Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: If It Sounds Like Writing

"Had he survived the stroke that killed him in 2013, Elmore Leonard would be celebrating his 95th birthday in October of this year, 2020. Had his mental faculties remained intact, he would also, presumably, have completed Blue Dreams, the book he was working on when he died. It would have featured a young Hispanic bull-rider targeted by an ICE agent for deportation, raising to forty-six the number of books he had written since 1954. He might also have added another short story or two to the dozens he'd published since his first in 1951. Even to have reached the age of eighty-seven evokes admiration, considering how many fatal diseases threaten to take down chain-smoking octogenarians, not to mention those who had drunk themselves into the hospital and AA's Twelve-Step program by middle age. Leonard's physical and mental longevity testifies to a constitutional fortitude that was more than matched by his indefatigable creative energy. Over the span of his writing career, working a regular nine-to-five weekday shift in his office while sitting in front of a stack of yellow lined paper and a typewriter, Leonard completed a book every sixteen months, on average. During the period when he was writing crime novels predominantly, that rate was closer to a book a year. Impressive as they are, however, longevity and stamina are not sufficient reasons for taking a writer's work seriously enough to devote a collection of critical essays to it. George Simenon wrote upwards of three books a year in the nearly sixty years of his writing life. That's not why his work has drawn the attention of those who devote their careers, academic and otherwise, to studying and writing about crime fiction"–