In a story in the January/February issue of The Atlantic, Christopher Orr explores why so many screen adaptations of the work of Elmore Leonard, America’s most cinematic novelist, are so bad—and what makes the exceptions, like TV’s "Justified," so good.
Leonard, the most famous (and successful) Detroit writer, died Aug. 20 at age 87. As Orr notes, he left behind more than 40 novels, a number of short stories and "Justified," which begins its fifth season in January. Leonard "had long since dethroned Raymond Chandler as the greatest of American crime writers," Orr writes. British author Martin Amis described Leonard as a "literary genius."
Leonard loved movies, and his books were filled with cinematic writing and characters who talked about movies.
"To date, more than two dozen of his novels and stories have been adapted for film or television—a few of them more than once. The Hollywood Reporter ranked him No. 2 on their 2012 list of “Hollywood’s 25 Most Powerful Authors,” behind Stephen King (who once called Leonard 'the great American writer')."
Why did Hollywood have such difficulty capturing Leonard’s appeal for so long?
"The adaptations of his early Westerns ("3:10 to Yuma," "The Tall T," "Hombre") were largely successful, but after his switch to crime writing, the studios lost their knack for translating him to the screen. The failure was mostly tonal: Leonard’s work inhabits a unique point on the crime-fiction spectrum, neither as grimly hard-boiled as James Ellroy’s or Dennis LeHane’s on the one hand, nor as elaborately comic as Carl Hiassen’s on the other. There is plenty of dry, ironic wit in Leonard’s work, but little in the way of jokiness."
"Orr points out that "Justified," one of the most successful adaptations of Leonard's work, was not his usual fare.
"It’s more than a bit odd that one of the best adaptations of Leonard should feature a contemporary cowboy ambling through the hills and hollers of Kentucky. Leonard’s stories more typically unfold in his native Michigan, in Florida (where he also spent considerable time), or in a combination of the two. For a neo-Western like Justified, however, Kentucky is an exceptionally apt venue, lodged in the popular imagination as a rural, lawless land of clans and feuds and meth and mine shafts and easy gunfire. And though Leonard mostly abandoned the Western as a genre when he switched to crime, a strong echo remained in his work, especially in a handful of books he referred to as his “eastern Westerns.” These are stories of men who—even if lawmen—exist to some degree outside the law, throwbacks to a more primitive, personal sense of justice."
