Riding the Rap (29 page)

I think the guy in the street thinks that the novelist, first of all, decides on his subject, what should be addressed; then he thinks of his theme and his plot and then jots down the various characters that will illustrate these various themes. That sounds like a description of writer's block to me. I think you're in a very bad way when that happens. Vladimir Nabokov, when he spoke about
Lolita
, refers to the “first throb” of
Lolita
going through him, and I recognize that feeling. All it is is your next book. It's the next thing that's there for you to write. Now, do you settle down and map out your plots? I suspect you don't.

Leonard:
No, I don't. I start with a character. Let's say I want to write a book about a bail bondsman or a process server or a bank robber and a woman federal marshal. And they meet and something happens. That's as much of an idea as I begin with. And then I see him in a situation, and I begin writing it and one thing leads to another. By page 100, roughly, I should have my characters assembled. I should know my characters because they've sort of auditioned in the opening scenes, and I can find out if they can talk or not. And if they can't talk, they're out. Or they get a minor role.

But in every book there's a minor character
who comes along and pushes his way into the plot. He's just needed to give some information, but all of a sudden he comes to life for me. Maybe it's the way he says it. He might not even have a name the first time he appears. The second time he has a name. The third time he has a few more lines, and away he goes, and he becomes a plot turn in the book.

When I was writing
Cuba Libre
, I was about 250 pages into it and George Will called up and said, “I want to send out forty of your books” — this was the previous book [
Out of Sight
] — “at Christmastime. May I send them to you and a list of names to inscribe?” I said, “Of course.” He said, “What are you doing now?” I said, “I'm doing Cuba a hundred years ago.” And he said, “Oh, crime in Cuba.” And he hung up the phone. And I thought, “I don't have a crime in this book.” And I'm 250 pages into it. [Laughter] It was a crime that this guy was running guns to Cuba, but that's not what I really write about. Where's the bag of money that everybody wants? I didn't have it. So, then I started weaving it into the narrative. I didn't have to go back far, and I was on my way.

Amis:
I admire the fluidity of your process because it's meant to be a rule in the highbrow novel that the characters have no free will at all.
E.M. Forster said he used to line up his characters before beginning a novel, and he would say, “Right, no larks.” [Laughter] And Nabokov, when this was quoted to him, he looked aghast, and he said, “My characters cringe when I come near them.” He said, “I've seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves with terror at my approach.” [Laughter]

Let's talk about
Cuba Libre
, which is an amazing departure in my view. When I was reading it, I had to keep turning to the front cover to check that it was a book by you. How did it get started? I gather that you've been wanting to write this book for thirty years. It has a kind of charge of long-suppressed desire.

Leonard:
In 1957, I borrowed a book from a friend called
The Splendid Little War
. It was a picture book, a coffee-table book of photographs of the Spanish-American War — photographs of the
Maine
, before and after; photographs of the troops on San Juan Hill; newspaper headlines leading up to the war; a lot of shots of Havana. I was writing Westerns at the time, and I thought, I could drop a cowboy into this place and get away with it. But I didn't. A couple of years ago, I was trying to think of a sequel to
Get Shorty
. And I was trying to work Chili Palmer into the dress business. I don't
know why except that I love runway shows. I gave up on that. And I saw that book again,
The Splendid Little War
, because I hadn't returned it to my friend in '57. And I thought, “I'm going to do that.” Yeah, the time has come. So, I did.

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.

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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“Vintage Leonard . . . He keeps you guessing, turning pages, gnawing your way to the end.”

San Francisco Chronicle

 

“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

 

“
Riding the Rap
shows Elmore Leonard at the top of his form. Whatever you call his novels, they always read like Elmore Leonard, distinctive in style and vision, brilliantly inventive in plot and characters.”

Los Angeles Times

 

“Another masterpiece from the master . . . Leonard has never been better.”

James Crumley

 

“The finest thriller writer alive.”

Village Voice

 

“Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish.”

Detroit News

 

“
Riding the Rap
made me feel like a kid again. Kept me up until four in the morning. When Elmore Leonard's people start talking, I can't help myself, I have to listen.”

Lawrence Block

 

“No one can beat Elmore Leonard when it comes to mordant humor and shockingly bizarre situations.”

Orlando Sentinel

 

“Vintage Leonard. Don't miss it. . . . Following Raylan Givens through the sea grape and palmetto, the lonely freeways and the shopping centers of South Florida, watching the crazies through his eyes, is worth the price of this book.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“A plot as syncopated and smooth as Leonard's legendary dialogue . . . Comedy and brutality converge in this loopy thriller—which may be the only American crime novel in which Jell-O provides a crucial clue.”

Newsday

 

“No one creates more realistic sleazebags than Leonard. This time, Arno and Givens are up against three of the slimiest—and most hilarious—characters Leonard ever created.”

Denver Post

 

“The hottest thriller writer in the U.S.”

Time

 

“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

 

“Elmore Leonard is a distinctive American artist, the way our great jazz musicians are. He proves once again with
Riding the Rap
that there is still his sound, and then everybody else's.”

Mike Lupica

 

“
Riding the Rap
is the work of an old master—it's taut, fierce, and mesmerizing.”

Stephen Hunter

 

“Tart, hip, and funny . . . As well as inimitable nutball characters and that unmistakable dialogue,
Riding the Rap
is shot through with sly, mordant street wisdom.”

Chicago Sun-Times

 

“As always, 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

 

“Nobody but nobody in the business does it better. . . . Leonard has a great feel for misfit
alliances, and in novel after novel, he nails them in all their menacing, gut-busting funny glory.”

New York Daily News

 

“Elmore Leonard is at the top of his game.”

Seattle Times

 

“The contemporary master of American crime fiction . . . Suffice it to say that while
Riding the Rap
demonstrates again that Elmore Leonard is no slouch when it comes to pulling together a dandy plot, it is for his dead-on characterizations and pitch-perfect dialogue that we read his books.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

“Leonard advances his plots in spare, cinematic fashion, saving the terse conversational give-and-take by which his characters make themselves known. Raylan Givens . . . is the prototype Leonard hero: alert, knowing, and unillusioned.”

People

 

“The coolest, hottest writer in America.”

Chicago Tribune

 

“Elmore Leonard has the best ear for dialogue in the crime-writing biz. Under Leonard's control,
Riding the Rap
glides to a conclusion both violent and funny.”

Playboy

 

“As well as a master storyteller, Leonard is one of our funniest writers, and for decades has richly dramatized elements of our culture.
Riding the Rap
is wonderful.”

Andre Dubus