SOURCE: "Junk Souls," in New York Times, Vol. 100, May 14, 1995, p. 7.

In the following favorable review of Riding the Rap, Amis applauds Leonard's characteristic style of narrative and dialogue.

Let us attempt to narrow it down. Elmore Leonard is a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers. He belongs, then, not to the mainstream but to the genres (before he wrote thrillers, he wrote westerns). Whereas genre fiction, on the whole, heavily relies on plot, mainstream fiction, famously, has only about a dozen plots to recombinate (boy meets girl, good beats bad and so on). But Mr. Leonard has only one plot. All his thrillers are Pardoner's Tales, in which Death roams the land—usually Miami and Detroit—disguised as money.

Nevertheless, Mr. Leonard possesses gifts—of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing—that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet. And the...