Martin Amis and Elmore Leonard

When news came of Martin Amis' death, I, like many, thought not only about his fiction but of how good his non-fiction writing is. In this vein, the first thing that popped into my mind, of all things, was the review he wrote on May 14, 1995 of Elmore Leonard's Riding the Rap for the New York Sunday Times Book Review. This is a review I read at the time, on that Sunday, since in those days I bought the physical edition of the Sunday Times nearly every week and read the Sunday book review regularly.

You can't improve on what Amis says about the book, so I'll quote him a little bit, talking about Leonard's thirty-second novel: 

"LET us attempt to narrow it down. Elmore Leonard is a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers. He belongs, then, not to the mainstream but to the genres (before he wrote thrillers, he wrote westerns). Whereas genre fiction, on the whole, heavily relies on plot, mainstream fiction, famously, has only about a dozen plots to recombinate (boy meets girl, good beats bad and so on). But Mr. Leonard has only one plot. All his thrillers are Pardoner's Tales, in which Death roams the land -- usually Miami and Detroit -- disguised as money.

Nevertheless, Mr. Leonard possesses gifts -- of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing -- that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet. And the question is: How does he allow these gifts play, in his efficient, unpretentious and (delightfully) similar yarns about semiliterate hustlers, mobsters, go-go dancers, cocktail waitresses, loan sharks, bounty hunters, blackmailers and crime syndicate executioners? My answer may sound reductive, but here goes: The essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle.

What this means, in effect, is that he has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence -- or let's say the American sentence, because Mr. Leonard is as American as jazz. Instead of writing "Warren Ganz III lived up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County," Mr. Leonard writes, "Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County." He writes, "Bobby saying," and then opens quotes. He writes, "Dawn saying," and then opens quotes. We are not in the imperfect tense (Dawn was saying) or the present (Dawn says) or the historic present (Dawn said). We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players' hidden minds. He doesn't just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breathe."

I remember reading this in 1995 and finding it such a sharp look at Leonard. It's admiring, of course, but doesn't just talk in semi-vagaries about "Leonard's great dialogue" or "Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing", but analyzes what is at the crux of all novels no matter what type of fiction the author writes, regardless of what genre the author navigates: language.  How the author uses language is where everything in writing starts, and it's surprising how often conversations about fiction and writing touch on everything related to writing except this core thing.  Anyway, I hadn't known before reading this review that Amis was such a Leonard fan, and if you want to read the full piece, you can Google it easily.

Also worth checking out is a co-interview Amis did years ago with Leonard, a most interesting talk between two writers who are so different, working toward quite different aims, but who so strongly value how they use language. The interview, perhaps unfortunately, is on the old Charlie Rose program, but you can't have everything. The draw here is Amis and Leonard talking writing.