I am finally getting around to reading a book called The Tenacity of a Cockroach: Conversations with Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders, published by Three Rivers Press in 2002. That's probably when I bought it--I can buy books a lot faster than I can read them, and they disappear for a while but resurface eventually. Its kind of like the La Brea Tar Pits...
Anyway, one of the interviews is with Elmore Leonard, the great crime writer. The interviewer points out that Leonard tends to let his characters describe each other. Leonard says, "Right. That's important, because it not only describes the characters to some degree, but it also tells what the one describing thinks of him. Even the weather, for that matter. If somebody looks out the window in my book, he has an attitude about the weather."
Leonard also has a bit to say about hanging in there: "I was fortunate that I had stuck to what I wanted to do. Because in '66 or '67, when we sent out my first non-Western, The Big Bounce, it was rejected by everybody. Everybody in Hollywood rejected it. Anyone who cared to say anything said, 'Well, it's a downer. There's nobody you'd like to associate with.' The main character is a former burglar and a migrant worker. In the movie, of course, he turns out to be a returned Vietnam War vet."
