Elmore Leonard and Peter on Raylan, Justified and Voices of the Dead

   I had the privilege of hearing a talk recently given by Peter and Elmore Leonard at our local library. Elmore is the best selling author of a gazillion western and thriller novels...many on the New York Times bestseller list. He is also a screenwriter and many of his works are box office hits with starring roles by actors like Paul Newman, George Clooney, Charles Bronson and Burt Reynolds to name just a few. Elmore's latest endeavor is as executive producer of the FX Network's latest hit series, JUSTIFIED.

       Peter Leonard, Elmore's son, has now broken from a successful advertising career (like father, like son) to try his hand at writing. His fourth work, VOICES OF THE DEAD, is coming out this month and he says it is, finally, his own voice speaking as opposed to a "knock-off" of his father's. I am certain Elmore is a difficult act to follow but Peter seems quite capable of holding his own. 

What I enjoyed about the evening was watching Elmore (even his son calls him Elmore). He is as interesting and demonstrative as many of his memorable characters. When Elmore speaks, he uses his hands to make his points...not unlike the cock of a dog's ears. I also liked the casual, conversational tone of the evening...as if we in the audience were all sitting around a large  table in the Leonards' home. They had no script, no index cards and no platform. Peter had some questions jotted on a piece of paper and  he referred to them when conversation slowed but , for the most part father and son discussed their craft.  

What I enjoyed about the evening was watching Elmore (even his son calls him Elmore). He is as interesting and demonstrative as many of his memorable characters. When Elmore speaks, he uses his hands to make his points...not unlike the cock of a dog's ears. I also liked the casual, conversational tone of the evening...as if we in the audience were all sitting around a large  table in the Leonards' home. They had no script, no index cards and no platform. Peter had some questions jotted on a piece of paper and  he referred to them when conversation slowed but , for the most part father and son discussed their craft. 

Elmore was born in New Orleans but  his father, who was a site locator for General motors, moved his family to Detroit in 1934. Elmore has been here ever since.  Peter, of course, was born and raised in our fair city. Both men have been good to our beleaguered town. Not only casting Detroit as the setting for most of his stories but also giving their time to our little community just north of Detroit. This talk was one of just three Elmore is giving to promote his latest and 46th work, RAYLAN. He really does not need to promote his books--they are now grabbed up by his hungry fans as soon as they hit the shelves. And Peter is well on his way to being just as loved and admired.

So, they talked about writing. About how disciplined a writer must be. Both writers honed their crafts while working day jobs with advertising agencies. This meant they adopted a routine of waking at dawn and writing for two or three hours before leaving for work. Then they would come home and be the family men they both were. (Interesting side note: in my other life as a professional florist, I designed the bridal flowers for Elmore's daughter. So my first encounter with the famous author was at the front door to his home when I dropped off the bouquets. I doubt he remembers! )  

Peter pointed out that Elmore said he was not a fan of recurring characters but, with Raylan, that has changed. This is Elmore's third title starring the lawman.
"It's kind of nice," Peter said. "You know the guy now."
"And," Elmore said. "I can get him to talk without much trouble. That's so important."
He said he even likes his bad guys because he can get them to talk. One of Elmore's outstanding successes is the dialogue he interjects into his stories. With little else in the way of describing a character, Elmore's readers have a crystal clear image of every person in his stories...all because of the dialogue.

They also talked about the names they give their characters and how important that is to the success of the story. That they find their names in any number of unexpected places. Raylan, for instance, was the same name as a man introduced to Elmore at a luncheon in Arizona. Peter talked about what it was like to be an author whose father was a famous writer. The good part, he said, was that he could always get the best advice on writing issues at the dinner table. The hardest part was developing his own voice.

The pair touched briefly on Elmore's treatise, THE 10 RULES OF WRITING. I've read it. It's skinny and as sparsely written as Elmore's fiction but packs more heat than many larger texts on the topic.

Out of curiosity I watched Justified last night. I am actually recording the series. I'm not much of a TV viewer. Never seem to find shows that hold my attention for their duration but Justified is good.
When it was over I went to bed and pulled out the book I'm currently reading. Reading, I have found, is a much better way to go to sleep.

 You can hear this entire program on our library's website: http://vimeo.com/35425452

         

Oath of Office : A Review

        It did not take me long to read Michael Palmer's latest medical thriller, OATH OF OFFICE, which will be released February 14, 2012. In this story that borders on the environmental thriller genre (read Karen Dionne's Freezing Point and Boiling Point), Dr. Lou Welcome is challenged with proving that the shooting spree his favorite patient, Dr. John Meacham, went on could not have been predicted. To the police and Lou's co-workers it appears he could have prevented the massacre if he were competent in his judgement of Meacham's shortcomings. These suspicions also cast a dark light on Welcome's recovery from alcoholism.

          Like Meacham, Lou has had his own substance abuse issues that led to losing his medical license, a divorce he did not want and a separation from his 11-year-old daughter, Emily, that tears at his heart every day. Recovered for five years now, Lou works part-time at the PWO (Physicians Wellness Office). His client's rampage, however, puts that position in serious jeopardy.

          Meanwhile the reader is quickly ushered from Lou's problems to those of the First Lady of the United States, Darlene Mallory. She is trying desperately to revive her marriage, which seems destined to collapse almost as quickly as her husband's re-election hopes. Darlene and President Mallory's secretary, Kim Hajjar, meet for cocktails after a particularly stressful day and run into the former Secretary of Agriculture, Russell Evans. He and Darlene grew up together but the friendship could not prevent Evan's resignation over a fabricated rendezvous with a teenage prostitute.

           A series of other bizarre and often gruesome incidents lead Lou to question the practices of a local corporate farm that specializes in genetically modified corn while Darlene's attempt to restore Russell Evans' reputation leads her to the same enterprise which, she learns, contributed heavily to her husband's campaign.

            While Lou's life is threatened and several of his cohorts are either murdered or beaten, Darlene becomes fairly certain her husband is involved in some serious ethics violations.  When both these trails merge, Lou and Darlene find not only clues to the crimes they are investigating but also a friendship that seems to fill voids in both their personal lives.

              OATH OF OFFICE is written primarily from two points of view--that of Dr. Lou Welcome and Dr. Darlene Mallory. It carries a crisp, fast-paced style by an author who clearly knows both the medical world and that of Washington DC. This is Michael Palmer's 17th thriller. Several have been on the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated into 35 languages. His website bio says, "He trained in internal medicine at Boston City and Massachusetts General Hospitals, spent twenty years as a full-time practitioner of internal and emergency medicine, and is now an associate director of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s physician health program."


I have no doubt persons who read this novel will be encouraged to read Palmer's other works as well.


If you would like the opportunity to win an autographed copy of OATH OF OFFICE, simply leave a comment at the end of this post and you will be automatically entered in a drawing  held February 14, 2012. This contest is only open to residents of the continental U.S.

OATH OF OFFICE will be available in hardcover as well as on audiobook. For a clip from the audiobook, click on the image below.

Jane Eyre, Scarlett O'Hara and Edna Pontellier

My three favorite heroines! Women who set their sites early on and stuck to them despite overwhelming physical, historical, cultural and political difficulties. Honestly, I think I could read The Awakening,  Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind alternatively the rest of my life and never be bored.

Two Journeys: David Guterson and Charles Frazier

Over the past couple weeks I finished two excellent novels, Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (also wrote Cold Mountain) and East of the Mountains by David Guterson (also wrote Snow Falling on Cedars).

The stories these authors tell are soft and lonesome. Not sad, really, but meditative. Frazier writes of a man, Col. William Cooper, who loses his parents at a young age and is handed over to an aunt and uncle. They subsequently bind him over to the owner of a western trading post. It is a story of a boy who never stops longing for his parents; who is taken in by Bear, an Indian chief; who falls in love with a woman married to a despicable Indian; who befriends a horse named Waverly; and who winds up as the legal spokesperson for an entire Indian nation. Though Will (his shortened name) does a fine job as lawyer, real estate investor and Washington lobbyist, his success becomes his undoing. Worse, he is never able to entice the elusive Claire to marry him, even after her husband dies.  In the end, Will loses all but the home he built.

 

Guterson’s story is told by a heart surgeon in his seventies who is dying from colon cancer. Dr. Ben Givens lost Rachel, his dear wife, six months before the story opens and cannot get past it. He determines that, rather than burden his two children with the care of a dying old man, he will take his two hunting dogs into the Washington plateaus to hunt chukkas. He chooses a place east of the mountains where he now lives. It is where he was raised…full of apple orchards carved out of the desert and nourished by giant irrigation machines.  His plan is to feign an accident that takes his life.

Constantly, Ben is fighting his illness…his pain often unbearable. In one of his hallucinatory states brought on by marijuana he remembers The War. It was his experiences there, in the trenches, that convinced him to become a heart surgeon.

Ben does have an accident but not the one he planned. He then spends several days attempting to return to his original plan. During that time he loses one dog to a pack of wolfhounds and his other is critically injured. Ben encounters several strangers who become instrumental in helping him not only get over Rachel’s death but to find answers to life’s mysteries that he didn’t know he was seeking.

Both authors have a very lyrical command of language. Words that flow like silken water over smooth river rocks. Their stories are passionate. They are loaded with characters you will not forget. And they portray personal journeys laced with a morality that is both moving and inspirational.

Here are some quotes that I loved.

From East of the Mountains:

“The drifts (driftwood) burned white and smokeless enough that they could sit close behind them in a bright womb of heat.  The world beyond disappeared. Darkness lay behond the firelight. The stars appeared awasy in pale ether.” 101

“His mind raced, his thoughts were rich, his memories vivid, graphic. He felt he could touch the past.” 60

“He had manipulated the hearts of human beings, and he thought he understood that when we speak of love, we speak of something transitory, something gone when we go. The heart, for Ben, was tangible--and nothing tangible remains.” 203

“He recalled reading once that the Hindus saw life in four progressive stages: twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter--one needed nothing martial to pursue this phase--twenty years as head of a household and twenty in the cultivation of the spirit.” 138

“How long (had he been) afraid of its (death) coming? Outwardly he’d been stalwart and stoic, but privately he’d quaked like a child, trembled in apprehension, lived with a constant, quiet fear below the surface of everything.” 254

“It was not life of the spirit at all, in which mortality inspires a course of right action and humility. It had been instead a willful turning from the true conditions of existence. But now he found--he’d known it since Rachel’s death--that this forgetting couldn’t sustain him to the grave. The interludes of ignorance had grown shorter. And now there were none, there was only knowledge, and he wasn’t ready for it.” 255

In the next chapter Ben saves the life of a migrant girl and the baby she cannot deliver. It is stuck in her birth canal. Soon after he meets up with an old neighbor who tells him a dying father is not a burden to his children, that suicide is unimaginable. “It is good,” Bea insisted. “’Seeing you die, it’ll make them compassionate. It’ll help them be more compassionate.’” 273

From Thirteen Moons:

“I asked him one time how he knew to suse the law in his favor. He said that the law is an axe. It cuts whatever it falls on. The man that wins knows how to aim the sharp edge away from himself.” 14

“Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time.” 20

“There are many who can make new selves at a moment’s notice. Slough a skin, dismiss memory, move on. But that is not a skill I ever acquired.” 202

“It was my Lancelot moment. Hesitate to get in the cart, and you are lost. Maybe every life has one moment where everything could have been different if you’d climbed on the cart.” 218

“There was no justice in the world anymore. All you could do was try to go on living as a form of vengeance, to keep your memory alive as long as possible.” 258

“He (Bear) talked a great deal about several new opinions he had developed in my absence, one of which was that we come to value the fall of the year more and more as we age and decline. It is easy in youth to become emotional at the overwhelming symbolic autumnalness of withered peaches and reddened honey-locust pods. Later in life, though, the season becomes more actual to us, not sentimental, just sadly true.” 320

“Alarming, really, how all the wheels of the world--the days and nights, the thirteen moons, the four seasons, and the great singular round of the year itself--begin spinning faster and faster the closer we get to the Nightland. We’re called to it and it pulls us. And the weaker we become, the harder and faster it pulls” 321

Towards the end of the novel Bear relates a hunting story. He had regretted, in his old age, how the animals of the forest had been systematically eliminated by gun toting fur traders and persons like him who needed to survive. He said he once came upon a buck badly wounded by three bullets and was too weak to move. Bear looked into the buck’s eye as it watched him coming to cut its throat and sell its skin for a dollar. --“There’s not a prayer for that, he would say.”

Turns out Random House lost a huge amount of money on their publication of Thirteen Moons, recovering a fraction of the $8 million they advanced to Charles Frazier. I cannot say why the book did not sell better. I thought it was fantastic.