Gold Coast (26 page)

Amis:
In a famous essay, Tom Wolfe said that the writers were missing all the real stories that were out there. And that they spent too much time searching for inspiration and should spend ninety-five percent of their time sweating over research. The result was a tremendously readable book,
The Bonfire of the Vanities
. Now you, sir, have a full-time researcher.

Leonard:
Yes, Gregg Sutter. He can answer any of your questions that I don’t know.

Amis:
Were you inspired by the research he put into this book?

Leonard:
He got me everything I needed to know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from Arizona to East Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had been in business over
100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger book and copied it and faxed it to me.

Amis:
Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?

Leonard:
No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in
Valdez Is Coming
, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.

Amis:
And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?

Leonard:
I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.

Amis:
The really bad guys.

Leonard:
Yeah, the really bad guys. . . .

Amis:
Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that
drives you? Is it just 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 nonfiction,
including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.

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 Bloomfield Village, Michigan, with his wife.

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ELMORE LEONARD
GOLD COAST

“A zingy thriller by the master of hard-boiled suspense . . . Bright writing, quirky characters, and crisp dialogue . . . from the best in the business.”

Dallas Morning News

“America’s pre-eminent crime fiction writer . . . The man with the ‘golden ear’ . . . his dialogue rings as true as the sound of Ella Fitzgerald on Memorex.”

Chicago Tribune

“Pure Elmore Leonard . . . An engaging tale of people who live slightly inside and way outside the law . . . You can’t help but be fascinated by them.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Leonard is tops in his field.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Vintage Leonard . . . A master of contemporary crime fiction.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Leonard is a writer, which is like saying Michael Jordan is a basketball player. He is a master of a kind of tabloid literature: quick, knowing, filled with perfectly observed talk, and always with at least one dead body somewhere on the premises. . . . The world he gives us feels real.”

New York Daily News

“Cream of the crime-writing crop . . . Leonard’s dialogue and descriptions are so good that they . . . keep the reader glued to the pages.”

Chicago Sun-Times

“Leonard writes prose that is as good as it gets: wryly funny, whiplash-plotted, peopled with memorable characters and sly dialogue.”

Seattle Times

“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

“Sex, money, and murder . . . [a] fine balance of nasty and flip . . . Leonard is a great teller of lean, mean, darkly funny stories.”

Boston Globe

“When Mr. Leonard is observing, satirizing, plotting, working up suspense, thickening the air with menace, discharging it in lightning flashes of violence, exposing the black holes behind the parts people play—when he tends to business, he gives us as much serious fun per word as anyone around.”

New York Times Book Review

“The hottest thriller writer in the U.S.”

Time

“No one writes better dialogue. No one conveys society’s seedier or marginal characters more convincingly. . . . Leonard’s sardonic view of the world proves immensely entertaining, and not a little thought-provoking.”

Detroit Free Press

“He is as good as the blurbs say: ‘The greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever,’ ‘Can’t put it down,’ and so on.”

Walker Percy

“Leonard is the real thing. . . . He has no tolerance for sham or pretense in the prose he writes or the people he depicts. He’s a funny writer—all the best suspense writers are—and an incisive, unsparing one. He does honest work, and reading it is a great pleasure.”

Washington Post Book World

“Leonard is the best in the business: His dialogue snaps, his characters are more alive than most of the people you meet on the street, and his twisting plots always resolve themselves with a no-nonsense plausibility.”

Newsday

“The finest thriller writer alive.”

Village Voice

“Leonard’s cinematic grasp of scene and setting, his ability to arouse within us a helpless sympathy for even the lowest of his characters, his quirky pacing and plot twists, and his sly humor and artfully oddball prose sear our eyeballs and keep the pages turning.”

Miami Herald

“The grand master of the crime genre . . . The foremost mystery writer in America today.”

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“A giant among writers of crime fiction.”

Columbus Dispatch

“No one can beat Elmore Leonard when it comes to mordant humor and shockingly bizarre situations.”

Orlando Sentinel

“Leonard remains the uncontested master of the crime thriller. . . . The thing that distances Elmore Leonard from his legion of imitators (apart from the inimitable style) is his seemingly inexhaustible store of hapless scoundrels and his ability to weave the threads of their sorry lives, twisted ambitions, and desperate dreams into a marvelous tapestry that depicts, better than any sociological study could ever hope to capture, the seamy underside of modern life. It’s a talent deceptive in its apparent simplicity.”

Tampa Tribune

“When Elmore Leonard’s people start talking, I can’t help myself, I have to listen.”

Lawrence Block

“Elmore Leonard can’t write ’em fast enough.”

Bergen Record

The Bounty Hunters
The Law at Randado
Escape from Five Shadows
Last Stand at Saber River
Hombre
The Big Bounce
The Moonshine War
Valdez Is Coming
Forty Lashes Less One
Mr. Majestyk
52 Pickup
Swag
Unknown Man #89
The Hunted
The Switch
Gunsights
Gold Coast
City Primeval
Split Images
Cat Chaster
Stick
LaBrava
Glitz
Bandits
Touch
Freaky Deaky
Killshot
Get Shorty
Maximum Bob
Rum Punch
Pronto
Riding the Rap
Out of Sight
Cuba Libre
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories
Be Cool
Pagan Babies
Tishomingo Blues

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

GOLD COAST. Copyright © 1980 by Elmore Leonard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books;.

EPub Edition NOVEMBER © 2002 ISBN: 9780061835513

First HarperTorch paperback printing: October 2002

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