Many critics consider Elmore Leonard to be the best living writer of crime fiction in the United States. Since the mid 1980s he has enjoyed enormous commercial success, and his style has influenced a generation of writers. Leonard began his career writing Westerns and adventure tales but because of changes in the market switched to writing fiction about contemporary crime in the 1970s. In his introduction to the omnibus collection Elmore Leonard's Dutch Treat (1985), George Will asserts that the effectiveness of Leonard's novels "derives from their realism. The realism is in the elusive path of the narrative. . . . He deals in small, telling details, not the Big Picture. However, he knows if you gather enough of the right details, you have, at the end of the day, a picture, and a true one." As Dick Lochte noted in the Los Angeles Times of 24 October 1993, "It's a mistake to categorize...