Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard

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. Agent: William Clark, William Clark Assoc. (June)