the conversation.
Both men, intriguingly, were advertising copywriters before turning to
fiction. In the 1950s, Elmore Leonard was working for a Detroit ad agency,
knocking out commercials for Chevrolet, when he started working for pulp
western magazines, getting up at 5am to write a few pages, before heading to
work. Peter started his own advertising agency in 1979. “I still write
copy,” he says “but I'd really like to get out.”
Elmore's twang interject: “I quit the ad agency in '61 and thought: ‘The next
six months I'm going to write a book',” as if urging his son to do just
that.
I ask if writing advertisements helped them to write fiction; both deny it.
“Writing ads really doesn't help,” says Peter. “You don't care, you're not
paid to care. There's no person in the ad.”
Elmore is nodding vigorously. “The characters have their own
personalities...the characters, that's what I like. We both favour
characters...as for plot, the plot just comes along.”
Peter: “Writing is about getting into the head of a character.”
Elmore: “I think of a sound. What do they sound like? If they can't talk, I
can have them shot.”
Peter: “I get attached to certain characters.”
Elmore: “If you've got characters that you like, and you can make them talk,
then it's in their hands. They'll say something that surprises you.” Both
men are speaking to me, but I suddenly realise they are actually talking to
each other. An unacknowledged father-to-son master-class is in progress. The
father is, very gently, telling the son how to do something that he has
spent his life perfecting. Both are evidently delighted to be sharing a
craft, but there is also a small flicker of competitiveness, beneath the
affection.
Peter: “But you make it look so easy.”
Elmore: “I throw away two of three pieces of paper to get one.”
Peter: “I throw away five pieces for every one...”
Elmore “It used to be five for me... it took me years and years to develop. I
used to use a lot of adverbs back then.”
Peter [in mock horror]: “What were you thinking of..?”
Famously, Elmore Leonard writes on yellow pads, all day, screwing up what
doesn't work, writing out a final version, putting in incidentals (“I add
the cigarettes and drinks later”), then tapping it out on a portable
typewriter and handing the result to his daughter to put on a computer.
“When Elmore was writing in the basement, I'd go down to see him and in the
wastebasket there'd be all these little balls of screwed up yellow paper,”
says Peter.
A character in Elmore's most famous novel Get Shorty remarks: “Do I know how
to write down words on a piece of paper? That's what you do, man, you put
down one word after the other as it comes into your head.” Elmore Leonard's
prose reads effortlessly but, in the words of Martin Amis, it “makes Raymond
Chandler look clumsy”. He writes of hard men with interior lives; crooks who
worry about their mothers and then kill without compunction. He offers no
easy moral clues. The violence is so casual that, as the writer Walker Percy
once observed, “people get shot in dependent clauses”. In Quiver the carnage
is just as extreme, but the build-up to it is slower and the tone less
detached. When Peter's characters are gunned down, one senses, it is more of
a wrench.
I ask if they plan to write a book together; the response is simultaneous and
emphatic.
“No.” “Absolutely not.” There is a small hiatus of embarrassment, before
Elmore adds: “I can't see myself writing with someone else. Ever.”
To say that Peter is not as good at writing crime thrillers as his father is,
of course, unfair. Nobody is as good a crime writer as Elmore Leonard, or as
prodigious, and the older man had yet to write some of his best novels by
the age of 56, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Rum Punch (retitled
Jackie Brown when Quentin Tarantino made the film).
By his own calculation he has now written 43 novels, as well as numerous short
stories and screenplays and shows little sign of slowing up. “I gotta new
book coming out shortly, Road Dogs, it's a prison expression, 'bout a coupla
convicts.” (He really does talk as he writes: I did not hear him utter an
adjective.) “I'm still collecting scenes for the next one. I have to find
out what it's about.” The torrent of words has become part of America's
cultural landscape, extending far beyond the printed word. Quentin
Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs was a homage to the writer. The characters in The
Sopranos might have muscled out of the pages of Elmore Leonard.
His fiction has ranged to Florida, Hollywood and even Rwanda, but is at its
best in the hard-boiled streets of Detroit, relayed in that city's terse,
grimy argot. “I learnt from Hemingway. He made it look so easy. In the
Fifties I would pick up For Whom the Bell Tolls and read a little bit before
I wrote.” In his homely jumper, sitting on a suburban sofa, it is hard to
imagine Elmore Leonard as a literary lion in the tradition of Hemingway, let
alone someone imaginatively at home in a world of loan sharks and hookers,
wry and brutal lawmen, illegal guns, alcohol and prison. He doesn't swear
and he doesn't drink, though a long and intense love affair with the bourbon
bottle ended with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1974.
Around the same time, Elmore was divorced from Peter's mother, Beverly.
Although Peter remembers his father as a cheerful presence growing up, Elmore
has since conceded that much of his bonhomie came out of a bottle.
Peter is the second of Elmore's five children, and in a noisy suburban
household, Elmore learnt to write anywhere and everywhere. “I remember when
you guys were singing Jimi Hendrix and watching Saturday night football, I
still managed to turn out eight pages, in the same room.” Leonard would
spend long hours in the Detroit police homicide department, learning about
guns, cops and “bad guys”.
Peter, however, as a student in Italy, managed to go one farther: he ended up
in an Italian maximum security prison after driving off in a taxi as a
youthful prank. Elmore Leonard bailed him out, and then sent a laconic note:
“Hard time makes the boy the man.”
Elmore was a hard taskmaster. When his son took his first shaky steps into
writing, a short story he showed to his father was returned with the
typically acerbic observation that the characters were like “strips of
leather drying in the sun”, without believable substance. The son, badly
stung, gave up writing for many years (he now says that he lacked the
maturity to write well).
In his fifties, Peter tried once more, this time with a foray into
screenwriting, but Elmore, despite having written numerous screenplays
himself, was again dismissive. “He said to me: ‘Why do you want to be a
co-pilot when you could be the pilot?'”
Elmore grins wolfishly, unrepentant at having pushed his son in the right
direction.
We sit in Peter's sunny dining room, eating tuna mayonnaise and tomato
mozzarella salad. Elmore declines to eat: “I'm gonna have popcorn later.”
Peter is charming and hospitable, but somehow uneasy. I sense that he is
caught between respectful homage and a small resentment at his father's
presence, both a blessing and burden, the knowledge that he lives under his
father's shadow but might not be published at all without it. Does he mind
being compared to his father? He shrugs, not quite convincingly. “I don't
mind, except when they attack me for it, as some critics have done...” The
father with the huge reputation and the set ideas; the aspiring son, in awe
of him, wanting to make his own way in a world that his father dominates: it
could be a scene from one of Elmore's own books.
Only once does he betray a desire to escape his father's legacy, when talking
about his completed second book, set in Germany in the 1970s, and the book
that he is now writing, set in Rome. “These are more international
thrillers.” He pauses. “I'm trying to get out of this little niche.”
Fictionally, he needs to get out of Detroit.
I hope he does. He clearly has talent, and however derivative it may feel,
Quiver is an impressive debut. But the paternal presence is a hard one to
escape from. Perhaps he should take up adjectives.
— Quiver by Peter Leonard, is published by Faber and Faber,
£14.99, on October 2Like father, like son
Like father, like son?
Kate was standing at the island counter, eyes swollen from crying, makeup
smeared across one of her cheeks, staring at the food: platters of cold cuts
and bowls of potato salad, plates of cookies, assorted cheeses and fresh
fruit. Owen's obituary, half a page in the Detroit Free Press, was folded
open next to the sink. A line under the photograph said, “Owen McCall, age
49, October 11, 2006.” Everybody had paid their respects and taken off, and
now she felt exhausted, drained. She poured a glass of chardonnay and lit a
cigarette. She was numb, her mind a blur, still trying to come to grips with
what had happened.
— Extracted from Quiver (2008) by Peter Leonard
Honey phoned her sister-in-law Muriel, still living in Harlan County,
Kentucky, to tell her she'd left Walter Schoen, calling him Valter, and was
on her way to being Honey Deal again. She said to Muriel: “I honestly
thought I could turn him around, but the man still acts like a Nazi. I
couldn't budge him.” “You walked out,” Muriel said, “just like that?” “I
valked out,” Honey said. I'm free as a bird. You know what else? I won't
have to do my roots every two weeks. Dumb me, I spent a whole year wanting
him to think I'm a natural blonde.” “He couldn't tell other ways you aren't?”
— Extracted from Up in Honey's Room (2007) by Elmore Leonard
Literary legacies
Stephen King's son Joseph had his debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, published in
2006 under the pen name Joe Hill. “I didn't want someone to publish my book
because of who my dad was or what my last name was,” he once said. The book
won rave reviews, and contracts in 13 countries - and a $1.1 million film
deal with Warner Brothers.
Martin Amis has said that his father, Kingsley, took no interest in his work
and did not even read the novel that he dedicated to him. In a letter to the
poet Philip Larkin in 1979, Amis senior famously said of his son: “Last year
he earned £38,000. Little shit.”
Alexander Waugh, son of the satirist Auberon and grandson of the novelist
Evelyn, long resisted following in the family footsteps. In a letter to his
six-year-old son, he wrote: “Do not let [the Waugh name] browbeat you into
thinking you have to become a writer, that it is your destiny or your duty
to do so. There is no point in writing unless you have something to say and
are determined to say it well.”
When Peter Benchley finished Jaws but couldn't come up with a name, he
appealed to his author father, Nathaniel, who wrote The Off-Islanders (which
became the film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming). The
dedicated dad came up with 200 suggestions, including What's That Noshing On
My Leg? The publishers suggested The Jaws of Leviathan and the author
shortened it.
