[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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