CANR

• Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon - 2019 Da Capo Press, New York, NY
• Beast: John Bonham and the Rise of Led Zeppelin (foreword by Dave Grohl) - 2021 Hachette Books, New York, NY
• Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard - 2025 Mariner, New York, NY

• The Crime Lady - https://buttondown.com/thecrimelady/archive/the-crime-lady-a-few-questions-for-cm-kushins/

  June 10, 2025
  The Crime Lady: A Few Questions For C.M. Kushins
  A Q&A with Elmore Leonard’s authorized biographer

  Cover for Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard
  Cover for Cooler Than Cool by C.M. Kushins (William Morrow)
  Dear TCL Readers:

  There is so much to update you on — primarily print and digital galleys for Without Consent are now properly in circulation, and my month-long stint at an artists’ residency — but that will have to wait till later this week. Today’s dispatch is the latest in my ad hoc author Q&A series, and it’s on a new book published today that will grab the attention of most every crime fiction reader.

  Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard is C.M. Kushins’ third biography and first of a writer (his earlier subjects: Warren Zevon and John Bonham.) It’s a breezy read that the Wall Street Journal’s Tom Nolan called “consistently engrossing.” It also has the blessing of Leonard’s children and mines his papers at the University of South Carolina, a comprehensive introduction to a man who kept things pretty simple: he wrote a lot, devoted himself to his family, and drank until it was no longer tenable to do so.

  Leonard’s life did not have the epic highs and lows as did Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, each the subject of several biographies apiece, and that is the conundrum that biographies of writers can fall into — the work is interesting, but the self-discipline required to make that work is a lot less sexy than personal chaos and self-destruction.

  Which isn’t to say Leonard lived a chaos-free life. Kushins carefully documents the marriages and divorces (and the premature death of his second wife, Joan), and it is clear there was a lot of hurt to go around. (Leonard’s first wife, Beverly, was a key source, so much so that her willingness to cooperate was “a wonderful surprise”; his last wife, Christine, wanted nothing to do with the project, and at one point sued to block the archive sale, though it was later settled.) But as important as these relationships were, Leonard’s writing was the central thing, and what drew Kushins to the project.

  After reading Cooler Than Cool, I had a ton of questions about Kushins’ origin story, his own working habits, and where Leonard fits in with the crime fiction canon. Our Q&A, conducted over email, was condensed and edited for clarity.

  The Crime Lady: I’m going to start at the end, because in the postscript to the biography you tell a wonderful, revealing story about the correspondence you had with Elmore Leonard as a teen, and how it changed your life. It really was, to quote Richard Holmes (as you do) “a handshake across time.” I’d love to hear more about that exchange and what it meant to you, and how it planted the seed for this book.

  C.M. Kushins: I’m always excited to talk about that experience, although I admit it was brief. To me, it just demonstrates the kind of person that Elmore truly was, and the patience he always displayed for younger writers who showed a genuine interest in putting in the work and learning how to write.

  I have two older brothers, so I was privy to more “adult” fare when I was growing up. I was twelve when Barry Sonnenfeld’s film of Get Shorty came out and my mother went and took Elmore’s original novel out from the library for me —mainly to shut me up until the movie was released. But by the time it did, the coolest person to me had already become the little old man in Detroit who wrote all that cool dialogue for John Travolta and Danny DeVito. So, I was hooked on Elmore’s books from a pretty young age. I wrote short stories and made a feeble attempt to get one into Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine the following year, and the rapid-fire rejection slip felt something like the time my first crush told me she wanted to be “just friends.” So … I sent it to Elmore — and he responded!

  It took about three weeks, but I had begged for help and guidance and, sure enough, he sent my pages back to me thoroughly proofread, along with a letter of encouragement and freshly-typed short story of his own. (That parcel was my most prized possession, and now resides in Elmore’s archive at the University of South Carolina.) I met him a year later while he was touring with the dual releases of Be Cool and The Tonto Woman, and he actually remembered me. I was beaming, and shy, but he signed both books, and what he wrote in The Tonto Woman stayed with me forever: “For Chad— Write every day, whether you feel like it or not.” So, I did.

  The following year, Elmore’s wonderful correspondence got the attention of my high school English teacher, who coupled it with a letter of recommendation of his own. With those, I got my first internship at a community newspaper and then just kept writing and writing for a decade and a half. By the time my first book, Nothing’s Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon, was released, both my mother and Elmore had passed away, but I celebrated the book’s publication by dedicating it to her and then making my own trip to the University of South Carolina in order to donate my correspondence with Elmore to their incredible literary archives. I couldn’t believe that Elmore had saved my letters to him! It was a very moving and surreal experience and, after I saw the amount of exclusive material they had—all of which I knew my fellow Elmore fanatics would adore—I sent the manuscript of my second book, Beast: John Bonham and the Rise of Led Zeppelin, to Peter Leonard and asked for a blurb. He not only gave me a wonderful one to include, but that started a warm dialogue with the Leonard family that resulted in permission for me to pen Elmore’s life story just in time for what would have been his centennial birthday.

  TCL: Though I am not a traditional biographer per se, I have relied heavily on archives and literary correspondence for my books. What was it like to sift through Leonard’s archive, and did having that access alter your perception of the work and of the man?

  CMK: Getting to do all that with Elmore Leonard as a focus was a joy. He had also taken steps to make things a little
  easier for future researchers or biographers, like saving everything, more or less, of relevance since 1951. As a lifelong fan, holding the original carbons for “Three-Ten To Yuma” and the drafts of Stick, LaBrava, and Get Shorty —all corrected in his famous blue ink — felt a secondary story was already unfolding, the words and thoughts in between the lines of exposition and dialogue that he’d put down.

  I suppose I was at an advantage knowing his work so well from such a young age, but when I would notice that he’d altered character names or removed subtle lines of dialogue from famous scenes, for instance, the biographer in me couldn’t help but think, “why did he do that?” —and then begin to imagine that I’m the author making those choices. Suddenly his intentions and humor began to bubble up to the later drafts and the narrative of his inner creative life suddenly became as vivid as the fiction he was writing.

  Elmore Leonard with his two eldest children, 1954
  Elmore Leonard with 2 of his children, 1954
  From a more playful, but equally important, angle, the idea that Elmore saved so many family photos, his old childhood homework — even his expired library cards — and, especially, years and years of detailed day planners, seemed both nostalgic and pragmatic. He saved all his personal correspondence, including fan letters, and saved anything and everything that had to do with his children and grandchildren. And, of course, he saved all of his original materials from Alcoholics Anonymous, his notes included — which was invaluable when it came time to address that topic.

  The collection itself taught me so much about both the writer and the person he was: a good, hardworking life preserved in minute pieces, and an artist who refused to stop learning how to get better and better.

  TCL: Cooler Than Cool certainly gets at the sheer day-to day of being a working writer, and in Leonard’s case, how that diligent work and output took years to pay off in a commercial and later, a critical way. The challenge of a life like his is that the drama - with a few notable exceptions - is mostly internal. How did you balance making sure readers knew what they needed about his work and what they needed to know about him and particularly, the good and the not-so-good about his personality?

  CMK: I appreciate this question immensely. Consistently maintaining the balance you’re describing may be the only real challenge with the book — other than edit it down from its original length (another byproduct of having so much of Elmore’s wonderful materials preserved). You’re very right that in telling the life story of an author, everything is, indeed, internal. But with Elmore, it was possible to trace how his creative decisions and his personal ones all intersected each other: his stories came from the newspapers he had delivered to the driveway in Birmingham, Michigan, or from personal experiences, and his characters often began as loose variations of people he knew in real life. From that, I was able to parallel some stuff between his two worlds.

  1956 ad for the Campbell-Ewald Agency featuring a young Elmore Leonard
  1956 ad for the Campbell-Ewald Agency featuring a young Elmore Leonard
  Elmore also drove himself to succeed in his two major endeavors, fiction writing and advertising. I stress that because it’s easy to forget that Elmore always had two jobs: he was active in some form of copywriting or advertising until the early 1970s, and even reminded one interviewer, “Advertising was very good to me.” He admitted that it staked his writing and, when his reputation finally allowed in the mid-1970s, he replaced his secondary “day job” with screenwriting—which was probably just was frustrating to him as the advertising work he’d left behind, although now, at least, he was independent. That certainly helped his writing—and funded it. As his biographer, his having dual work lives, as well as being a very active and “present” father during his children’s formative years, gave me three concurrent narratives in his life to keep bouncing back and forth from—kind of like one of his novels. With all that in mind, it was interesting connecting those threads and showing readers how he found inspiration everywhere—and was always amused.

  TCL: I was also struck by the struggle, as portrayed, Leonard had with alcoholism, in that it took a lot longer, and more failed attempts, to first quit drinking and then eventually find a proper equilibrium. Your previous books also examined similar terrain, and I wondered if you noted any parallels or resonances between these three men, and if there is a common thread in your biographical subjects.

  CMK: It wasn’t intentional but, yes, I did write three
  consecutive biographies about functioning alcoholics — and all creative artists who put their struggles into the work. With Warren Zevon and John Bonham, pretty much everyone who knew them were aware of their struggles, including the media. Warren always had a support system, but he often pushed those people away and didn’t achieve sobriety until he was, more or less, ready to face it himself. When I interviewed people who had known him, it was fascinating to see that those who befriended Warren during his most chaotic years were more guarded at first, well-aware of what those addictions had done to his life and career; his post-sobriety friends, however, all claimed they couldn’t believe that the Warren they knew was the same one from all those old Rolling Stone articles—the “rock and roll werewolf” had matured into a sort of curmudgeonly, professor-type who joked that he couldn’t recall full decades of his life. John Bonham, however, was so successful at such a young age—and made so much money for so many people—that he was constantly surrounded by neophytes willing to fuel any addiction that would get him on stage, like Elvis Presley.

  In Elmore’s case, none of his work associates or editors were ever aware that he’d ever had an issue with alcohol. I think he was honest about it later, when he claimed he never realized it was a real problem until marital problems escalated and a friend recommended to him AA in the late 1960s. Up until then, he had been accustomed to social circles that were all heavy-drinking atmospheres: neighborhood antics, the Navy, then the “three martini lunch” culture — although that wasn’t actually his drink. But I think he had a string of wake-up calls that he took seriously and spoke about pretty openly later on.

  When I was writing about it, I made a promise to myself and his family that I would only include as much about that period as Elmore, himself, had shared throughout the years. In 1985, he wrote a pretty powerful essay entitled, “Quitting,” about how he got sober—and he would often mention the number of years he’d been sober to interviewers as he got older, or some of the lessons it had taught him about his own mortality and need for creative focus. I was good working with that.

  TCL: Leonard’s later reputation vaulted him out of genre circles, but he never forgot his roots as a writer of Westerns and crime novels, and I hadn’t realized, for example, that his famous “Rules for Writing” started off as a speech at a Bouchercon. What did working on this book clarify about his relationship with genre, and the writers, past and contemporary, he was in conversation with?

  CMK: With the Westerns, I think Elmore viewed that whole time period in two ways: it provided an outlet where he could develop as a commercial fiction writer, and it supplied him with a relatively dependable supplemental income that let him that education going. He also had a fantastic early agent named Marguerite Harper — a bit of an unsung hero that I hope readers will find as fascinating as I did — who discovered him and taught him how to work successfully with editors and publishers. Elmore always claimed that he wrote Westerns because he liked Western movies, but even from the beginning, Harper was telling him to push for contemporary fiction.

  image of the Library of America box set of Elmore Leonard: The Classic Crime Novels
  Library of America boxed set of Elmore Leonard novels
  I think he certainly did enjoy the process of putting his research together in a creative way, but he also admitted later that there was an intimidation factor in having to write uniquely within the most mainstream genre of all—“popular fiction”—which would have required learning a while new style of writing. And just as he said about the advertising world, the Western genre “had been good” to him; he’d published over thirty short stories and five novels, two of which had been made into films. Later on, when he was really satisfied with his contemporary voice maybe 1970 through 1972—I think Elmore looked more fondly on the Western tradition because he’d learned he didn’t necessarily need it to be a writer anymore.

  With his contemporary crime writing, however, I love that Elmore used Dizzy Gillespie and Marian McPartland as the jazz artists he related to as a writer. But I’d disagree, since his stance that he just wrote “what he liked” most mirrored Miles Davis, who compared listening to genres of music to pushing the vegetables to the side of plate: “Eat what you like, skip what you don’t.” He was very modest about how he worked and seemed to really dislike the over-analysis of his style, even though, intuitively, knew which rules to break for the biggest linguistic impact—something that seemed to benefit him in both fiction and advertising.

  From what his archive demonstrates, Elmore shied away from talking about writing with other writers too much if it took him away from his desk for too long. Other than that, he corresponded with a lot of writers - Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, and Jim Harrison, to name a few — I didn’t even know he knew! And he always responded to fans seeking advice on writing, including me. What’s interesting is that, although he read a lot of contemporary fiction in his later years, no one ever seemed to affect his style or sound.

  TCL: Finally, what would be one takeaway for readers new to Elmore Leonard? Should they start with the 70s Detroit novels or the 80s Florida ones?

  CMK: The fun question is always the most difficult (and I hope you’ll share your answer, too)! If someone is new to Elmore Leonard, but they’ve heard of his books from a movie or television show adaptation, I think it’s safe to start there, only because I know that you’ll be hooked. Otherwise, if you read Stick, LaBrava and Glitz consecutively, you’ll probably want to read everything he ever wrote. Personally … I think Cuba Libre is a masterpiece of historical fiction, and he deserved significantly more critical attention in 2005 for The Hot Kid.

  **

  Many thanks to Kushins for taking the time to answer my questions. For what it’s worth, I think his answer on where to start with Elmore Leonard is the correct one, though for me, personally, it wasn’t until I read Fifty-Two Pickup and The Switch that Leonard’s writing really started to click for me (though I did enjoy The Hot Kid and said so for The Baltimore Sun back in the day.)

  I also appreciate Leonard much more now, as a middle-aged person, than I did in my twenties and early thirties. Do I wish he wrote women better on balance? Absolutely. (I still prefer Jennifer Lopez and especially Carla Gugino’s versions of Karen Sisco than the written original.) But what I once took for glibness about the human condition reads now as a deep understanding of mortality’s knife edge. Sentimentality had no place in his fiction because it had no place in Leonard’s life.

  Until next time, I remain,

  The Crime Lady

• Broad and Liberty - https://broadandliberty.com/2025/11/20/paul-davis-my-qa-with-author-c-m-kushins/

  Paul Davis: My Q&A with author C.M. Kushins
  Paul DavisNovember 20, 2025
  ADecrease font size. AReset font size. AIncrease font size.

  I’m an Elmore Leonard aficionado. I love the late, great crime writer’s novels, such as Get Shorty, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit and Raylan.

  He never wrote a novel about Philadelphia, but there is a Philadelphia connection in Glitz, his novel about Atlantic City. His cop character Vincent Moro in Glitz goes up against “Frank the Ching” and “Ricky the Zit,” two South Philly wiseguys. Leonard, who liked to use local color, had Moro bribe a doorman with a cheesesteak. I got a kick out of that.

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  WHO INVITED PAUL?

  WHO INVITED PAUL?
  I met Elmore Leonard briefly in 2009 when he came to Philadelphia to promote his novel, Road Dogs. I attended the event at the Philadelphia Free Library in Center City with my friend and former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Frank Wilson. Frank introduced Leonard to the packed house.

  Elmore Leonard struck me as having the cool insouciance of an elderly jazz musician. So I thought C.M. Kushins’s title of his biography of Elmore Leonard, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, was spot on.

  I reached out to C.M. Kushins and you can read my Q&A with him below:

  Davis: Why did you write a biography of Elmore Leonard? And why did you use the title “Cooler Than Cool?”

  Kushins: Elmore has been my personal hero since I was a child; in fact, when I was fifteen, I sent him a short story I’d written and asked for advice. He was incredibly generous to me and even took the time to write back to me and proofread my work. I was, as you could imagine, a fan for life. As I got older and transitioned into a professional author, too, I’ve always went back and re-read Elmore’s books for both enjoyment and inspiration. And, well, the centennial of his birth was coming up and, since my admiration for his work and style have only grown, I really felt that a comprehensive and definitive biography of his life and work would help to celebrate and solidify his place as an important American writer. And as for the title, I admit it’s from a line in Elmore’s first contemporary crime novel, The Big Bounce.

  Davis: How would you describe Elmore Leonard? How did he get the nickname “Dutch?”

  Kushins: The impressions that I got from studying Elmore’s life is that he was always playful and curious about the world — even from a young age — but knew the value of hard work and persistence, whether in his day-job or, later, as one of the world’s most successful writers of fiction. I think he was an incredibly generous person who liked to entertain both himself and his audience with his stories but also used his writing to say the things about the world that required a creative outlet. I’m fairly certain that writing was also the true love of his life.

  He got the nickname “Dutch” in high school when he was on the baseball team; he shared the name with a famous ballplayer and his buddies gave him the same name, so “Dutch” Leonard stuck for life.

  Davis: How did Leonard first become a writer? What and where did he publish his first stories?

  Kushins: Elmore had a love of reading and of movies even from a very young age; his mother and older sister would read to him when he was child. Although he liked to tell stories, he didn’t make a true stab at writing fiction until he returned from military service during World War II (he was a “Seabee” in the U.S. Navy).

  When he returned, he went back to college and studied English and Philosophy and soon started submitting short stories to the school paper and an annual short story contest affiliated with a school literary club. It wasn’t until a few years later—then married and working full-time at the Detroit advertising giant, Campbell-Ewald — that Elmore made the decision to use all his “spare” time devoted to fiction.

  Famously, he began getting up at five o’clock in the morning and wrote for two hours before getting ready for his office job, as well as his responsibilities as a husband and father. With diligence, however, he got his first short story published on his own steam in 1951 and attracted the attention of his first literary agent. For the next decade or so, he was a professional author of Western pulp fiction and an advertising executive.

  Davis: Why did he switch from Westerns to contemporary crime fiction?

  Kushins: As far back as his earliest success with Western fiction, Elmore’s first agent, Marguerite Harper, advised him to “branch out” as a writer, since genres are a fickle thing. Elmore, however, had truly devoted himself to learning the “sound” of crafting a good Western, as kept a comprehensive ledger of his research and self-education on the time period and — in particular — of the Apache indigenous nation.

  Only later, after his massive mainstream success, did Elmore admit that he’d had trepidations about writing contemporary stories, since that particular market already had so many wonderful authors he’d be competing with. Instead, when he made the conscious leap to contemporary fiction, he “relearned” aspects of his storytelling tools, and leaned much heavier into dialogue and used much less exposition. That right there set him apart from his peers, and deservedly so — as he’d completely reinvented his “sound” in order to keep telling the stories he wanted to tell.

  Davis: Who influenced him?

  Kushins: Well, if you mean pragmatically, Elmore himself always held up three specific authors as the ones who shaped him the most: Ernest Hemingway, Richard Bissell, and George V. Higgins. And as different as those authors may seem, their respective use of authentic spoken language seems to have been the biggest “draw” for Elmore’s attention.

  Davis: How does his crime fiction differ from other crime writers?

  Kushins: For many years, Elmore struggled with how the mainstream critics and his own early publishers publicly presented him. Both seemed to pigeon-hole him into being the next Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, yet his writing didn’t even remotely resemble either of them. It was only in, perhaps, the mid 1980s that his signature literary sound got the full critical attention that it deserved — making him more of a “stylist” than a paperback writer of crime tales.

  Personally, I would have to say that Elmore’s emphasis on characterization over basic plotting is what continues to separate him from any other American author that you’ll still find on the “crime and mystery” shelf. His stories always have a fantastic ending — but that’s only because he spent so much time making his characters seem real that their decisions and ultimate denouements seem logical.

  Davis: How and why did he spend so much time with Detroit cops? What did he learn there that he used to good effect in his fiction?

  Kushins: Stories seem to differ as to what drew Elmore towards working with law enforcement for his mid-career works. According to his now-deceased lifelong friend, the private investigator Bill Marshall, Elmore had a form of “writer’s block” just prior to his writing of City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. But to be honest, I don’t think Elmore suffered from “writer’s block” a day in his life. I think following a successful decade and a half of writing Westerns, it occurred to him that modernizing his sound would have to include expanding his narrative horizons, including his native Detroit and key parts of Florida.

  More accurately, I’d say that his assignment writing about Detroit Squad Seven — his only work of genuine journalism — got his creative wheels spinning in ways that hadn’t happened since he’d dedicated himself to full-time fiction.

  While covering the Homicide Department in his own city, Elmore witnessed the full gamut of human emotions on a nightly basis — and then got to discuss the events with both the police and the criminals themselves. The experience was invaluable. His storytelling was never the same, and both his modern law enforcement and criminal protagonists seemed to become more human, more riveting—and both more relatable. I think, as a serious author, he couldn’t resist using that atmosphere as his career’s creative playground.

  Davis: Why did he use researcher Gregg Sutter?

  Kushins: Gregg is an incredible researcher and proved himself to Elmore very early on in Elmore’s own transition towards mainstream fame at the end of the 1970s. Prior to that, Elmore had had to conduct all his research himself — including “field trips” to different U.S. states and even to Europe and Israel. But remember, by then, Elmore was in his fifties, a recovered alcoholic, and newly married; I think he wanted a semblance of balance and normalcy to his life by that point, and having a professional researcher who doubled as a devoted fan was the best possible option. Ultimately, Gregg’s research would lead to deeper trust, and, by the final decades of Elmore’s life, Gregg was making invaluable research contributions to the final works.

  Davis: You spend a good bit of the book covering his book deals and his book to film deals? How important to his fame and legacy were the films and TV series?

  Kushins: Thanks for asking that — much appreciated! Aside from the appeal of reading all the fun Hollywood stuff within the book, I think putting an emphasis on Elmore’s multimedia work is crucial to evaluating his full canon as an author. From his earliest beginnings as a pulp writer in his twenties, Elmore was advised that he’d make a much more lucrative income on his writing through film and television sales — so it was always a goal. (Remember, it wasn’t overtly commercial to Elmore; as a kid, he’d loved film adaptations of his favorite books, as long as the movies were good!)

  But I think Elmore’s story is a truly American one. His father — who died very early in Elmore’s adulthood — had aspired to becoming a fine artist himself, until circumstances led him to the job market before high school graduation.

  Davis: What novel of his do you believe is his best work? Do you have a personal favorite?

  Kushins: This is a tough one, since I have my own personal favorites and, as I’ve gotten older, new favorites based on a deeper appreciation for his style and growth.

  On a personal level, Get Shorty was the first one I read and remains special — as does Out of Sight, since that was the one I read just before writing to Elmore himself. But looking at his work retrospectively, I think Elmore hit a serious “traditional” high watermark with, say, his Western, Last Stand at Saber River. To me, that’s the best of the Westerns, since Hombre — which followed next — was written in the first-person narrative and doesn’t really display his expanding style. For crime enthusiasts, I can’t recommend Stick, LaBrava, and Glitz highly enough — or his later historical works, The Hot Kid. With that, I feel like Elmore’s literary style came full circle.

  Paul Davis’ Crime Beat column appears here each week. He can be reached at pauldavisoncrime.com.

• Library of America - https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/his-own-sense-of-higher-justice-c-m-kushins-on-the-freewheeling-career-of-elmore-leonard/

  Interviews July 25, 2025
  “His Own Sense of Higher Justice”: C. M. Kushins on the Freewheeling Career of Elmore Leonard

  Elmore Leonard
  Photo illustration of Elmore Leonard depicting his signature glasses and cap

  There are few experiences in American literature more thrilling than a sequence of Elmore Leonard dialogue. With an ear tuned to the unpretentious poetry and crackling rhythms of everyday speech, Leonard distilled a distinct prose style that combined the cinematic panache of genre fiction with incandescent language and unforgettable characters. From his early novels that pushed the frontiers of the Western to his later contemporary crime classics like Get Shorty, Rum Punch, and Out of Sight, he infused the base materials of page-turning potboilers with raucous humor, penetrating observation, and surprising moral insight.

  In his new biography, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard (Mariner Books, 2025), writer C. M. Kushins investigates the long arc of this matchless author’s multi-decade career, spanning five a.m. drafting sessions before clocking in at his advertising agency day job, forays into the vagaries of Hollywood filmmaking, and heartfelt reckoning with his spiritual beliefs. Below, Kushins discusses Leonard’s key influences and artistic aspirations, his lifelong engagement with his Catholic faith, and the complex considerations of craft and commercialism that informed his claim (amply realized) that he “wrote to be read.”

  LOA: Elmore Leonard combined a superlative ear for dialogue with vernacular and propulsive prose (“If it sounds like writing,” he once said, “I leave it out”). What are the hallmarks of Leonard’s style?

  C. M. Kushins: Leonard’s style was marked by incredible, realistic dialogue; it was something he had an instinctive talent for, but also honed over time. If you go back to his childhood, he would “tell” the plots of recent movies to his neighborhood friends, and then, in fifth grade, took his first stab at writing with a short play based on All Quiet on the Western Front.

  I think he knew early on that his ear for dialogue was among his strongest storytelling abilities and he worked to craft a unique sound that emphasized it. Following his successful transition into the “contemporary crime” genre in the late 1960s, he admitted that he’d had trepidation about writing stories within a modern setting, as so many other successful authors already did it so well. His move from the Western into the contemporary world wasn’t as easy as many readers would assume.

  Famously, he spent the first decade of his career getting up at five in the morning and writing at least one page of fiction before he’d even allow himself to have a cup of coffee.
  A strong combination of working as a screenwriter during the early 1970s—as well as his famed discovery of George V. Higgins’ crime classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle—helped shape Leonard’s signature sound. Much has been said about how Leonard’s admiration for Higgins is best seen by Leonard’s economic use of exposition and plot-driving dialogue, but I think that Higgins’ portrayal of his native Boston was a much more important revelation to Leonard. If you read Eddie Coyle, you can see how the city itself is a character in the larger tragedy of the story. Leonard immediately began using his own locales—Detroit and Florida among them—soon after. According to Leonard, Higgins also taught him the crucial lesson to start a story in the middle of the action, throwing the reader into the scene already taking place.

  Elmore Leonard
  Elmore Leonard in 1990 (Marc Hauser Photography Ltd / Getty Images)

  Among Leonard’s unique hallmarks—incredible dialogue aside—I would say that the balance of characterization between law enforcement, criminals, and “regular” everyday citizens (Leonard’s “decent man in trouble,” as The New York Times once dubbed them) is a key to deciphering his humorous take on human morality. That and the fact that his women are usually smarter than his men.

  LOA: Leonard at one point constituted, in your words, “a one-man writing factory,” producing fiction, ad copy, and screenplays all at the same time. Can you discuss his tenacious work ethic and how he balanced his art with making a living?

  CMK: Leonard was unique as a popular author in the sense that his philosophy and approach to storytelling was both uncompromising and pragmatic. If you go back to his father, Elmore Leonard, Sr., you see that the elder Leonard had youthful aspirations to become a fine commercial artist (Leonard’s son, Christopher, has one of his grandfather’s New Orleans seascapes hanging in his home) but had to set those ambitions aside when he was forced to join the workforce in his teens.

  Decades later, in his twenties, Elmore Leonard nearly had to make the same decision when his father died rather young and Leonard attempted to purchase his New Mexico car dealership, apparently forsaking his own desire for a career in writing. It didn’t work out, but Leonard continued to work a full-time job in advertising at Campbell-Ewald while supporting a young wife, and soon, a growing family—all while writing Western fiction in the early mornings.

  The Campbell-Ewald Advertising Agency ad featuring young copywriter Elmore Leonard that appeared in theOctober 6, 1956, issue of The New Yorker
  1956 Campbell-Ewald New Yorker ad featuring a young Elmore Leonard (Fair Use)

  I think he knew early on that if he wanted to pursue a career in any creative trajectory, he’d need to do two things: have a stable “day job” that would support his family and stake his writing, and select a surefire genre that would allow him to keep selling fiction while getting better at writing it. Funnily enough, that practice didn’t really stop until the mid-1990s!

  If you think about it, even when Leonard retired from advertising, he viewed his screenwriting work as just that—work—replacing the stability that copywriting had once provided while still allowing him to hone his prose.

  Famously, he spent the first decade of his career getting up at five in the morning and writing at least one page of fiction before he’d even allow himself to have a cup of coffee. After helping his wife, Beverly, with the kids, he attended an abbreviated Catholic Mass on the way to Campbell-Ewald, then worked at the office until at least five in the afternoon. He kept this up with incredible discipline, even after his stories and novels began to sell and two films had been adapted for the screen. He took the advice of his first agent, the tenacious and brilliant Marguerite Harper, to heart and didn’t give up his advertising work until he knew he could survive first as a freelancer, then as a full-time author. Leonard’s story is really one of a lifelong, hard-won fight for creative independence.

  LOA: Leonard developed his authorial skill in the Western genre, having deliberately chosen it for its commercial prospects. But his work was far from formulaic: he was an early practitioner of the “Revisionist Western” emerging in the 1950s and ’60s, and he incorporated Western elements into his later novels (Terrence Rafferty, editor of LOA’s Elmore Leonard: Westerns, claims, “In a sense, Elmore Leonard never really stopped writing Westerns”). How did Leonard’s relationship to the Western evolve throughout his career?

  CMK: Without shamelessly praising the Library of America for its efforts, I have to say I loved all of the LOA Elmore Leonard volumes. Gregg Sutter and Terrence Rafferty did wonderful jobs editing those, and I strongly agreed with their selections.

  Elmore Leonard LOA volumes
  Elmore Leonard in the LOA series: Four Novels of the 1970s, Four Novels of the 1980s, Westerns, and Four Later Novels

  That being said, within Rafferty’s Western volume, I loved that he emphasized the progressive nature of Leonard’s earlier work. I wouldn’t say that it’s an aspect that most readers miss, only that most mainstream readers tend to gravitate toward Leonard’s contemporary crime fiction while shying away from the Western stuff, never realizing just how modern that work feels.

  In fact, I think that Leonard’s own personal life and beliefs fueled much of his Western work in ways not necessarily present in his later crime writing. For example, Leonard’s Catholic beliefs and sense of the cultural zeitgeist (the civil rights movement and Vatican II, for example) show in the moral and ethical decisions that face his characters in even the earliest Western stories.

  While he never eliminated those themes from his work, they are very evident in the short stories and Western novels—much in the way that Graham Greene wasn’t a Catholic writer, but was a writer who happened to be Catholic, and so his protagonists seemed to follow those same internal senses of guilt and justice.

  To me, Hombre is one of the best books ever written about racism and bias in any form, Valdez Is Coming is one of the coolest re-imaginings of the Christ mythology in modern fiction, and Forty Lashes Less One holds up staggeringly well as an early commentary on what became the privatized prison system. Not that Leonard had those aims in mind, however; he just claimed he enjoyed Western movies and told the stories he wanted to tell.

  Leonard Western Paperbacks
  First editions (all paperback originals) of Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Hombre (1961), Valdez Is Coming (1970), and Forty Lashes Less One (1972)

  LOA: Among Leonard’s key influences were giants like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, as well as less-known figures such as Richard Bissell and the aforementioned George V. Higgins. What did Leonard learn from these writers and how did he see himself in relationship to the American literary canon or his author peers?

  CMK: There’s a great lesson in there, that even before he ever truly set pen to paper, Leonard began his career as an active reader—devouring almost anything that he could, first as a kid and later while serving in the Navy during World War II. As child, his mother subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and at night his older sister would read stories to him before bed. In the service, Leonard was privy to the same bundles of paperbacks sent to those stationed abroad—classics and dime-store novels alike. During those years, Leonard shaped his own percept of what “good and bad” writing was, coming to the conclusion that most writers “used too many words” and—as he famously recalled from Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday—unnecessary, flowery exposition that Steinbeck had deemed “hooptedoodle.”

  By the time Leonard graduated from college, he was taking his writing seriously and placed much of his self-education on studying Ernest Hemingway—his first real literary hero—and in particular For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Leonard regarded as a Western tale in literary guise. What Hemingway lacked, however, was the sense of humor that Leonard himself found in real life, but he soon discovered that in the writing of Richard Bissell—although he would also study John D. McDonald and some major contemporaries who graced the “slicks” like Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post.

  Many years later, Leonard was established enough as a best-selling author that his time to read fiction for fun had significantly dwindled. He made it a habit never to read fiction while working on a book, instead poring over the volumes of necessary non-fiction and research provided by Gregg Sutter for the next project.

  However, Leonard kept up lively correspondences with a number of his contemporaries—many of whom readers may be surprised to learn he knew. For example, he had fan letters from authors as diverse as Martin Amis, Raymond Carver, and Clive Cussler, and kept up correspondences with Margaret Atwood and Jim Harrison. I think in his later years, Leonard read all of those authors as a sort of mutual appreciation society—although he was still often labeled a “genre writer.”

  Elmore Leonard in 1989
  Leonard in 1989 (CCA SA 3.0)

  LOA: Leonard was raised Catholic, and though he stopped taking the sacrament later in life, he still reported that “it’s important to me to go through this little drill about what my purpose is before I get out of bed every morning.” Can you speak about Leonard’s relationship to religion and how it filtered into his fiction?

  CMK: The subject of Leonard’s religious and spiritual beliefs interested me, too—especially since, as a child, I thought it was cool that both he and I went to Catholic school and were primarily taught by nuns. Leonard’s children told me that, when he was younger, his own Catholic beliefs were stronger than even his parents’ had been; up until the late 1960s, Leonard even served as a eucharistic minister and catechism teacher for his local parish.

  Around that time, however, he also left Campbell-Ewald and began his first attempt as a freelance copywriter, temporarily putting his fiction writing on the back burner. One of the most lucrative ongoing gigs he had was writing short screenplays for industrial and education films, directed by an old friend. Leonard’s first screenplay—a recruitment film for the Franciscan Order—inadvertently initiated a lifelong friendship with the short documentary’s subject, a recently ordained missionary priest named Juvenal Carlson. For decades, the two would keep up a lively correspondence, no matter where in the world Carlson ended up on assignment, and Leonard would always pose his own spiritual questions to him, even when Leonard himself all but left the church in the early 1970s. When Leonard conquered his alcoholism in late 1970s, he managed to find much of the structure and daily affirmation that the church had once given him in his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

  I think Leonard reached a point in his life when the solace provided by organized religion and AA were no longer needed, and he was able to step away from both. But it was a personal thing to him. He continued to fund numerous Catholic charities and other philanthropic organizations that he didn’t necessarily take part in, yet continued to respect and praise. And he also continued to fuel his fiction with cool priests (albeit, fake ones), nuns, and strong protagonists that stuck to internal moral codes that seemed to demonstrate, at times, his own sense of higher justice.

  LOA: “I’ve always seen my books as movies,” Leonard said, and fittingly his work has produced numerous film adaptations, from Western genre flops to ’90s neo-noir hits like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Jackie Brown. What about his fiction invites the cinematic treatment? And what are your favorite movie versions of books by Leonard?

  Leonard movie adaptations
  Film adaptations of Leonard: Out of Sight (1998), Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), and 3:10 to Yuma (2007)

  CMK: Leonard had no pretense in admitting that, even during his earliest years as a professional writer, selling his stories for Hollywood adaptations was a key goal. Not only had both of his agents (Marguerite Harper until her death, then Hollywood power broker H. N. Swanson) encouraged him to switch to contemporary settings and styles, but also to write sellable work that would keep readers and audiences wanting more.

  Although Leonard never compromised his writing style, he always claimed that he “wrote to be read” and he, himself, loved movies—if they were good. Nothing seemed to frustrate him more than if one of his screenplays or novels was turned into a bad film; he didn’t mind a director making changes if it improved the story for the screen. Look how Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Jackie Brown are all dynamic adaptations that Leonard adored, yet those respective filmmakers made necessary changes to properly adapt the stories to new mediums. That didn’t seem to bother Leonard if the film worked; as he said, the book was his.

  He often admitted that when a filmmaker or producer would read his work, they would see his style beckoned adaptation: a set of chronological scenes, driven by great dialogue that furthered both the characterization and the story. Although Leonard later said that, despite his playful jabs, Hollywood had “been good” to him, and I believe he really felt that way. You could see the joy on his face when he visited the set of one of his adaptations and the cast and crew were genuinely excited to see him there. But I also think that he was somewhat relieved when, blissfully in his seventies, he could wake up in the morning and just write—allowing other, younger screenwriters to adapt his work while he could keep his focus on fiction.

  Cooler Than Cool
  Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard by C. M. Kushins (Mariner Books, 2025)

  My favorite adaptation will always be Get Shorty. As a child, it was my first encounter with anything written by Leonard, and I was fortunate enough to have read the book right before the film came out. I absolutely loved both and became a devoted Leonard junkie for the rest of my life. I will say, though, that both Out of Sight and Jackie Brown are close contenders, since they truly bring Elmore’s sound to life on the screen. I have to give credit, however, to Paul Schrader, who made a really faithful and cool adaptation of Touch in 1997. For decades, Leonard had been told that the story was, more or less, unfilmable, and I think Schrader proved that wrong by sticking to the book.

  LOA: With dozens of books to choose from, it can be hard for readers to know where to start with Leonard. What recommendations would you give to those eager to begin exploring his oeuvre?

  CMK: Well, normally this would be a tough one, but Library of America made it easy! If a reader is new to Leonard’s work, I highly recommend the four volumes that LOA put out; they’re excellent cross sections of Leonard’s career and, if you like a specific volume, you can easily go on to read his other works from that era. But if you can get hooked by Westerns, try and go in chronological order.

  However, for real newbies, I always recommend the short stories—especially since I love the collection Fire In the Hole (originally When the Women Come Out to Dance). After that, I revere Leonard’s Carl Webster Saga—including Cuba Libre, The Hot Kid, Comfort to the Enemy, Up In Honey’s Room, and an incredible short story titled “Tenkiller.”

  After that, I’ll bet you’ll want to read everything he ever wrote.

  Leonard at the 70th Annual Peabody Awards Luncheon, 2011
  Leonard at the 70th Annual Peabody Awards Luncheon in 2011 (CC BY 2.0)

  C. M. Kushins is the author of Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, 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.

COOLER THAN COOL

The life and work of Elmore Leonard

C. M. KUSHINS

512pp. Mariner Books. $32.

SWAG

ELMORE LEONARD

240pp. Penguin Classics. Paperback, 9.99 [pounds sterling].

THE SWITCH

ELMORE LEONARD

208pp. Penguin Classics. Paperback, 9.99 [pounds sterling].

RUM PUNCH

ELMORE LEONARD

272pp. Penguin Classics. Paperback, 9.99 [pounds sterling].

This year marks the centenary of Elmore "Dutch" Leonard, who died in 2013 at the age of eighty-seven. He is widely regarded as one of the most idiosyncratic and influential crime writers of the twentieth century. Often called the "Dickens of Detroit", he offered gritty, realistic portrayals of American lowlife that demonstrate a masterly use of dialogue to conjure up character, reveal injustice and evoke emotion.

The origin of Leonard's nickname is more prosaic than his fiction. It was a nod to Emil "Dutch" Leonard, a five-time All-Star pitcher for the Washington Senators, who was at the peak of his career while Elmore was in high school. Leonard adopted the name early, even signing his first works with "Dutch" in the byline. It stuck for life.

His first novel, The Bounty Hunters, was published in 1953; his last, Raylan, in 2012. In those six decades, he wrote forty-five novels, dozens of short stories and numerous screenplays and television scripts. In celebration of the centenary, Penguin is re-releasing fourteen of Leonard's novels, starting with three classics: Swag (1976), The Switch (1978) and Rum Punch (1992). These coincide with the publication of C. M. Kushins's monumental biography of the author, Cooler Than Cool.

Each of the novels highlights Leonard's signature style: spare prose, dialogue-driven plots, morally ambiguous characters. The earliest, Swag, is at once funny, bleak and tense. It reads like a jazz jam session: unpredictable, tightly rhythmic, cool. The unlikely protagonists--Frank Ryan, a used car salesman, and Ernest "Stick" Stickley Jr, an ex-con car thief--form a partnership to rob liquor stores and supermarkets. They follow a self-made code of conduct for successful stickups, a set of rules that, as Kushins notes, mirror Leonard's own rules for writing. At first, the plan works. But it collapses under the weight of ego, greed and human fallibility.

The prose is stripped to the bone yet rich with implication. Character and voice carry the story. Humour is dry, violence sudden, tension simmering beneath the surface. Crime is portrayed with almost documentary realism; the illicit blends seamlessly with the mundane. Beneath the caper lies a sharp commentary on American ambition--and the delusions that power its dreamers. Frank and Stick aren't monsters. They're just trying to beat a system rigged against them, and their crash is the inevitable result of fantasy colliding with frailty.

Next comes The Switch, another character-rich novel that subverts genre expectations. Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, two small-time crooks, kidnap the wife of a wealthy man--only to discover that he's having an affair, plans to divorce her and has no intention of paying a ransom. What begins as a standard kidnapping plot becomes a story of shifting loyalties and quiet revelations. Leonard's hallmark minimalism is in full force: dialogue carries the plot and exposition is nearly invisible. Mickey Dawson, the kidnap victim, evolves into the novel's emotional and moral centre. She's a proto-feminist character who dismantles power structures with wit and composure. Leonard avoids melodrama, letting absurdity and personality create tension and humour organically. His refusal to moralize or sensationalize crime gives The Switch its observational distance.

Finally, Rum Punch, which is among Leonard's most accomplished works. A sequel of sorts to The Switch, it sees the return of Ordell and Louis in a gunrunning and money-laundering scheme. This time, the centre of gravity is Jackie Burke, a middle-aged flight attendant caught smuggling cash for a gun dealer. The novel explores themes of agency, betrayal and survival in a world set against the working class--especially women of colour. Power shifts happen in low-key conversations between weary cops and jaded criminals. Jackie is a departure from the femme fatale model: she uses intelligence and instinct to outwit both the criminals and the law.

The novel critiques institutional corruption and moral ambiguity, but with dry irony rather than sermonizing. Leonard avoids easy heroism, allowing characters such as Jackie and Max Cherry to move through moral grey zones. What emerges is more than a clever caper--it's a subtle exploration of justice and autonomy. Rum Punch is a subversive and enduring entry in the American crime canon.

In Cooler Than Cool, Kushins provides rich context for these novels and shares several revealing backstories. Asked once if he appeared in his own novels, Leonard replied: "Yes. I play all the parts". We learn that Mickey was inspired by a local news story, and that Leonard based her husband, in part, on himself--particularly their shared habit of arguing with their wives about counting drinks at parties. It is noted that Leonard's life--despite its occasionally anarchic nature--returned frequently to firm sets of rules. Swag features ten rules for pulling off a successful heist, including: "ALWAYS BE POLITE ON THE JOB", "NEVER SAY MORE THAN IS NECESSARY" and "NEVER COUNT THE TAKE IN THE CAR". Ten more of Leonard's rules concern writing: "Never open a book with weather"; "No more than two or three exclamation marks per 100,000 words"; "Use regional dialect sparingly" (though he didn't always follow this); and, most important: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it". These numbered edicts became so closely identified with him that his son, at his funeral, offered a list of ten parenting rules derived from them.

In other vignettes, Kushins recounts the trouble Leonard's agent had convincing Doubleday to publish The Switch in hardback, as its charming criminals were deemed unmarketable. Rum Punch was famously adapted by Quentin Tarantino into Jackie Brown (1997), starring Samuel L. Jackson, whose portrayal of Ordell captured the shift from the naive schemer of The Switch to hardened, philosophical thug.

At times, Kushins veers toward hagiography--but that's understandable. As an eleven-year-old, he was given a copy of Get Shorty (1990) and became hooked. At fifteen, he sent Leonard a short story, which the author read and returned with notes, as well as his standard advice: write a million words to find your confidence. Kushins clearly found his. Six months after their correspondence, the teenage Kushin shook his hero's hand at a New York book signing of Be Cool (1999). He notes drily that Richard Holmes, author of Shelley: The pursuit (1974) and Coleridge: Early visions (1989), likened the relationship of biographer and subject to a "handshake across time". There was no metaphor in Kushins's handshake with "Dutch".

His biography covers Leonard's life, influences, addictions, marriages, punishing work habits and creative process. Dedication to writing came at a huge personal cost. For years, Leonard wrote early in the morning and worked full-time in advertising, with little energy left for his family. His first marriage was marred by daily drunken arguments and ended in divorce. His second was another failure. He struggled with alcohol and cannabis addictions, although saw no problem with the latter. These struggles were reflected in his writing, in which many of his characters battle with booze, broken relationships and other demons.

His writing began with westerns, and Kushins traces his shift to crime, his evolution as a stylist and his growing interest in writing complex, authentic female characters. Elmore Leonard's voice still feels so modern, it's startling to learn that his Hollywood agent once represented F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's a reminder of a career that spanned six decades and left an indelible mark on American literature.

Justin Warshaw is King's Counsel

Caption: Elmore Leonard, 1992

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 NI Syndication Limited
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Warshaw, Justin. "Dickens of Detroit: A crime writer who offered 'gritty, realistic portrayals of American lowlife'." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6385, 15 Aug. 2025, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852386091/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8838d7bc. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. By C. M. Kushins. June 2025. 512p. Mariner, $32 (9780063306868); e-book (9780063306882). 813.

He was supposed to be a car dealer. Except he hated cars--he liked to read, and was discovering that he might be a good writer. Maybe there was a career in that? Elmore Leonard (1925--2013) became one of the most respected and popular writers of crime fiction, particularly pulps and westerns. Known for his bare-bones writing style and pitch-perfect dialogue, he influenced generations of writers who came after him. In this new biography, Kushins (who's also written books about Warren Zevon and John Bonham) draws on previously published sources, new interviews, and unpublished material including letters, excerpts from an unfinished novel, and snippets from a memoir-in-progress. Kushins isn't the first to give Leonard the biographical treatment--see, for example, Paul Challen's Get Dutch! (2000)--but he may be the first to really get inside the author's mind, to show us not just who Elmore Leonard was but how he got that way. For Leonard's legion of fans, the book is a must-read, but you don't need to be a Leonard fan to enjoy this beautifully crafted life story.--David Pitt

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Pitt, David. "Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, pp. 15+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211520/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ff4311f4. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Kushins, C.M. COOLER THAN COOL Mariner Books (NonFiction None) $32.00 6, 10 ISBN: 9780063306868

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 asFreaky Deaky andGet 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.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Kushins, C.M.: COOLER THAN COOL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213361/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49685c12. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Kushins, C.M. BEAST Hachette (NonFiction None) $31.00 9, 7 ISBN: 978-0-306-84668-7

A lengthy narrative biography of the legendary drummer.

It’s inarguable that John Bonham (1948-1980) was the piston that powered the heavy musical machinery of Led Zeppelin. Despite the unparalleled brute force for which he was known, however, he was a drummer of great subtlety and range whose heroes were jazz masters and who eventually served as inspiration for scores of younger musicians. As Kushins, the author of a biography of Warren Zevon, shows, Bonham was also a complex man. He drowned his severe anxiety in booze, and he hated the time spent away from his family and farm while still enjoying his role in a band that gave him license to indulge his animal instincts. The author covers all of the bases in delineating the life of his subject and makes a convincing case for his iconic status. However, in arguing that Bonham was a misunderstood man of many facets, he underemphasizes the level of his destructive behavior and the deleterious effects that his addictions had on his career and those around him. When Kushins writes about how Bonham died choking on his own vomit at the age of 32, some readers may wonder how he lasted so long. At the time, Led Zeppelin was running on fumes, and Bonham wasn’t the only one incapable of functioning as he had at his peak. Throughout, Kushins is sympathetic to the deeply flawed musician, and this overlong but largely entertaining portrait is less focused on scandal and dark magic than many accounts of the band. Along with the chronicle of Bonham’s life, the author includes quoted reviews of so many concerts praising Bonham that they eventually run together and repeat themselves, like an interminable drum solo. Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer, provides the foreword.

Kushins brooks no dissent about his subject as the greatest rock drummer ever. Good for Zep devotees and fans of the era.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Kushins, C.M.: BEAST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A669986651/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96e9507c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon. By C. M. Kushins. May 2019.416p. Da Capo, $29 (9780306921483). 782.42166092.

Warren Zevon had a reputation for being a tough guy, a singular artist, and an "excitable boy" who sang about lawyers, guns, money, and werewolves. First-time author Kushins examines Zevon's heritage as the son of a WASP mother and a Ukrainian-Jewish professional-gambler father with organized crime ties; mastery of songwriting and "smooth-talking"; recording career; love of the rock-and-roll lifestyle; substance and alcohol abuse issues; and a life-long phobia about doctors. Kushins captures the essence of the brooding yet wickedly witty singer. Zevon could be wildly irresponsible, his behavior erratic even on a good day, and, worse, many of his years were wasted in self-loathing. It wasn't for nothing that Zevon once told the Chicago Tribune that "All my songs are really about fear." He was known, and admired, for his acerbic lyrics, but also for his lovely ballads, including his swan song, "Keep Me in Your Heart." No less than the great Irish poet Paul Muldoon collaborated with him. A straightforward account, including a comprehensive discography, of Zevon's fascinating creative life cut short by mesothelioma when he was only 56.--June Sawyers

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Sawyers, June. "Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 18, 15 May 2019, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A589800104/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48e05101. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Warshaw, Justin. "Dickens of Detroit: A crime writer who offered 'gritty, realistic portrayals of American lowlife'." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6385, 15 Aug. 2025, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852386091/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8838d7bc. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Pitt, David. "Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, pp. 15+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211520/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ff4311f4. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Kushins, C.M.: COOLER THAN COOL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213361/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49685c12. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Kushins, C.M.: BEAST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A669986651/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96e9507c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Sawyers, June. "Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 18, 15 May 2019, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A589800104/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48e05101. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

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