The Nature of Things

When Elmore Leonard died at age 87 this week, he left behind a prodigious body of work. I noted that several of the obituaries and appreciations of him that I read referred to him as a "man of few words," certainly an ironic epitaph since he produced so many of them. Ironic but also true for he was a man who eschewed writerly flourishes. He wrote clean and spare prose, with no words wasted and that is what he advocated for other writers. In 2001, Leonard wrote a piece for The New York Times in its series called "Writers on Writing." In it he talked about his philosophy of writing and listed ten rules for writers. They are worth reviewing now as we think about Leonard's life's work and what he has meant to modern culture. Elmore Leonard's Rules of Writing 1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looki...

Djibouti, Elmore Leonard's latest, may be unique in his oeuvre in that its main characters apparently do not have any criminal history. They are identifiable Leonard characters though with their super-cool, super-smart personas and their dropping of pronouns in their conversations. Much of the first half of this book is taken up with conversations betweeen those two characters, Dara Barr, a 30-something award-winning documentary film maker and her right-hand man, six-foot-six, 72-year-old Xavier LeBo, able seaman, cameraman, schlepper and somewhat of a sexual athlete as written by the 85 year-old Leonard. Hmmm... Dara and Xavier are from New Orleans and they met there in the aftermath of Katrina while Dara was filming a documentary of the catastrophe. That film won an Academy Award for them. Now Dara is interested in filming the modern-day pirates of Somalia, and Xavier, with his seafaring experience and all-round super cool, is just the man to help her. The long expository conv...