Killshot

pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?

Leonard: It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.

Amis: Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]

[Applause]

Editor s note: Martin Amis is the author of many novels — including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train — and many works of nonfic

About the Author

Elmore Leonard has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Be Cool. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Valdez Is Coming, and Rum Punch (as Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloom-field Village, Michigan, with his wife.

ELMORE LEONARD

KILLSHOT

“One of his most ambitious . . . Leonard has written an Elmore Leonard crime fiction thriller, but it’s a novel, too. Not a pretentious or ‘literary’ novel, of course, but a novel that only Elmore Leonard could write. . . . While there is plenty of the physical tension erupting into violence you expect, the real menace is psychological. . . . Leonard tops himself every time.”

Boston Globe

“Terrifically enjoyable . . . takes your breath away . . . the suspense hardly lets up . . . Leonard’s well-known virtues are all on display: the ripe, funny dialogue; a final scene so masterfully crafted you want to applaud; an array of secondary characters that stay with you the way secondary characters do in Dickens.”

Washington Post Book World

“A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”

The New Yorker

“Classic Leonard . . . Killshot is probably his best.” Newsweek

“Bone-chilling . . . Killshot is a riveting page-turner, a hare-and-hounds chase through the bleak suburbs of Detroit and the seamy riverfront dives of Cape Girardeau. . . . Leonard has a masterful touch with characterization and, in the Colsons, he’s created a wry, likable couple who . . . in their own way, are every bit as tough—and ten times brighter—than the lethal yo-yos stalking them. And the villains . . . are sinister in every dark meaning of the word. . . . Leonard’s dialogue crackles like the riveting torch that Wayne Colson handles so deftly one hundred feet above the hard ground.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Sinewy . . . shattering . . . Leonard pushes the suspense to the edge of endurance.”

Detroit Free Press

“Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He’s fast becoming an authentic American icon.”

Seattle Times

“Elmore Leonard is an awfully good writer of the sneaky sort; he’s so good, you don’t notice what he’s up to.”

Donald E. Westlake

“Elmore Leonard dazzles as he sprinkles his work continually with unexpected convolutions. . . . In Killshot, Mr. Leonard does not disappoint us; the reader is kept continually off balance, a step behind the action, tugged cunningly into blind alleys.”

New York Times Book Review

“Killshot is fine, taut work. . . .The world’s greatest cops ’n robbers novelist . . . gives us stalking, stakeouts, and the inevitable showdown. It’s all done with Leonard’s spare, deft, understated touch with dialogue and character. Leonard’s growing horde of fans will eat it up.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Elmore Leonard can still set the compass of his imagination in a new direction and sail off to explore untried territory. . . . While Killshot offers the familiar pleasures of good dialogue and fast action that we’ve come to expect from him, there’s almost as much gratification here in watching him at play with fresh ideas and challenges. . . . It isn’t just good guys against bad guys. To make the whole thing work, Mr. Leonard has to mix about a dozen different shades to the palette of behavior that ranges from decent to sociopathic. . . . Nothing is wasted. Each scene has multiple purposes. And every word counts.”

New York Times

“Elmore Leonard is arguably the best living writer of crime fiction.”

Roanoke Times & World News

“A pas de quatre that has a more-than-satisfying suspense quotient . . . Dialogue that manages to be pungent and funny, and yet exactingly realistic . . . In Killshot . . . Leonard is breaking the bounds of his genre.”

USA Today

“Killshot is vintage Leonard. There is lots of dialogue of the sort Leonard is renowned for, lots of action celebrating the illogic of daily life (as it intersects with crime), and no small amount of violent action— some random, some purposeful—leavened with irony. . . . Elmore Leonard has gotten so good . . . that now what he’s doing looks easy. But it’s easy in the way that plays Magic Johnson or Larry Bird make are easy: All superfluous motion has been removed, what you see are the essentials of the art.”

St. Petersburg Times

“A master of tight plotting . . . Elmore Leonard is as dependable as a Ford used to be and as knowing as a New York fashion designer. . . . In Killshot, there’s more good at stake than usual in a Leonard novel. . . . He takes risks this time round. He creates a genuinely attractive couple. . . . Leonard is still the best in the business. With Killshot he’s risen, again, to the occasion and created a novel that satisfies.”

Christian Science Monitor

“Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish.”

Detroit News

“Leonard has become a phenomenon. . . . His crime novels [are] grippingly true-to-life tales of double-cross and redemption, with a murky morality that seems to suit the times. . . . Leonard truly shines. He has created a gallery of compelling, off-the-wall villains unequaled in American crime fiction.”

New York Times Magazine

“No high-concept plots, no glitz . . . a wealth of detail, a richness of texture. The good people are human and we do care about them. . . . Whatever his characters say is their truth. No complex interior monologues, no introspection—what they do is what they think. . . . Elmore Leonard hasn’t left his fight in the gym. . . . The old master still packs the equalizer. It’s called Narrative Force, and Leonard has more of it than most writers do at their