In these musings, I often wax poetical about Stephen King, my favorite author and a master of the horror genre. But today I want to talk about another writer I have grown to love over the past decade.
I first discovered Elmore Leonard watching a repeat of one of my favorite western movies. With the opening credits of Valdez is Coming, I discovered it was based on a Leonard novel of the same name. Soon, I had a copy on my Kindle, followed by Hombre, another great dark-western movie. This in turn was followed by Escape from Five Shadows, Last Stand at Saber River, The Law at Randado, and all the other Leonard westerns, including a complete collection of his western stories. But then I asked myself, now what?
I grew up in Detroit, as did EL. But until a few years ago had never read one of his gritty urban novels. But I enjoyed the movie Get Shorty, and since I had no more westerns to read, I gobbled up that one before diving into his other crime fiction. That’s one of the fun things about discovering a prolific author. The anticipation of digging into his body of work, knowing that it will be a feast that’ll take a long while to reach dessert. I always found that a bit of a problem with Tolkien. He baked a delicious four-layer cake, but one can only chomp through the ring trilogy and Hobbit so many times before cavities set in.
My most recent Leonard appetizer was Riding the Rap, the second of the Rylan Givens novels. Rylan is a US Marshall from the coal mines of Kentucky. Like all Leonard’s characters, he’s richly crafted, multi-layered, and a little quirky. I’m looking forward to tackling another quirky character, a judge called Maximum Bob. He’s sitting in my to-read pile courtesy of an Amazon partner selling him for $0.01 plus shipping. But for now, I’m nibbling another collection of short fiction, Fire in the Hole, which features Rylan again. It just keeps getting better and better.