This year marks the centenary of Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, who died in 2013 at the age of eighty-seven. He is widely regarded as one of the most idiosyncratic and influential crime writers of the twentieth century. Often called the “Dickens of Detroit”, he offered gritty, realistic portrayals of American lowlife that demonstrate a masterly use of dialogue to conjure up character, reveal injustice and evoke emotion.
The origin of Leonard’s nickname is more prosaic than his fiction. It was a nod to Emil “Dutch” Leonard, a five-time All-Star pitcher for the Washington Senators, who was at the peak of his career while Elmore was in high school. Leonard adopted the name early, even signing his first works with “Dutch” in the byline. It stuck for life.
His first novel, The Bounty Hunters, was published in 1953; his last, Raylan, in 2012. In those six decades, he wrote forty-five novels, dozens of short stories and numerous screenplays and television scripts. In celebration of the centenary, Penguin is re-releasing fourteen of Leonard’s novels, starting with three classics: Swag (1976), The Switch (1978) and Rum Punch (1992). These coincide with the publication of C. M. Kushins’s monumental biography of the author, Cooler Than Cool.
Each of the novels highlights Leonard’s signature style: spare prose, dialogue-driven plots, morally ambiguous characters. The earliest, Swag, is at once funny, bleak and tense. It reads like a jazz jam session: unpredictable, tightly rhythmic, cool. The unlikely protagonists – Frank Ryan, a used car salesman, and Ernest “Stick” Stickley Jr, an ex-con car thief – form a partnership to rob liquor stores and supermarkets. They follow a self-made code of conduct for successful stickups, a set of rules that, as Kushins notes, mirror Leonard’s own rules for writing. At first, the plan works. But it collapses under the weight of ego, greed and human fallibility.
The prose is stripped to the bone yet rich with implication. Character and voice carry the story. Humour is dry, violence sudden, tension simmering beneath the surface. Crime is portrayed with almost documentary realism; the illicit blends seamlessly with the mundane. Beneath the caper lies a sharp commentary on American ambition – and the delusions that power its dreamers. Frank and Stick aren’t monsters. They’re just trying to beat a system rigged against them, and their crash is the inevitable result of fantasy colliding with frailty.
Next comes The Switch, another character-rich novel that subverts genre expectations. Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, two small-time crooks, kidnap the wife of a wealthy man – only to discover that he’s having an affair, plans to divorce her and has no intention of paying a ransom. What begins as a standard kidnapping plot becomes a story of shifting loyalties and quiet revelations. Leonard’s hallmark minimalism is in full force: dialogue carries the plot and exposition is nearly invisible. Mickey Dawson, the kidnap victim, evolves into the novel’s emotional and moral centre. She’s a proto-feminist character who dismantles power structures with wit and composure. Leonard avoids melodrama, letting absurdity and personality create tension and humour organically. His refusal to moralize or sensationalize crime gives The Switch its observational distance.
Finally, Rum Punch, which is among Leonard’s most accomplished works. A sequel of sorts to The Switch, it sees the return of Ordell and Louis in a gunrunning and money-laundering scheme. This time, the centre of gravity is Jackie Burke, a middle-aged flight attendant caught smuggling cash for a gun dealer. The novel explores themes of agency, betrayal and survival in a world set against the working class – especially women of colour. Power shifts happen in low-key conversations between weary cops and jaded criminals. Jackie is a departure from the femme fatale model: she uses intelligence and instinct to outwit both the criminals and the law.
The novel critiques institutional corruption and moral ambiguity, but with dry irony rather than sermonizing. Leonard avoids easy heroism, allowing characters such as Jackie and Max Cherry to move through moral grey zones. What emerges is more than a clever caper – it’s a subtle exploration of justice and autonomy. Rum Punch is a subversive and enduring entry in the American crime canon.
In Cooler Than Cool, Kushins provides rich context for these novels and shares several revealing backstories. Asked once if he appeared in his own novels, Leonard replied: “Yes. I play all the parts”. We learn that Mickey was inspired by a local news story, and that Leonard based her husband, in part, on himself – particularly their shared habit of arguing with their wives about counting drinks at parties. It is noted that Leonard’s life – despite its occasionally anarchic nature – returned frequently to firm sets of rules. Swag features ten rules for pulling off a successful heist, including: “ALWAYS BE POLITE ON THE JOB”, “NEVER SAY MORE THAN IS NECESSARY” and “NEVER COUNT THE TAKE IN THE CAR”. Ten more of Leonard’s rules concern writing: “Never open a book with weather”; “No more than two or three exclamation marks per 100,000 words”; “Use regional dialect sparingly” (though he didn’t always follow this); and, most important: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it”. These numbered edicts became so closely identified with him that his son, at his funeral, offered a list of ten parenting rules derived from them.
In other vignettes, Kushins recounts the trouble Leonard’s agent had convincing Doubleday to publish The Switch in hardback, as its charming criminals were deemed unmarketable. Rum Punch was famously adapted by Quentin Tarantino into Jackie Brown (1997), starring Samuel L. Jackson, whose portrayal of Ordell captured the shift from the naive schemer of The Switch to hardened, philosophical thug.
At times, Kushins veers toward hagiography – but that’s understandable. As an eleven-year-old, he was given a copy of Get Shorty (1990) and became hooked. At fifteen, he sent Leonard a short story, which the author read and returned with notes, as well as his standard advice: write a million words to find your confidence. Kushins clearly found his. Six months after their correspondence, the teenage Kushin shook his hero’s hand at a New York book signing of Be Cool (1999). He notes drily that Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The pursuit (1974) and Coleridge: Early visions (1989), likened the relationship of biographer and subject to a “handshake across time”. There was no metaphor in Kushins’s handshake with “Dutch”.
His biography covers Leonard’s life, influences, addictions, marriages, punishing work habits and creative process. Dedication to writing came at a huge personal cost. For years, Leonard wrote early in the morning and worked full-time in advertising, with little energy left for his family. His first marriage was marred by daily drunken arguments and ended in divorce. His second was another failure. He struggled with alcohol and cannabis addictions, although saw no problem with the latter. These struggles were reflected in his writing, in which many of his characters battle with booze, broken relationships and other demons.
His writing began with westerns, and Kushins traces his shift to crime, his evolution as a stylist and his growing interest in writing complex, authentic female characters. Elmore Leonard’s voice still feels so modern, it’s startling to learn that his Hollywood agent once represented F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a reminder of a career that spanned six decades and left an indelible mark on American literature.
Justin Warshaw is King’s Counsel
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