Ford's Hi-Line and Why I should read more Elmore Leonard

Back from an extended road trip - directed toward Utah, but sidelined (car issues) to Montana. Travel always makes me think about my life, my writing, my direction (in both). Montana, at first, was a substitute vacation - but as I drove across the Hi-Line, I felt my mind clearing, echoing the landscape around me. Richard Ford's Rock Springs, and especially, Wildlife, came back to me as I drove through Havre, Great Falls, Missoula and Billings. A lot of Rock Springs happens in places like those along the Hi-Line (the northern highway, 200, across Montana). My stories and novels often take place in those places (!), except about a 100 miles north, across the border.

Driving through Great Falls, though, was a bit disappointing - it didn't fit the mood of Ford's Wildlife, nor his story Great Falls from Rock Springs. But I was viewing it as a drive-through tourist, and a number of years later than those stories took place. (They were from the 60's) A further disconnect was my road trip reading material. I like to bring along books that are set in the landscape of my trip. Now, as I thought I was headed south to Utah, I'd packed The Son (Philipp Meyer), set in Texas (close enough), and immersed in that old west of guns and oil. Nonetheless, it is a great novel, and worthy of all the recent praise, including a blurb from Richard Ford.

Along the way, I read that Elmore Leonard died. I was reading one of his books (Freaky Deaky) before I left on my trip - I didn't want to read crime fiction on the way, so I left the Leonard book at home. Unexplainably, I felt bad about this. I haven't read a lot of Leonard, but enough to know that he has influenced my work. Sometimes I wonder if I see him more through movies made from his books, than his actual novels. But the great movies capture his writing, rhythm, and characters, so well that they are like reading a novel. Top of the list: Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Jackie Brown. His style of dialogue is often referenced as changing the crime-fiction genre. Anytime a couple of criminals are bantering back and forth about food, or movies, or pop trivia, that convo can be traced back to Leonardian roots (a word, I proudly just made up). Travolta talking about Royales with Cheese in Pulp Fiction could have been written by Leonard. The hired killers in Gross Pointe Blank could have been written by Leonard (a lot of that movie, really).

And then when I look at some of my characters in Correction Line - takiing baseball, or the distance to the sun, or how geese fly - well, yep, Elmore again.

Now in the middle of writing my new novel - one that is more rooted in the crime fiction / detective genre than ever before - I find myself thinking of those conversations in Get Shorty, or Jackie Brown (which is the novel, Rum Punch). The reasons I picked up Freaky Deaky was to listen to those rhythms again. Re-reading Leonard, I am also struck by the structure of his novels, and his ability to move things forward. I am also struck by how much he wrote (I think around 45 novels). His 10 rules on writing get referenced a lot. They made his list into what I thought was a too skinny book - I mean, they're great rules, but not worthy of a whole book (one rule per page, not much else). Still, they bang around in the back of my brain when I write - Don't Start with Weather (guilty) Don't Write the Parts that Readers Skip (also guilty).

His influence is greater than some might imagine - including me. It's like when I'd explain Chaplin to my kids, or the early movies of Orson Welles and Hitchcock. "Yes, you've seen this in a lot of current movies - to the point of cliché - but this was the guy that did it first." So when Travolta talks about a foot massage with the Sam Jackson character, or all the movies that came after, and when we come to expect hitmen to talk like this, well, you know who was the first to write this way.