----- Original Message ----- From: "Dick Lochte" <
dlochte@adelphia.net>
> Wasn't Leonard's claim that he had learned nothing
from either
> Chandler or Hammett? I don't see how anybody writing
in the crime
> field today can say that and mean it. I'm thinking
primarily of
> Hammett here. The Black Mask boys, with Hammett as
the most
> visible, put a distinctive stamp on crime fiction
that influenced
> everything in the genre that came after. I wonder if
there was a
> follow up question: if Hammett wasn't an influence,
then who?
> Perhaps like Robert Parker, Leonard is a Melville
man.
On his website, Leonard lists his rules of writing. http://elmoreleonard.com/archives/010elrules.htm
He mentions Conrad, Steinbeck and Hemingway in such a way as
to imply they were influential.
There's this from a Guardian interview at
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/0,6000,882253,00.html
"Leonard learnt his trade slowly. As a boy, he got into
popular fiction from his mother's book-of-the-month club. By
the early Fifties, he was reading Steinbeck and John O'Hara.
'I liked the way both always had a lot of people talking,' he
says, 'and then I discovered Hemingway. I learnt a lot of my
style from him, but he had no sense of humour, so I had to
look elsewhere for that.'"
Incidentally (but no less interestingly), in the same
article:
" The New York Times critic suggested his Christmas wish was
that when the likes of 'Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje and
Toni Morrison, to name but three, looked under their trees,
they found that some kind soul had been thoughtful enough to
send them a copy of this book' [Leonard's "When The Women
Come Out To Dance"] - in order to teach them how to
write."
From an NY Times interview in 1983:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/home/leonard-23books.html
(you'll need to register)
"Mr. Leonard has been compared to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler and Ross MacDonald but disclaims any literary
kinship. ''There's no similarity in style or subject
matter,'' he says. ''I was more influenced by Hemingway,
Steinbeck, John O'Hara and James Cain.''"
From 1984:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/home/leonard-rogue.html
"He doesn't write Raymond Chandler-style detective stories,
either. He hasn't read Chandler or Dashiell Hammett in 40
years, and he doesn't think he's ever read a Ross Macdonald
mystery."
In the same article Leonard cites further influences:
"Leonard says he learned the importance of dialogue from
Hemingway, whom he counts as his principal literary mentor
(ahead of - not surprisingly - James M. Cain and -
surprisingly - Mark Harris and Richard Bissell, two offbeat
novelists from the 1950's from whom Leonard presumably
learned something
"about irreverence and humor").
Again in the same article:
"Leonard's own literary voice is stripped-down and clean -
again, more like Hemingway than the occasionally overwrought
prose of a Raymond Chandler. ''I never, never do images or
metaphors,'' he once told an interviewer. ''The second reason
is that they slow everything down. The first reason is that
I'm no good at them, and I don't do what I don't do
well.''"
In 1977 Newgate Callendar makes the now obvious comparison
when reviewing
"Unknown Man No. 89":
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/home/leonard-unknown.html
"But it really is wrong to talk of this writer in terms of
Chandler and Macdonald. He has little in common with those
two. They are "clean" writers; there is no profanity to speak
of in Chandler, and Macdonald has never been an exponent of
the verismo school of speech. Leonard is. The real influence
on Leonard is George V. Higgins, whose "The Friends of Eddie
Coyle" came out about five years ago and marked a
breakthrough into the kind of language previously encountered
only in paperback books with green covers: Even had he wanted
to, Chandler, say, would not in his time have been allowed to
reproduce the speech of the criminal subculture, with
four-letter words as numerous as cockroaches in a tenement
flat."
The Guardian cites his influences as:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,96563,00.html
"A serialisation of All Quiet On The Western Front in the
Detroit Times when a child; Richard Bissell; Hemingway (when
Leonard first discovered him, he thought "here's a guy I can
learn from")."
A couple of observations from Business Week (those of a
sensitive disposition look away now):
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2003/nf2003017_0041.htm
"Leonard is one of those man's-man writers whose bare-bones
style is influenced by old-fashioned (out-of-fashion,
actually) male storytellers such as Ernest Hemingway, John
O'Hara, and John Steinbeck....He uses very little description
in his stories and none of the windy exposition you'll
sometimes find in works by other great crime writers, such as
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler". And another Hemingway
comparison:
"Hanging Out at the Buena Vista, the second story in the new
collection, is clearly modeled on Hemingway's Hills Like
White Elephants, one of the greatest very short stories ever
written, and one that Leonard deeply admires."
In another interview Leonard states:
http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3808/avfeature_3808.html
"It takes 10 or 15 years to get confidence in the style that
you want to develop. I saw Hemingway doing it, and I see
other writers doing it. I was impressed by John O'Hara's
dialogue."
Al
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