Elmore Leonard – Good Guy

By James O. Born 

Elmore Leonard, Dutch to his friends, passed away at 87 on Tuesday morning.  He was a friend of mine.  He literally got me writing.  The hole his passing leaves in my life has only started to hit me.  There are other postings and obituaries that document his skill as a writer and his success over many, many years.  I would point out Wallace Stroby,writing for the Star Ledger    and   Scott Eyman, the book editor for the Palm Beach Post .  A more personal view comes from the current king of crime fiction, Michael Connelly writing for the LA Times.

I'd like just a few moments to share my own views of Dutch Leonard. 

Virtually anyone who can read English would recognize that he was a great writer of both Crime Fiction and Westerns.  But in my opinion that's not his biggest accomplishment.  To me, Dutch achieved what few people can: he was a really good guy.  That's tough to beat.  Not everyone can raise a great family, treat other people well, have a wicked sense of humor and not take themselves too seriously and be a phenomenal success.

I met Dutch around 1987 at a library event one of my father's friends had invited me to.  It was the first such event I'd ever attended (it wouldn't be the last.)  We started chatting and he was interested in my job at the DEA.  He casually asked if he might call me sometime for some technical advice.  I didn't think much of the request at the time.  Little did I know that the encounter would change the trajectory of my entire life. 

Me harassing an elderly man until he smiled outside of Books and Books in Coral Gables.

Most published authors are approached by people interested in writing, nervous to show their first manuscript to someone, but confident they had written the Great American Novel.  He was encouraging and helpful, but most importantly, and this cannot be overstated, he was critical.  He told me what I had to do to be a better writer and by following his advice, I eventually landed a book deal and a second career.  It was tough to hear at the time but every sentence I look at now is viewed through the prism Dutch created.  I can hear him telling me not to get sappy in this very post.  No flowery language, just tell the story.  His most famous line, "Cut out the stuff people skip."  That's a genius that rivals Oppenhiemer.

But it was his many other traits that led me to try to emulate him.  His patience and love of family, his thoughtfulness and interest in doing the best he could at whatever he did.  All the details that are easy for most of us to over look in our own lives.  As busy as he was, Dutch didn't forget people or kindness.  The word "effortless" comes to mind.  He made everything seem easy even if it wasn't.  

No matter how much success he had or how popular he became, it never went to his head.  He was interested in other people.  He wanted to know what made people tick.  That was how he could create such perfectly flawed and believable characters.  No one is perfect, but everyone deserves a chance.  It's in his novels and his life.  A theme that will resonate long after we are all gone.

It's easy to point to him as a mentor, but it was also his longtime associate, Gregg Sutter, who would brutalize my manuscripts until I finally got an idea of what I was supposed to do.  A guy like Gregg is so invaluable that words don't do justice to his service.  It was Gregg who pulled out the nuggets of gold from mountains of research.  He would travel the globe looking for an interesting angle or aspect that Dutch could turn into a masterpiece.  And Dutch trusted him completely.  There is no higher compliment.

Gregg Sutter, a young John E. Born and Dutch in 1990

Oddly enough, I would have to say that I met a guy I depend on now as a mentor through Dutch more than 20 years ago.  I listened to a panel on crime fiction with Dutch and two other writers.  One member of the panel was still an attorney in Miami who had written several novels.  His name was Paul Levine.  Even then I recognized that he pronounced his name incorrectly, but when we reconnected 10 years later, after the publication of my first novel, he displayed the same patience and interest in helping others as Dutch did for so long.  Through Paul I met the other contributors to this blog.  It's funny how everything is connected.  Another thing Dutch did for me without even realizing it.

I'm sad that the world lost a great writer on Tuesday.  But what strikes deeper and more profoundly is that the world lost a great guy too.  That's what's important to remember. 

Was It For This The Clay Grew Tall?

from Jacqueline

If you’ve lived a few years on this planet, you come to know that, at the opposite end of the good and the bad things that happen in this world, there is the truly magnificent and the unbearably horrific.  Always we must rejoice in the magnificent, and always we must grieve, collectively, for that which is beyond bearable, but has to be borne, somehow. 

Today, having seen the photographs of the Hades that Egypt has become, I find I am looking back at the terrors I have known, even since childhood, and I am glad that I am shocked anew. I am glad that I feel sick to my stomach about the suffering of people who are not simply living the fear we associate with, say, losing a job, or dealing with bereavement, the loss of a house, divorce – all those events are terrible in themselves, but I know that with time the grieving passes and that life spreads out the tablecloth of possibility once more, and we are invited to take a bite of whatever nourishment that is laid out for us.  It might not be quite what we enjoyed before, and it might take some getting used to, but, for most of us, time heals.  And I know that time can, eventually, heal the wounds of collective disaster too, though the scar tissue runs deep and broad, and it takes work, and people coming together, putting aside their anger, fear, grief, and doing their best to wash away the misery with love.

I wonder how long will it take Egypt to recover from the terror that is borne every day by ordinary people?  Just a couple of years ago it was the big tourist destination – Europeans flocked there in their thousands on package vacations - and now this.  Apparently tourists in the coastal resorts are being told to remain inside their hotels until their departure, and of course, they're leaving as soon as they can.

But what has touched me today, in the midst of the photographs of this human disaster, is this photograph. 

 A lone woman trying to stop a bulldozer from crushing a wounded man.  It looks like Tiananmen Square all over again – remember that?

And remember this young Iranian woman?

 Her name was Neda, which means “voice.”  And I am left wondering about the terror that comes with having the courage to want a voice in this world.

Today is one of those days when the closing words of  the poem, “Futility” by WW1 poet, Wilfred Owen, come immediately to mind:

Was it for this the clay grew tall?


—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil


To break earth’s sleep at all?

I am sure there are some who might say the photograph of the Egyptian woman was staged, or it was all so and so’s fault, while pointing the finger around the globe, and adding, well, this is just what happens in these places, isn’t it?  Or there are those who will ignore the news, trusting the phoenix of hope to eventually fledge, after all, it has before, eventually.  Or they might say that there has to be some sort of sacrifice to shock people into a new way of being. Frankly, right now I don’t care about all that, because I’ve heard it all before.  I just know that humanity has shot itself in the foot yet again, and we are witness to a tragedy of monstrous proportions.  God help those who are caught up in this hell on earth.

With all my heart, I wish you peace this weekend - wherever you are in the world.  Cherish your freedom, honor your voice and cradle your peace gently.

Sea Writing JuJu

Patty here...

For the next ten days, I'm off sailing the briny blue waters of Southern California. For me, the sea is associated with a number of writing milestones and while I'm gone I hope to finally finally finally finish the draft of my next novel. Since I may not always be in Internet range, I'm leaving you with a few pictures of where I'm going, where I've been and a few sailing friends I've met along the way.

Avalon, Santa Catalina Island: This is where I finished the rough draft of my first novel False Profits and where one April day I got caught in the worst storm in my 18 years of sailing. There haven't been many adventures that left me wondering about survival. That was one of them. I have never written about the experience but one day I will.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning” —Anon

Cherry Cove, Santa Catalina Island: I've spent many happy days bobbing on a mooring, reading books, contemplating life and writing. Just a short way up the coast at Isthmus Cove is where I got the call from my agent that Mysterious Press had bought my first book.

Cat Harbor, Santa Catalina Island: It's officially named Catalina Harbor but nobody calls it that. Rustic and beautiful. This was taken on a calm day but it is the only safe harbor in the area when the Santa Ana winds blow.

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge." —Raymond Chandler, Red Winds

Santa Barbara Channel, CA: Your intrepid Naked Author in her foulies,

navigating through strong winds and rough seas.

"I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over." —John Masefield, Sea Fever

Channel Islands, CA: "Call me Ishmael."

Block Island Channel, Rhode Island: Flying the spinnaker while 

crewing on a friend's sloop from Connecticut to Block Island.

"O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,

Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,

Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,

Survey our empire, and behold our home!"  —Lord Byron, Corsair

Block Island, Rhode Island: S/V Aurora anchored in the harbor.

"One ship sails east and another sails west
With the self-same winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sail and not the gale
Which determines the way they go.
As the winds of the sea are the ways of fate
As we voyage along through life,
Tis the act of the soul that determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife."
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Block Island, Rhode Island: Looking for that which every sailor yearns.

The after-sail PAR-TEE with friends!

HAPPY MONDAY!

The Fount of Penmanship

from Jacqueline

I love fountain pens.  In fact, I am pretty much almost as much a pen-a-holic as I am a book-a-holic, and I’m very partial to lovely notebooks too.  My favorite games when I was a child were “Offices,” and “Schools,” along with my daily “let’s pretend” that I was a writer. I still feel like the latter most of the time, actually.  And before I leave this paragraph, can you imagine my brother’s chagrin, as a four-year-old whose favorite game was “play in the mud and see how dirty you can get” when he was steamrollered into sitting on a chair and being told to listen while I wrote sentences for him to copy from my toy blackboard.  Mind you, something stuck, because who did he come to years later, every time his resume needed updating, eh?  Best fiction I ever wrote, that.

 But I digress.  This story is about my love of fountain pens, especially.  I love a really good fountain pen, a writing instrument with some heft to it, but not too much weight that it makes my hand ache or interferes with the flow of ink.  I prefer to fill my own fountain pens, though let’s face it; cartridges have been the way to go for decades now.  I have about six fountain pens, and it’s getting close to the time when I should buy one of those special boxes to store my pens in – the ones that look like cutlery boxes, but display your pens instead.

I was in a pen store a few weeks ago, and had stopped to look at a dipping pen with a set of nibs.  You know the sort of thing. 

 The assistant came up and asked me if I would like to try, and I had to tell her that I knew all about using one of those pens, because when I was a kid, we wielded a pencil until we were eight years old, then we graduated to dipping pen, and only when the dipping pen was mastered were we allowed to bring our own fountain pen to school to use.  Here’s what I remember:  I remember dreading being the ink monitor – we all had to be the ink monitor for one day a month, though with 32 kids in the class, someone always got away with it and I hoped it would be me.  There was a big enamel jug filled with ink, and in the morning if you were the ink monitor you had to go round filling all the inkwells. The desks were of the Victorian variety – had been there since the school was built – and each desk had a hole for an inkwell and a china receptacle for the actual ink.  That jug was heavy for a child, and woe-betide you if you splashed it everywhere.

I still have a ridge against the middle finger of my right hand where the dipping pen nib pressed into my skin as I wrote, leaving a round blue-black stain that didn’t come out until I went to secondary school and was allowed to use a ballpoint (well, I think we were allowed to use ballpoint by the time we were 15 – I may be mistaken).  So, it was with some glee that as a nine-year-old I skipped along to Sykes, the town stationers, when Mr. Croft finally curled his finger at me in class, and I was told that if I wished I could bring my first fountain pen to school - finally, I had graduated from dipping that nib in the ink.  Hallelujah!  I had been keeping a precious half-crown in my pocket to buy that Platignum pen for weeks, and went straight into Sykes on my way home. 

I know we have so many tools with which to write - you can write a whole novel on your cellphone, if you like – but I am a great believer in the power of writing with traditional tools.  I write straight to the laptop, Microsoft Word is my first tool, whatever I am creating on the page, however, when it comes to revision, my fountain pens are at the ready.  I can sit and work a paragraph using pen and ink – it slows me down, brings my attention to each word, and the fact that I want to create a good page of work is in every stroke of the pen.  I am sure it opens a different place in my mind, brings my attention to the scene in a different way, and it works for me.

I think, too, that using a pen, especially a fountain pen, is good discipline.  Even if kids abandon them as soon as they can after school, there is something about the pen that gives one a deeper opportunity to explore each word, to make sure it’s right, to spell it correctly, so that meaning is not lost.  I am sure people are encouraged to be more adventurous with vocabulary when they’re not abbreviating on a cellphone.  I hate abbreviations in emails and text messaging – it feels so sloppy to me.  And it’s not just me being old fashioned – that’s me seeing words go down the drain and wondering how people will ever understand each other in the future.  Oh yes, perhaps they’re not understanding each other.

Finally, before I leave this treatise – and I can see I could write a book on this subject already – let me tell you about the pen that, for me, was a “sign” that I could be a published author, one day.  I was already publishing articles in very specific educational journals, and so wanted to break into something different, more mainstream.  There’s a British publication I would sometimes have my mother send me, and the “star prize” on the letters page was a Parker Duofold Fountain Pen.  Well, I finally wrote a letter to that magazine, and lo and behold, it was chosen as the star prize - almost twenty years ago now.  That blue and black marbled Parker Duofold sits on my desk, always, ready to be pulled into service – when a thank-you card has to be written, or an important letter signed. And soon, when I get back from England next week, it will be my revision pen, galvanizing me, bringing a sense of discipline as I turn from being the storyteller to the technician of the word, an advocate for the reader embarking upon the revision of another novel.

Have a lovely weekend, all ….

Entropy, Redux

By Cornelia

It is official. I am the most disorganized blogger EVER. Which means I have completely spaced on Naked Authors for months. Which is not because I don't love you guys, because I totally, totally do.

It is about chaos, and geography, and The Crazy. That would be MY crazy. Or as my sister likes to say, "cray-cray." Only in my case I think it would be "cray-cray-cray-cray"

Or perhaps "cray-cray-cray-cray [repeat sixty more times]"

Here is what has happened since last I typed:

I packed up my clothes and wok and Cuisinart and ice-cream machine put them in the beau's car and watched while these Russian guys loaded the car onto a truck four days late 

and took a train to New York and got on a plane for San Francisco and went to the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference for four days and got to see Our Jackie (YEA!!!!!) and so many other wonderful tribe-folk 

and did--I think--ninety-six panels and one speech 

and stayed up too late yakking and went to a party at the beau's cousin's house and the car showed up in California four days late and then we picked up the dog of the friend whose house we were staying from the kennel it was in when friend's son got called away on a sudden private-detective gig five hours north of Marin and we ate dim sum at Yank Sing 

and drove to Carmel and spent the night at Mom's house and drove to Brentwood and stayed the night at a friend of the beau's and then moved into our rental place in LA (which is the most beautiful place I've ever lived in my whole entire life--like, seriously, an apartment in Paris in the Thirties only with banana trees BUT NOT EXPENSIVE)

and then discovered that we only have this place for two months instead of four so have to find another house for October and November and did I mention I'm supposed to go to Greece in three weeks with Mom, 

AND my daughter is flying out here on Sunday? 

Oh, and my ghost-writing gig is apparently going REALLY REALLY REALLY badly 

and I of course think that they will fire me and that I will starve to death alone in my car in the woods surrounded by the stench of my own failure 

and everyone I've ever met will laugh uproariously at this turn of events and say "I told her so" 

and also the beau's TV show is apparently THE MOST OFFENSIVE RACIST MISYOGYNIST AGEIST WHAT-THE-FUCK-EVER PROGRAM EVER MADE in the entire history of humanity? (I think it's really funny and gorgeously written and acted. Not that the Television Critics Association gives a flying crap what *I* think.)

Also my friend Candace's house burned down in Austin so she's staying at my house back East while I'm gone. 

Did I also also also mention that I only just moved into that house on April 1, and got all my stuff out of storage in California and had it shipped to New York? Because, yea, apparently I always need to be three thousand miles away from my beloved books and archival ephemera.

But I digress.

Here's the deal: I have never, ever, ever been happier in my life than I am right now.

Thank you so very much, oh Dear Nakeds, for seeing me through the tough times it took to get to here. 

I fucking love you guys.

And if things ever really go to shit again, we will have excellent woodland picnics together, sitting on the hood of my car.

What's Your Favorite College Campus?

Paul Levine, BOULDER CO

Do you have a favorite college campus?

I've seen a lot of handsome college campuses: Stanford, Duke, Pepperdine,

Notre Dame.  Most Florida schools.  Many, many more, including of course all those years it took me to graduate from Penn State.  (Now, I've never seen Ole Miss, which everyone raves about).

Anyway, I bicycled through the University of Colorado campus yesterday.  I have to rank the "Tuscan vernacular" style of arcitecture there among my favorite.  The setting ain't too shabby, either.

 

Class was not in session; hence the air was crisp and clear of all marijuana haze.  Marcia and I have rented a house along Boulder Creek and fall asleep to the sound of the rapids.     


We have taken Nordic pole walking lessons.

 

No, that is not us.

I will try to keep you apprised as our travels take us farther west.

Paul Levine

 

The Organized Writer

Patty here…

 I’ve volunteered for various organizations all my adult life and I wouldn’t have it any other way. For the past year and a half, as President of Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles, I served as one of the co-chairs charged with planning and executing the 2-day California Crime Writers Conference, which was held on June 22-23, 2013 at the Hilton Pasadena to a sold out crowd. Managing 200 attendees and 67 faculty members was a huge amount of work but an equal amount of fun. I'm generally hesitant to toot my own horn, but in this case I'll acknowledge that I introduced new policies and procedures that added value to the conference and learned things I would never have been motivated to tackle. My fellow volunteers were smart, dedicated, and a joy to work with. Plus, I had the opportunity to spend time with two of my favorite authors, our awesome keynote speakers Sue Grafton and Elizabeth George. By all measures the conference was a spectacular success.

 Sue Grafton, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Patricia Smiley and Elizabeth George 

(Photo by Robin Templeton)

There’s one last thing I’m doing for the conference that hasn’t been done before: creating a 40-page “what-went-right-what-went-wrong” manual for the next group of conference planners so they don’t have to reinvent the proverbial wheel. If you think that sounds tedious, you’d be wrong. I have an MBA with an emphasis in Strategic Planning, so I've been trained to sniff out potential disasters and avert them before they happen. It’s exactly the sort of thing I love. More than that, it’s exactly the sort of thing I’m good at. Perhaps that's also why I write crime fiction—that internal detective.

Patricia Smiley with PR liaison Diane Vallere and fellow co-chair Jeri Westerson

(Photo by Robin Templeton)

For me, organizing is fun. Perhaps that’s why when I was writing my first novel I created a collage of photographs of people and locales and architectural drawings related to the novel that I pasted on a poster board. For all my subsequent novels, including my work-in-progress, I’ve made charts, graphs, timelines and beautifully formatted character bios.

Yes, I know what some of you are thinking: a time-wasting distraction to avoid writing. I say, au contraire. When you write, you should feel free to exercise all aspects of your creativity. If a collage or a manual makes you happy, I say go for it.

Now that the conference is over, I'm kicking back and wondering: What's the next big thing? Any suggestions?

 Happy Monday!