SOURCE: "Elmore's Legs," in New Yorker, Vol. LXXII, No. 29, September 30, 1996, pp. 43-7.

In the following essay, Wilkinson presents Leonard's researcher, Greg Sutter, and traces Sutter's various experiences while gathering background material for Leonard's works.

Elmore Leonard, the writer of sleek and authentic novels about criminals, such as Stick and Get Shorty, has never much enjoyed doing research. His earliest books were written in the fifties and involve cowboys and bandits. Leonard has spent most of his life in Detroit. To describe a mountain or a canyon or a butte, he consulted one issue or another of the magazine Arizona Highways. After the market for westerns disappeared, in the sixties, he relied on a newspaper reporter he knew who covered crime. "I don't like to research," he says. "I like to write." Nevertheless, for the last fifteen years, what verisimilitude in his novels is not the result of his...