Badass Writer of the Week: Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard

We're switching it up a little bit this week. Rather than provide you with a biography of Elmore Leonard, we’re recommending our favorite Leonard yarns.  The reason we picked him as our badass writer of the week should be pretty self-explanatory.   

Rum Punch

Sean Tuohy: Rum Punch is the first book that I thought really captured what living in South Florida is like. Elmore captured the vastness of the area and threw in some wicked, but oh-so real characters that leapt off the page. Leonard's characters always speak like real people and none of his prose feels forced. Rum Punch tells the story of a flight attendant stuck in the middle between gun runners, the FBI, and an honest bail bondsman Max Cherry. Cherry is one of the best characters to ever come from a Leonard book and brought to life on the silver screen by the great Robert Forster in Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown.” In the book, Cherry is a man who wants to do right by his pushy wife and an upstanding guy overall, but he is stuck working with scumbags who jump bail and ends up falling in love with the flight attendant. Drama, gunfire, and an ill-planned heist ensue. Rum Punch is a quick read that feels like an epic, which is why it’s one of Leonard’s best.

Pronto

Daniel Ford: I’ve read Riding the Rap, Fire in the Hole, and Raylan, but my favorite Raylan Givens story penned by Elmore Leonard will always be Pronto. Harry Arno gets in trouble with bad people (the man is a Leonard criminal through and through: dopey, desperate, and money hungry) and runs off to Italy to hide. Raylan takes a vacation to track him down and keep him safe from Tommy Bucks (who has one of the best villain nicknames of all time: the Zip). Like all Leonard novels, the plot is less important than the colorful characters spouting terrific dialogue at every turn. Raylan, as always, is constantly exasperated and is constantly foiled by Harry’s enemies and by Harry himself. The bad guys do Leonard bad guy things, and Raylan does Raylan things, and people are shot and bleeding at the end. The novel’s finale, in which Raylan warns the Zip to leave Miami in 24 hours or he’ll shoot him, provided the recently concluded television series with plenty of earthy source material for its pitch perfect pilot. Pronto also includes what could quite possibly be my favorite Elmore Leonard lines of all time: “Raylan shot him” and a paragraph of description later, “Raylan shot him again.” What more do you need?

My edition of Pronto also included an interview with Elmore Leonard from 1998, in which he was asked why he kept writing. Here was his response:

“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 47 years, and I’m still trying to make it better.”

We should all strive for such work ethic and humility. 

Here are a few YouTube clips of Elmore Leonard that further prove he's much more of a badass writer than you are:

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Badass Writer of the Week: Stephen King

Stephen King

By Sean Tuohy

Boo! Are you scared?

No?

Then go read a Stephen King story because for the past 40 years, the Maine-born writer has been causing readers to wet their beds out of fear. King's works can also regularly be found being turned into a movie, television show, or mini series. The man pumps out books like Babe Ruth hitting homers.

We couldn't summarize King's massive and impressive career. We'd have to shut down Writer's Bone for a year to do that. In the spirit of Halloween, we're going to share a couple of key frighting moments from some of King's adapted works. However, the selected scenes do appear in the original work.

Enjoy!

They All Float Down Here

Best Bartender From Portland, Maine to Portland, Ore.

Not Going Anywhere

That Bathroom One

Pay Back

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Badass Writer of the Week: Ponyboy Curtis

Ponyboy. 

Yeah, he's not real.

By Sean Tuohy

We know. You don't have to say, "Hey, Writer's Bone, Ponyboy is not a real person!" Duh. He's a beloved fictional character from The Outsiders, a book most of us had to read in school and a movie that features the Karate Kid getting burnt to a crisp. When we started Badass Writer of the Week, we never said that the writer we choose had to be, you know, an actual person.

So...

Now that we got that our of the way, we can get back to Ponyboy. The well-meaning young greaser who reads Gone With The Wind to his buddy Johnny, and gets in rumbles with the Socs is a badass writer in our book.

How is he a writer? In the book, Ponyboy talks about doing well in English class and talks about how he likes to write. Also, in the movie, he is shown writing "The Outsiders" story down. Ponyboy is a natural storyteller and it shows throughout the book and movie.

We believe in what Ponyboy Curtis believes in here at the Bone. We believe that good things come out of bad things. We believe that teenagers need to go through a lot of shit to mold them into valuable adults. We believe that Pony left his poor Midwestern town for the East Coast and became a brooding, dark writer like Cormac McCarthy.

Oh, you need more reasons for his badassey, Judgy McJudgerson? How about the fact that he always sticks by his friends and family no matter what? Or that he  loves his brothers more than anything else? Or that he runs into a burning school to save children? He put himself in danger to rescue his best friend and a group of scared kids he didn't even know.

And again, he's a teenager. Fictional or not, that's an impressive badass resume.

We should note that S.E. Hinton struggled so much with the fame and pressure from the success of The Outsiders that she lapsed into a three-year writer's block. Ponyboy's awesomeness was too much for even his creator to handle (According to her website, Hinton eventually started writing again after her husband got sick of her being depressed. He demanded she write two pages a day).

What other fictional characters would you add to our Badass Writers of the Week? Let us know in the comments section or tweet us @WritersBone.

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Badass Writer of the Week: Jack Higgins

Jack Higgins

By Sean Tuohy

This week’s Badass Writer is a good guy who writes about the bad guys.

International best-selling author Jack Higgins has thrilled and excited readers the world over for the past 40years with no signs of stopping. His runaway best-seller, “The Eagle Has Landed,” put his name at the top of the list for thriller writers. He hasn’t looked back since. Higgins’ heroes are not your typical do-gooders (for example, Sean Dillon, one of his most famous characters, is a classically trained actor turned IRA hit man). But before Higgins started writing about men living tough and dangerous lives, he lived one himself.

Born Harry Patterson in 1929, Higgins grew up in Northern Ireland during World War II and social unrest within Ireland. Higgins has spoken about walking to the market with his mother as a child when a fire fight broke out and his mother used her body to shield him from bullets. Much of the violence and unrest that he witnessed as a child affected him later in life and made its way into his writing.

Higgins was known as an indifferent student as a child who could care less for school. He bounced around Ireland before he found a home in the British Army, where he became a noncommissioned officer in the cavalry. While in the military, Higgins discovered that he had sharpshooting skills and a high I.Q. Yep, this guy can do a math problem with ease while shooting a target a mile away.

Military service lit a fire under Higgins. After he got out, he went back to school, and, unlike before, he threw himself into school work and studied throughout England. Once he was finished with school, Higgins began writing. He pumped out short thriller paperbacks. None of them were hits, nor were they very good, but Higgins kept working at his craft.

It all came to a head when he published his sixth novel, the aforementioned “The Eagle Has Landed.” Higgins was the hot new writer despite the fact he had been writing for nearly 10 years. “The Eagle Has Landed” tells the tale of a group of German commandos sent to England to kidnap Winston Churchill during World War II. The book was later turned in to a film with Michael Cain, Donald Sutherland, and Robert Duvall. Not a bad payoff for a hardworking writer.

Now approaching 90 years old, Higgins still publishes at least one novel a year that features oddball protagonists and all-around tough guys. We assume he’ll long outlive any zombie apocalypse, nuclear holocaust, or plague by entertaining the barbarians at his door with his thrilling prose.

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Badass Writer of the Week: Charles Willeford

Charles Willeford

By Sean Tuohy

It takes a tough guy to know how to write a tough guy novel and Charles Willeford was the definition of tough guy.

How tough was good old Charles Willeford? When you Google Image search his name it is impossible to not find a picture of him smoking and looking ultra cool. During his career as a writer Willeford penned a dozen hardboiled noir age novels and the genre-bending Hoke Molsey series. Willeford has been praised by James lee Bruke, Elmore Leonard, and Quentin Tarantino as the best crime writer of all time.

But before he became a tough guy writer, Willeford lived the tough guy life.

Born in 1919, Willeford had a rough start. He lost both parents before he was a teenager and came of age during the Great Depression. At 13 years old, when most of us were getting bitch slapped by puberty, Willeford assumed an identity and jumped on a freight train. He was barely a teenager and he essentially became Jason Bourne.

Willeford lied about his age, joined the Army, and fought in World War II as a tank commander. While still in Europe, Willeford wrote and published his first book that was the toughest, meanest collection of…poetry. Wait a minute. Really? You mean the guy who fought in WWII and also worked as a fireman, cook, and gas truck driver before he was 20 years old, wrote poetry? Then again, who are we to judge? Even tough guys have a soft side.

After 1950 Willeford was all over the place. He joined the Air Force for a while, he was a boxer, actor, radio host, and in between all that went to college and got his M.A. in English. During this time, Willeford published several highly praised, but low grossing novels, High Priest of California and Cockfighter among them.

Charles Willeford

While working as a professor at Miami Dade College, and nine years after his last published novel, Willeford printed his most successful novel Miami Blues. The cop drama took place in Miami during the wild drug days in the 1980's and features hard-nose, no-nonsense police detective Hoke Molsey.

Miami Blues was later turned in to a film starring Alec Baldwin. Willeford, now in his sixties, was finally making a living as a full-time writer.

He pumped out a total of four Hoke novels before his death in 1987. We assume that when he died Willeford was puffing a smoke and coming up with one final great tough line.

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Badass Writer of the Week: Bob Mayer

Bob Mayer

By Sean Tuohy

This is a first for Writer’s Bone (no, we did not learn what healthy diet means). We got to interview this Friday’s Badass Writer of the Week!

Bob Mayer is a former U.S. Army Green Beret, a best-selling author of the Green Beret and Area 51 series, and has started his own publishing company called Cool Gus Publishing. What makes Bob a true badass writer in the eyes of the Writer’s Bone crew—besides the fact he shares the same job as Rambo—is the fact that he is always looking ahead. Mayer embraced the new world of e-book publishing and proved it could be a successful market. Also, using the skills he learned while in the Special Forces, Mayer published Write It Forward, a guide for new authors who are interested in navigating the e-book publishing world.

We know, we know, we wanted him to teach authors how to shoot a bow and arrow too, but maybe we can convince him to do that for his next book.

Writer’s Bone: Did you always know you'd become a writer, or was it something you discovered later in life?  

Bob Mayer: I always read a lot. I think that’s the best preparation for becoming a writer. I lived in books as a child. I wrote a lot of technical stuff and orders in the military, but it was only when I moved to the Orient to study martial arts that I began writing. It was more out of a sense of wanting to tell a story than thinking about getting published.

Writer’s Bone: Besides the military background,  what do you and your hero David Riley have in common?

BM: We’re both from the Bronx and from lower-middle-class families. We both used the military as a way up and out. His mode of leadership also mimics what mine is.

Writer’s Bone: What are some misconceptions that people have about the new e-book market?  

BM: They think it’s easy. It’s gotten tougher with each passing month as more and more books get loaded. Also, there is so much more to it than just doing a cover and formatting and uploading a book. There’s an art to promoting books and gaining readers.

Writer’s Bone: What do you recommend to authors new to the e-book market?  

BM: Focus on series. And don’t worry about promoting until you have at least three books out there. That will also weed out a lot of your competition as most people will quit after one book if they don’t see immediate results.

Writer’s Bone: Where did the idea for Cool Gus Publishing come about and how has it evolved over time?  

BM: When Jen Talty approached me about bringing out my backlist, I realized we needed to think bigger than that. Once we established the capability to do this, we brought on other authors. However, we’re staying small because you can only focus on a handful of authors. We want to do right by a few authors, not try to make a little off a lot.

Writer’s Bone: What is one positive for standard publishing and one positive for e-book pubishing?

BM: Traditional publishing is almost always better for a new writer because you will get some exposure. Not much, but more than you can do on your own. However, unless you get extremely lucky, focus on moving past it down the line.

For publishing on your own, you have complete control, but you also have complete responsibility. Your success or failure rests on your shoulders. I look at that as a positive, but it can overwhelm some people.

Writer’s Bone: Tell us a little about Write it Forward. What kind of response have you gotten from writers who have read the book and followed your strategies?  

BM: I have taken the strategies we used to succeed in Special Forces and applied them to being an author. While authors tend to be creative, we also have to run a business and have a career plan. Most don’t. Those who do have a stronger chance to succeed. The number one thing required to succeed is to set a long term goal and doing whatever it takes to succeed. Most writers don’t even have that long term, or strategic goal. Thus the odds of succeeding are not very good.

Writer’s Bone: Is there anything you miss about being in the Army?  

BM: The camaraderie. In Special Forces, we had an elite and unique group of soldiers. It was great working with people you could trust with your life.

Writer’s Bone: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?

BM: I have two yellow labs: Gus and Becca. My company is named after Cool Gus (which is Gus when he wears his sunglasses).

You can learn more about Bob Mayer by visiting his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Bob_Mayer.

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