A lively, eventful biography of the eminent—and undeniably cool—writer Elmore Leonard.
Leonard, nicknamed “Dutch” as a teenager in honor of a then-current baseball player, had other heroes as a kid: As biographer Kushins notes, Leonard wrote that his boyhood idols were the “desperadoes…roaming the Midwest and holding up banks” during the Depression era. As he grew up, the son of a General Motors executive and a mother who aspired to write, he became a model student who, for a brief time, entertained thoughts of priesthood but then “discovered girls.” He saw action in the Pacific in World War II, though he later joshed that “his military service had accounted for little more than distributing beer and taking out the trash.” Back home in Detroit, he went into advertising while trying his hand at writing, concentrating on genres “where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time.” He began with Westerns, encouraged by the postwar boom in pulp Western fiction, turning in stories such as “Three-Ten to Yuma” that would rank at the top of the canon. By the mid-1950s he was writing more novels than stories while taking “stabs at the type of satirical domestic vignettes associated with John O’Hara, Roald Dahl, and John Cheever.” Soon he found a new niche in crime, taking the point of view of the street-smart hustler and desperadoes of his youth and saying, “I’m not all that interested in the way educated people think.” Yet, of course, after the success of books such as Freaky Deaky and Get Shorty—books intensely researched and planned out to the last comma, with those exact outlaws at their heart—Leonard’s work is now standard among those educated people, and not even as a guilty pleasure, enshrined in the library of America.
A welcome celebration of a writer who, word by word and page by page, earned every bit of his fame.
Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard by C.M. Kushins will be published in the English language by Mariner in June 2025.
C. M. Kushins is the author of Nothing’s Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon and Beast: John Bonham and the Rise of Led Zeppelin. He has been a freelance journalist for over fifteen years and his work has appeared in High Times and The Daily Beast, among others.