[This weekend marks the 100th birthday of the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of phenomenal crime and mystery writers, leading up this weekend post on Elmore himself!]
One of the
highest cultural compliments an author can receive is for their works to be
adapted for other media, and very few American writers have been adapted as
frequently as Elmore Leonard. So here are LeonardStudying and AmericanStudies takeaways
from five such adaptations for film and TV:
1)
3:10 to Yuma (1957): Before
Leonard settled into his groove as a writer of contemporary crime fiction, he
started (as so many 20th century genre writers did) with Westerns.
One of his most successful early short stories was “Three-Ten
to Yuma” (1953), which was also one of his first works to be adapted as a
film. It’s an excellent story that was made into a strong film, as is also the
case with the 2007 remake; but I think the broader AmericanStudies point is just
how ubiquitous Westerns
were in mid-century, to the point that even one of our best contemporary
crime writers began with that more historical genre.
2)
The Big Bounce (1969): Leonard’s
first contemporary crime novel was 1969’s The
Big Bounce, and it was enough of a smash that it was adapted into a
film in the same year. Unfortunately, the adaptation was, let’s say, less
successful—indeed, in 2009
Leonard called it “the second-worst movie ever made,” with the first being
the 2004 remake! Rather than further bury those two films, I’ll just note how
unique and strongly developed Leonard’s storytelling and style were at this
still-early point, which is evidenced both by the immediate adaptation and by
the difficulty of adapting him well.
3)
Get Shorty (1995): Leonard
published 22 novels in the 21 years between The Big Bounce and Get
Shorty (1990), and a number of them were likewise adapted. But I think Get
Shorty represents a significant turning point in his career, as it’s both a
crime novel and a novel about Hollywood, one clearly based on Leonard’s own
complicated and often frustrating experiences with film adaptations of his
works and that industry overall (ironically enough, Get Shorty is one of
the more successful such adaptations). Few of our novelists have careers both
long and successful enough where they can arrive at such a meta-point, and it’s
fascinating to trace Leonard’s journey through that lens.
4)
Touch (1997): I’d
say those three stages (Westerns, crime novels, and meta-fiction) reflect the
most prominent beats in Leonard’s career arc overall. But of course anyone as
prolific as Leonard has of course also ventured into other territory, and one
of the more interesting examples is Touch
(1987), a black comic thriller that satires evangelicals, the mass media, and the
commercialization of religion in late 20th century America. From
what I can tell, the 1997 film adaptation doesn’t work as either comedy,
thriller, or satire—but the fact that this off-brand Leonard novel still
garnered an adaptation reflects just how much the man could do no wrong.
5)
Justified
(2010-2015, 2023): I said most of what I’d want to say about this fabulous TV
show, an adaptation of Leonard’s
novels and stories about U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (especially “Fire in
the Hole”), in that hyperlinked weeklong series. (I couldn’t get into the
2023 reboot, based on Leonard’s non-Givens-related 1980
novel City Primeval.) I’ll just add this: Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan
Givens and Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder are two of the greatest characters ever
put on the small screen, and (with all due respect to those two great actors
and everyone involved with the show) that too is a testament to Elmore Leonard’s
stunning talents.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Crime or mystery novelists you’d share?
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