Murderers are not announced in their final chapters, secrets are not revealed, the fates of nations do not hang on their outcome. They are tales of heroes and villains engaged in mortal and moral struggle. What distinguishes them is Leonard's ability to create characters, conversations and situations that are as natural and convincing as they are unique."
Leonard writes realistically about the underworld in the tradition of James M. Cain and W. R. Burnett. His characters on the margins of society are often career criminals looking to get rich quick, hustling for a scam, or primed for the big heist. They may be con artists and they may be psychopathic killers. For most of his characters, survival is difficult enough, and success is impossibly elusive. In one of several unpublished interviews Leonard gave in the spring and summer of 1997, he asserted that his characters are "the kind of people who think they 're hip, who are looking for a big score." He attempts to portray "the way they talk, the street parlance. People in crime and on the fringes of crime and people on the other side--they interest me. Nearly all the cops I've hung out with (since the 1980s) are on the investigative level--homicide, the state cops in Florida, the FBI, probation officers--and they 're interesting.
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