Last man standing

“Raylan”
By Elmore Leonard
HarperCollins Publishers, $16.19
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Elmore Leonard is a writer. That might seem like stating the obvious, but it bears repeating if only to emphasize that what he does is write. Every weekday — and some weekends — the 86-year-old author sits at his desk in suburban Detroit from 9:30 in the morning until six at night, writing first drafts on yellow-lined legal pads and then typing them up on a typewriter.

“Everything is written longhand,” Leonard said in a recent interview. “As I’m writing, I’m crossing out as much as I’m writing. Finally, I hit a sound I like and go with it. If I have three or four pages at the end of the day, I’ll think, ‘Good.’ That’s the way I’ve been doing it for 60 years.”

As the cliché goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Leonard’s 45th novel, “Raylan,” was released last week. It’s the latest marker in an astonishingly successful career: His books have sold millions, many have been turned into movies (including “Get Shorty,” “Out Of Sight” and “3:10 to Yuma”) and Leonard is now considered by many to be one of the all-time great writers of crime fiction. None of this has been a happy accident.

Born in New Orleans in 1925, Leonard began writing westerns in the 1950s, while working as a copywriter at an ad agency in Detroit.

“I’d get up at five in the morning and write two pages before getting ready to go to work,” he said. “It took a while for me to get up at five, but once I got into the habit, it was easy. I’d just get up, go into the living room and write. I think that really paid off — I wrote five books and 30 short stories at 5 a.m.”

He quit the ad agency in 1961 and transitioned to writing crime novels as the market for westerns dried up in the mid-’60s.

“I wanted to sell,” he said. “I wanted to make money writing on my own terms. There are people who write a short story and then put it away. I don’t understand that. Because their motive to begin with must be to be read and yet they’re afraid of what might be said about what they write. I’m writing to be read.”

Leonard soon developed his own singular, compulsively readable style. His books were gritty and dark, but also full of colorful, loquacious characters and moments of wry comedy. In his best works — such as “LaBrava,” “Freaky Deaky” and “Rum Punch” — the line between good guys and bad guys is thin. The former are always compromised and the latter are always interesting, and the narrative seems to hum along effortlessly.

“When I write, I don’t want the reader to think of what they’re reading as a story with a beginning, middle and end,” he said. “I want them to be so absorbed by the characters and what they’re doing that they’ll never think of me writing it. Dialogue is my main strength. I use the dialogue as much as I can to tell the story because when I start describing things, there’s a danger that I’m going to be overwriting or that I’m just not going to sound very good.”

“Raylan,” in some ways, bridges the gap between Leonard’s westerns and his crime novels. Its main character, federal marshal Raylan Givens, operates in the modern world but is clearly modeled on the gunslingers of the Old West. Givens has already been the focal point of two other Leonard books, 1993’s “Pronto” and 1995’s “Riding the Rap,” one novella, 2002’s “Fire in the Hole,” and was recently brought to life on the small screen by actor Timothy Olyphant in FX’s acclaimed series “Justified.” Leonard is an executive producer of the series, though he claims that the title is just an honorific.

“They were paying me for being whatever it was, an executive producer, so I thought, ‘I should do something. I’ve never just been paid for nothing,’ ” he said. “So I wrote a book. I’d send it to them, pieces at a time, so if they wanted to use it, they could. They used some but not much.”

Leonard doesn’t read as much as he once did — “I used to go to bed with a book every night,” he said, “now I fall asleep after a few pages” — but is often shocked at the books that end up alongside his on the best-seller list.

“The people who are selling the most books today I don’t even think can write,” he said. “Like Tom Clancy. He’s the most boring writer. Jesus, I can’t believe that he sells so many books.”

Leonard is already at work on his next novel, “Sweetmary,” about a private prison in Arizona, and when asked about it, he goes into exhaustive detail about a corrupt lawman, some 20-year-old Apache Indians with a taste for tequila and a rodeo star. He describes a scene he is working on and then searches his desk so he can read some dialogue.

At 86, Leonard is still clearly excited to tell more stories. He thinks he’s a better writer now than he was 20 years ago, but admits it’s not as easy as it once was.

“I’m getting a little wobbly,” he said. “I think it gets harder after 45 books. I don’t want to repeat myself. I want it to sound fresh. My plots are not as strong as they might be. I’ve just got to concentrate more.”

His goal right now is to write 50 books — so at least four more.

“I don’t know if that’s possible but then again, I can’t imagine retiring,” Leonard said. “It’s what I do.”