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Dubbed "The Dickens of Detroit" by Time magazine in 1984, Elmore Leonard has written more than thirty novels, as well as many short stories and screenplays. He began his writing career in the early 1950s, turning out short stories for western pulp magazines. Shortly thereafter, he began publishing western novels. The sale of the film rights to some of his westerns led to a long and lucrative association with Hollywood. When the western market dried up in the mid 1960s, he began writing contemporary crime novels; it was not until the early 1980s that he achieved widespread critical acclaim for his crime fiction.
Although one routinely finds Leonard's crime novels shelved in the mystery sections at libraries and bookstores, he rejected the mystery label for his books in a 1990 interview: "They are definitely not mysteries in the classic sense of being puzzles. They're certainly not whodunits. The reader knows everything that's going on--very often more than the main character." Laced with deadpan humor, Leonard's contemporary crime novels explore the underside of American life in the manner of the films noirs of the 1930s and 1940s, undercutting reader expectations by avoiding stereotypical portraits of even the lowest of his low-life characters.
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