Killshot by Elmore Leonard
Leonard: No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in Valdez Is Coming, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.
Amis: And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?
Leonard: I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.
Amis: The really bad guys.
Leonard: Yeah, the really bad guys....
Amis: Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?
Leonard: It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.
Amis: Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]
[Applause]
Editor’s note: Martin Amis is the author of many novels — including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train — and many works of nonfiction, including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.
About the Author
ELMORE LEONARD has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Be Cool. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Valdez Is Coming, and Rum Punch (as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan, with his wife.
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Praise and Acclaim
KILLSHOT
“One of his most ambitious . . . Leonard has written an Elmore Leonard crime fiction thriller, but it’s a novel, too. Not a pretentious or ‘literary’ novel, of course, but a novel that only Elmore Leonard could write. . . . While there is plenty of the physical tension erupting into violence you expect, the real menace is psychological. . . . Leonard tops himself every time.”
Boston Globe
“Terrifically enjoyable . . . takes your breath away . . . the suspense hardly lets up . . . Leonard’s well-known virtues are all on display: the ripe, funny dialogue; a final scene so masterfully crafted you want to applaud; an array of secondary characters that stay with you the way secondary characters do in Dickens.”
Washington Post Book World
“A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”
The New Yorker
“Classic Leonard . . . Killshot is probably his best.”
Newsweek
“Bone-chilling . . . Killshot is a riveting page-turner, a hare-and-hounds chase through the bleak suburbs of Detroit and the seamy riverfront dives of Cape Girardeau. . . . Leonard has a masterful touch with characterization and, in the Colsons, he’s created a wry, likable couple who . . . in their own way, are every bit as tough—and ten times brighter—than the lethal yo-yos stalking them. And the villains . . . are sinister in every dark meaning of the word. . . . Leonard’s dialogue crackles like the riveting torch that Wayne Colson handles so deftly one hundred feet above the hard ground.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Sinewy . . . shattering . . . Leonard pushes the suspense to the edge of endurance.”
Detroit Free Press
“Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He’s fast becoming an authentic American icon.”
Seattle Times
“Elmore Leonard is an awfully good writer of the sneaky sort; he’s so good, you don’t notice what he’s up to.”
Donald E. Westlake
“Elmore Leonard dazzles as he sprinkles his work continually with unexpected convolutions. . . . In Killshot, Mr. Leonard does not disappoint us; the reader is kept continually off balance, a step behind the action, tugged cunningly into blind alleys.”
New York Times Book Review
“Killshot is fine, taut work. . . . The world’s greatest cops ‘n robbers novelist . . . gives us stalking, stakeouts, and the inevitable showdown. It’s all done with Leonard’s spare, deft, understated touch with dialogue and character. Leonard’s growing horde of fans will eat it up.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Elmore Leonard can still set the compass of his imagination in a new direction and sail off to explore untried territory. . . . While Killshot offers the familiar pleasures of good dialogue and fast action that we’ve come to expect from him, there’s almost as much gratification here in watching him at play with fresh ideas and challenges. . . . It isn’t just good guys against bad guys. To make the whole thing work, Mr. Leonard has to mix about a dozen different shades to the palette of behavior that ranges from decent to sociopathic. . . . Nothing is wasted. Each scene has multiple purposes. And every word counts.”
New York Times
“Elmore Leonard is arguably the best living writer of crime fiction.”
Roanoke Times & World News
“A pas de quatre that has a more-than-satisfying suspense quotient . . . Dialogue that manages to be pungent and funny, and yet exactingly realistic . . . In Killshot . . . Leonard is breaking the bounds of his genre.”
USA Today
“Killshot is vintage Leonard. There is lots of dialogue of the sort Leonard is renowned for, lots of action celebrating the illogic of daily life (as it intersects with crime), and no small amount of violent action—some random, some purposeful—leavened with irony. . . . Elmore Leonard has gotten so good . . . that now what he’s doing looks easy. But it’s easy in the way that plays Magic Johnson or Larry Bird make are easy: All superfluous motion has been removed, what you see are the essentials of the art.”
St. Petersburg Times
“A master of tight plotting . . . Elmore Leonard is as dependable as a Ford used to be and as knowing as a New York fashion designer. . . . In Killshot, there’s more good at stake than usual in a Leonard novel. . . . He takes risks this time round. He creates a genuinely attractive couple. . . . Leonard is still the best in the business. With Killshot he’s risen, again, to the occasion and created a novel that satisfies.”
Christian Science Monit
“Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish.”
Detroit News
“Leonard has become a phenomenon. . . . His crime novels [are] grippingly true-to-life tales of double-cross and redemption, with a murky morality that seems to suit the times. . . . Leonard truly shines. He has created a gallery of compelling, off-the-wall villains unequaled in American crime fiction.”
New York Times Magazine
“No high-concept plots, no glitz . . . a wealth of detail, a richness of texture. The good people are human and we do care about them. . . . Whatever his characters say is their truth. No complex interior monologues, no introspection—what they do is what they think. . . . Elmore Leonard hasn’t left his fight in the gym. . . . The old master still packs the equalizer. It’s called Narrative Force, and Leonard has more of it than most writers do at their absolute peak. . . . Any long-time fan will feel right at home.”
Chicago Tribune
“A fast-paced, bang-up tale . . . The suspense accelerates throughout, but Leonard’s crisp dialogue and offbeat characters keep Killshot from being just another chase tale.”
Orlando Sentinel
“Leonard will always deliver a book that’s tense, fast-moving, brutal; a novel in which the villains are as fascinating as coiled cobras; a book written in prose as shorn of ornamentation—and as deadly accurate—as a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber police special. Killshot does not disappoint. . . . It’s a helluva read . . . a classic Leonard cat-and-mouse game . . . He has invented two top-shelf villains. . . . It’s great entertainment, and the climactic chase is not recommended for reading by cardiac patients. . . . Elmore Leonard isn’t an author—he’s an addiction.”
Orange County Register
“Elmore Leonard is truly a great writer.”
Washington Times
Other Books
Books by Elmore Leonard
The Bounty Hunters
The Law at Randado
Escape from Five Shadows
Last Stand at Saber River
Hombre
The Big Bounce
The Moonshine War
Valdez Is Coming
Forty Lashes Less One
Mr. Majestyk
52 Pickup
Swag
Unknown Man #89
The Hunted
The Switch
Gunsights
Gold Coast
City Primeval
Split Images
Cat Chaster
Stick
LaBrava
Glitz
Bandits
Touch
Freaky Deaky
Killshot
Get Shorty
Maximum Bob
Rum Punch
Pronto
Riding the Rap
Out of Sight
Cuba Libre
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories
Be Cool
Pagan Babies
Tishomingo Blues
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
KILLSHOT. Copyright © 1989 by Elmore Leonard, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2003 ISBN 9780061808555
First HarperTorch paperback printing: February 2003
First William Morrow trade paperback printing: March 1999
First William Morrow hardcover printing: April 1989
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Elmore Leonard, Killshot