Elmore Leonard: Cat Chaser

“Probably wouldn’t be,” Jiggs said.

“But it could be anytime.”

“I’m patient up to a point.”

“Okay, that’s all I wanted to know,” Moran said. He reached over and picked up the phone.

Jiggs watched him.

Moran said, “Jerry, call the cops.” He hung up.

Jiggs said, “George, am I hearing things? What’re you gonna tell ’em. Some bullshit about I threatened you? I say I didn’t, it’s my word against yours, George, you know that.” Jiggs seemed tired and a little upset. “There’s nothing you can give the cops they can put on me.”

Moran took his time. He said, “I didn’t call them for you.”

There was a pause. He saw Jiggs on the edge, motionless, between knowing and not believing.

Moran brought Nolen’s .45 out of the drawer close in front of him and had time to rest the butt on the counter, the barrel pointed at Jiggs’s striped tie. He saw Jiggs’s right hand come up, clearing the edge of the counter with Smith and couldn’t wait any longer than that. He pressed and pulled the trigger and saw Jiggs blown from the stool, saw his expression in that moment, mouth opening, and the next moment saw him lying on the vinyl floor, head pressed against the base of the sofa. He saw the seersucker turning red, saw the hand holding the gun move and shot him again, the first explosions still ringing in his ears. Within moments he heard the door bang open, Nolen and Mary in the room and saw their eyes, a glimpse of the look in their eyes; but his attention was on Jiggs as he came around from behind the counter with the .45 leveled, pointed at a down angle, a thought coming into his mind that he might or might not tell Mary about someday: thinking as he saw the blood he was glad he had not had the tile floor carpeted.

He went to one knee, picked up Jiggs’s glasses from the floor and carefully placed them on him, pushing the bridge up on his nose, looking at Jiggs’s eyes staring at him, not yet sightless but lost beyond bewilderment. His mouth moving soundless.

What was there to say? Moran stood up.

He heard a voice say “Jesus” that sounded like Nolen and heard Mary close to him say “Moran?” Not sure now when she used his first name and when she used it last, if it depended on her mood or if it mattered. He felt…well, he felt all right. He felt much better than he did after shooting Luci’s future husband on the roof in Santa Domingo in 1965. Was that why he went back-the real reason-because he had shot someome he didn’t know? He wondered. The more he became aware of what he was feeling the more certain he was that he felt pretty good. Close to Mary, looking at those eyes full of warm awareness…

He said, “I don’t have a lawyer. You think I’m gonna need one?”

Mary was smiling now, trying to. She said, “I don’t know, George, you do pretty well on your own.”

Finally there was that high-low wail in the distance, listening for it like he was always waiting to hear sirens. Boy, what next?

The Writers’ Guild Theatre, Beverly Hills, January 23, 1998. Sponsored by Writers Bloc; Andrea Grossman, Founder.

Martin Amis:We’re welcoming here Elmore Leonard, also known as “Dutch.” And rather less formally, “The Dickens of Detroit.” It is an apt description, I think, because he is as close as anything you have here in America to a national novelist, a concept that almost seemed to die with Charles Dickens but has here been revived.

I was recently in Boston visiting Saul Bellow, and on the shelves of the Nobel laureate, I spied several Elmore Leonards. Saul Bellow has a high, even exalted view of what literature is and does. For him, it creates the “quiet zone” where certain essences can nourish what he calls “our fair souls.” This kind of literature of the Prousto-Nabokovian variety has recently been assigned the label “minority interest.” There is patently nothing “minority interest” about Elmore Leonard. He is a popular writer in several senses. But Saul Bellow and I agreed that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.

I thought we might begin at the beginning, and talk about your early years as a writer and how you got started. In my experience, everyone at the age of fourteen or fifteen (or a bit earlier) starts to commune with themselves and to keep notes and to keep a diary. It’s only the writers who go on with that kind of adolescent communion. Was it like that for you? Did you get the glimmer quite early on?

Elmore Leonard:Let me ask first: Do you think if I lived in Buffalo, I’d be Dickens? [Laughter]

Amis:”The Balzac of Buffalo,” perhaps. [Laughter]

Leonard:I had a desire to write very early on but I didn’t. I wrote just what I had to write in school compositions and things like that. It wasn’t until I was in college after World War II that I wrote a couple of short stories. The first one because the English instructor said, “If you enter this contest” – it was a local writers’ club within the University of Detroit – “I’ll give you a B.” I’ve always been inspired in this somewhat commercial approach toward writing. [Laughter] Which is why I chose Westerns to begin with.

In 1951, I decided to look at the field. I looked at the market, and I saw Westerns in The Saturday Evening Post , Collier’s , almost everything from the Ladies’ Home Journal down through men’s magazines and pulps. There were then at least a dozen pulps still in business, the better ones paying two cents a word. So I decided this was a market. What with all of these magazines buying short stories, this was the place to start. And because I liked Western movies a lot, and I wanted to sell to Hollywood right away and make some money, I approached this with a desire to write but also to make as much money as I could doing it. I didn’t see anything wrong with that at all. I think the third one sold, and that was it. After that, they’ve all sold since then. But then the market dried up, and I had to switch to crime.

Amis:You were also, as I understand, writing commentaries for educational films and industrial movies.

Leonard:Yes, industrial movies about air pollution, building highways, Encyclopaedia Britannica , geography, and history movies. I did about a dozen of those – the settlement of the Mississippi Valley, the French and Indian War, the Danube, Puerto Rico. I think they were twenty-seven-minute movies. I did that right after I had left an ad agency where I was writing Chevrolet ads, which drove me crazy. Because you had to write real cute then. I had a lot of trouble with that. I could do truck ads, but I couldn’t do convertibles at all. [Laughter] So I got out of that. But I still had to make a living. So I got into the industrial movies and a little freelance advertising.

Amis:But the breakthrough was Hombre , was it not?

Leonard:Yes, the sale to the movies. Because the book itself I wrote in ’59, and by then the market was so weak. I was getting $4,000 for a paperback, for example. And that one sold for $1,250, and it took two years to sell it. I didn’t get that much for the movie rights, either, four or five years later. That was when I got back into fiction writing.

Amis:How do you feel when a book of yours goes through the treadmill of being turned into a movie? It’s happened to me once, in my first novel, The Rachel Papers , and I thought, “Whatever they do to it, the book will still be there.”