Top-selling US crime author Elmore Leonard, best known for movie adaptations Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, has died aged 87.
Leonard died in Detroit following complications from a stroke suffered last month.
Known in his home town as the ‘Dickens of Detroit’, Leonard wrote 46 books, including recent best-sellers Djibouti and Raylan, as well as stories adapted for Hollywood movies including the 3:10 to Yuma.
More than 25 of Leonard’s works were made into movies or television shows, beginning with Paul Newman in the 1967 film Hombre. His novella Fire in the Hole inspired the US TV series Justified, which will soon enter its fifth series.
In 2012 Leonard was awarded the medal for distinguished contribution to American letters from the National Book Awards in recognition of “his outstanding achievement in fiction writing”.
“I don’t have any reason to quit,” Leonard told Reuters in 2012, referring to his career. “I still enjoy writing.”
Leonard was born in New Orleans and moved with his family to Detroit aged 8, where he became fascinated by the exploits of real-life gangsters Bonnie and Clyde. He was inspired to become a writer after reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western front as a boy.
(Elmore Leonard interviewed by Channel 4 News in 2006. He first made it onto the New York Times best seller list in 1985.)
During World War Two he built bases in the Pacific for the US Navy. He enrolled at the University of Detroit and entered writing contests and sold stories to magazines including tales of the Old West.
In the 1950s he wrote copy for an advertising company, and each day before work he would rise before dawn and deny himself a cup of coffee until he had written a page. He initially wrote westerns before moving onto crime novels to improve his commercial appeal.
“I don’t have any reason to quit” – Elmore Leonard last year.
Leonard was renowned for his heavy work schedule and writing longhand on unlined legal pads, ordering a thousand of them a year, according to the Detroit News.
He was “working very hard” on his latest novel earlier this month after suffering his stroke, said the paper quoting his longtime researcher Gregg Sutter. His 47th book Blue Dreams was expected to be published this year.
Leonard was married three times and had five children with his first wife.