SOURCE: "'High Noon in Detroit': Elmore Leonard's Career," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 25, No. 3, Winter, 1991, pp. 181-87.

In the following essay, Hynes surveys Leonard's career, noting various qualities unique to the author's works.

Elmore Leonard is perhaps as popular as a writer can hope to be. After twenty-eight novels his inventiveness seems as inexhaustible as that of Dickens, to whom he has been favorably compared. Nevertheless, despite his turning out a book every year or two, and despite the predictably favorable reviews he earns and the high esteem in which he is held by his peers, Leonard tends to be critically regarded as a lesser achiever, one whose works fall into journalistic compartments labeled "Westerns" or "Criminal Proceedings" or "Annals of Crime" rather than simply "Fiction." Moreover, this is the case even though Leonard has never been interested in mystery stories, "whodunnits," or detective fiction.

Leonard has...