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August 21st, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Updated
American crime writer Elmore Leonard, whose novels about guys with guns inspired Hollywood films including Get Shorty and Jackie Brown, has died at home near Detroit at the age of 87.
A statement on his official website said Leonard passed away “at home surrounded by his loving family”. He had suffered a stroke earlier this month.
The genre master’s 45 gritty novels attracted a wide audience over more than five decades and many were made into films.
Last year the National Book Federation awarded Mr Leonard its lifetime achievement award.
Leonard’s best-known works were set in the grimy underworld of cities like Detroit and Miami, starring cops, crooks and hitmen with richly varied notions of right and wrong.
He once admitted his books “aren’t exactly plot-driven.”
“They’re about people, with guns, in dire situations.”
Known by the nickname Dutch, Leonard had his commercial breakthrough in 1985 with the publication of Glitz.
His following books, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Killshot, Bandits, and Freaky Deaky, came out every year-and-a-half or so and were best-sellers.
Leonard’s 46th book, Blue Dreams, was expected to be published this year.
Get Shorty and Out of Sight were made into films. Among other films inspired by Leonard’s work are the Paul Newman western Hombre and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, which is based on the novel Rum Punch.
He also worked as executive producer on the television series Justified.
Writing legacy: A man of few words, dialogue was king
Leonard laced his novels with razor-sharp dialogue and avoided long paragraphs with descriptions of landscapes or inner monologues, which he derided as “hooptedoodle.”
He explained his bare-boned prose in a 10-point writing guide published by the New York Times in 2001 and cited by his many admirers on Twitter as news of his death spread.
Tips include: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things” and “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
“Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them,” he wrote.
“What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care.
“I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”
His most important rule, summing up all 10: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Born in New Orleans, served in WWII and worked as ad man
The National Book Foundation awarded its 2012 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Leonard last November.
“For a half-century, Elmore Leonard has produced vibrant literary work with an inimitable writing style,” the foundation’s executive director Harold Augenbraum said.
In presenting the award, the British novelist Martin Amis channelled Leonard’s famed succinctness by describing him in sum as “a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers.”
The author was born on October 11 1925 in New Orleans.
His father worked as an executive for General Motors and the family moved several times, eventually settling in Detroit in 1934.
Leonard served in a naval construction battalion during World War II and then went to work at an advertising agency in 1949.
During that time he began writing Western novels and short stories in his free time.
He quit the ad agency job to write full-time in 1961 and eventually moved into crime writing as popular television westerns swept up the market for cowboy yarns.
After suffering a stroke late last month, Leonard passed away at 7:15am local time at his home near Detroit, his official website said.
The author married three times and is survived by five children, 12 grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
AFP/ABC
Topics:
crime-fiction,
death,
books-literature,
author,
film-movies,
human-interest,
united-states
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Source Article from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/us-crime-novelist-elmore-leonard-dies/4901154
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