Though many of his novels have been turned into films, it’s the novels themselves that possess the real crackle and technical command. If you think of the first lines of the great Tishomingo Blues, it is quite unfilmable – “Dennis Lenehan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that’s what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder … when he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they’d put a cute look of pain on their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn’t it like really dangerous?” A film could show Dennis telling one girl this, on one occasion. The resources that allow a narrator to convey the endless repetition of Dennis’s conversation and the predictable responses, and put it within a dry reported speech, as if Dennis were, bored, half-overhearing himself, are there to be exploited by the novelist of huge technical command.
— The Guardian looks at the career of Elmore Leonard.
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