Cooler Than Cool
The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
Drawing on unprecedented archival and family access, Cooler Than Cool: The Life of Elmore Leonard, is the first comprehensive biography of the master American crime writer, author of witty, gritty bestsellers like Get Shorty and Raylan.
Over the course of his sixty-year career, Elmore Leonard, “the Dickens of Detroit,” published forty-five novels that have had enduring appeal to readers around the world. Revered by Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, and Stephen King, his books were innovative in their blending of a Hemingway-inspired noirish minimalism and a masterful use of realistic dialogue over exposition—a direct evolution spurred by his years as a screenwriter.
Leonard’s fiction contained many layers, and at the heart of his work were progressive themes, stemming from his years as a student of the Jesuit religious order, his personal beliefs in social justice, and his successful battle over alcoholism. He drew inspiration from greats like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the true motivation and brilliance behind his crime writing was the ongoing class struggle to achieve the American Dream—often seen through the eyes of law enforcement officers and the criminals they vowed to apprehend.
C. M. Kushins tells Leonard’s full life story against recurring themes and evolving storytelling methods of his work, drawing on interviews with primary sources ranging from Leonard’s family and friends to those who acted in, produced, and directed his work onscreen. He also includes never-before-published excerpts from Leonard’s unfinished final novel and planned memoir. Definitive and revealing, Cooler Than Cool shows Leonard emerging as one of the last writers of the “pulp fiction” era of midcentury America, to ultimately become one of the most successful storytellers of the twentieth century, whose influence continues to have far-reaching effects on both contemporary crime fiction and American filmmaking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reporter Kushins follows up Nothing's Bad Luck with this solid biography of crime novelist Elmore Leonard (1925–2013). Tracing Leonard's development as a writer, Kushins recounts how newspaper accounts of Bonnie and Clyde enamored a young Leonard with the seedy criminals who would populate his fiction. In 1950, he took a job at an ad agency and began writing westerns in his free time, selling his first piece (the novella Apache Agent) to Argosy magazine the following year. Kushins covers Leonard's alcoholism and marital woes (two of his three marriages ended in divorce), but the focus is mostly on Leonard the writer. For example, Kushins explores Leonard's influences by discussing how reading George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1972 inspired him to pivot to crime fiction and adopt a more naturalistic prose style. Kushins sometimes indulges in a surfeit of detail, as when he explores at length the creative disputes that led Dustin Hoffman to withdraw from a film adaptation of Leonard's LaBrava. However, Leonard's fans will appreciate peeking behind the curtain of his creative process, as when Kushins describes the tortured composition of Get Shorty, for which Leonard took the unusual step of restarting the book from scratch several times. A strong overview of a towering crime novelist's career, this satisfies.
