SOURCE: "Common Criminals and Ordinary Heroes," in Armchair Detective, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 14-20.

In the following essay, Sandels surveys Leonard's crime novels and reveals how the author departs from and provides commentary on traditional crime story formulas; Sandels also delineates standard themes and elements of plot and character found in these works.

Elmore Leonard's crime novels have much of the flavor of his earlier Westerns. In City Primeval (1980), subtitled High Noon in Detroit, a police detective, Raymond Cruz, and a killer, Clement Mansell, face each other in a classic Western shoot-out. The shoot-out which ends Glitz (1985) is almost identical to the one which ends Leonard's 1979 Western novel Gunsights. The tone of his Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s conformed to the social criticisms of the day. Blacks, Indians, and Mexicans instead of WASPs were often the protagonists, and they looked deceptively harmless on the outside. On the...