His stories depict killers, small-time hoodlums, and reformed criminals who follow codes of conduct that make sense to them, no matter how distorted they may appear to the reader. His chief protagonists are seemingly detached men and women who want to follow the rule of noninvolvement expressed by Jack Ryan, a process server, in
Unknown Man No. 89 (1977): "never get personally involved.... That was rule number one. Don't get too close and start feeling sorry for people. You want to do that, go work for the Salvation Army." Leonard's protagonists, however, are forced by circumstances, and their own impulses, into the fray. They are seldom without flaws and do not hesitate to fashion their own forms of justice when the law, as it inevitably does, fails. In a play on Raymond Chandler, Michael Wood wrote: "Elmore Leonard's characters are usually tarnished and afraid, but pretty good at surviving."
Many reviewers consider Leonard to be among the best of the hard-boiled crime novelists, a list that includes writers such as Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M.
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