Elmore Leonard never gets short financially
By Jay MacDonald • Bankrate.com

Elmore Leonard: I got $10,000 for "Hombre." The two before that, "The Tall T" and "3:10 to Yuma," I got $5,000. I didn't get up there until "Valdez is Coming," where I got $75,000 and finally I was making some money. The only movie where I had serious points was "Stick" (with Burt Reynolds), and that didn't make anything.

Bankrate: You carried one theme from your Westerns into your crime fiction that wasn't readily found in either genre until you put it there: humor.

Elmore Leonard: I see humor in practically everything. Everything seems a little funny, a little quirky, to me. So I thought, I've got to use that. When I started out, the Westerns weren't particularly funny; they were straight drama shootouts. Once I realized that Hemingway wasn't going to help me all the way because he's the one I studied very, very closely starting out in the '50s -- he made it look so easy -- I started to find other writers to study so I would loosen up.

Bankrate: Your writing career got a big boost in the '70s from another master of crime, John D. MacDonald.

Elmore Leonard: He gave me a really wonderful blurb that really helped the sales. He and I became friends by correspondence. He was on his 28th Travis McGee when he died, and he told me, "I don't know if I can write another one of these."

Bankrate: Hollywood became very interested in your crime fiction around that time, too. You even wrote a number of screenplays, right?

Elmore Leonard: Yes, I did the screenplay for "Mr. Majestyk [and] Joe Kidd" for Clint Eastwood. I've always had a good agent in Hollywood, so I have not worried about that. And by the '80s, the book deals were a lot better than they were before, when I was selling a paperback for $6,000. Now with the book deals, I don't need to sell to Hollywood, but we still do.

Bankrate: Why not just ditch the Detroit winters and write screenplays in Hollywood?

Elmore Leonard: I've done screenplays, but I don't like it at all. I think of it as work. You're an employee, and you're doing what you're told if you want the money. Why do that when I get so much satisfaction out of writing a book? I'm asked all the time, especially in Hollywood, "Why would you live in Detroit if you can live anywhere you want?" And I say, "Because I know all the streets now and I'm too old to learn the streets anywhere else."

Bankrate: Did you invest your money along the way?

Elmore Leonard: Investing never, never interested me at all. Reading the Wall Street Journal was a turnoff more than anything else. But then my brother-in-law became a stockbroker and he was trading all kinds of stuff for me and then all of a sudden it just went bad. I was never in real estate.

Bankrate: After 38 novels, how do you manage to jump-start your muse every day?

Elmore Leonard: I'll pick up one of my older books, it doesn't matter what book, and just open it up in the morning to get the sound, the attitude in my head, and I'll start reading a scene that I'd forgotten all about, and sometimes I'll find myself laughing out loud. I didn't laugh out loud when I wrote it, but when I come across it later, yeah. When "Get Shorty" opened in New York, I saw it with my editor and she said after, "I thought the funniest thing was to hear you laughing at your own lines."