one tough hombre

One day in 1984 I found a novel called LaBrava in a bookstore. It was written by a guy called Elmore Leonard, of whom I'd never heard, but the blurb described him as ''the legitimate heir of James M. Cain''. To be honest, the author's picture on the inside cover - an ageing man with a beard, sporting heavy-rimmed glasses and a flat cap - didn't exactly suggest the re-birth of the cool. But, what the hell, I took a chance and bought the book. One of my better moves, as it turned out.

Because Elmore ''Dutch'' Leonard is the real thing. Accept no substitute. The best of the best. The grandfather of modern American crime fiction. George Higgins, James Ellroy, James Lee Burke . . . yes, sure, they're all fine writers. But Elmore, at 72, is still the king. Riding high these days on the strength of being ''re-discovered'' by Hollywood. Last year it was his novel Get Shorty which got the Tinseltown treatment. This year it is Rum Punch, aka Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown.

So I hit the phone number which will put me through to a house in the outskirts of Detroit. His voice comes through loud and clear on the second ring. ''This is Elmore Leonard,'' he says. I am talking to a hero.

He was in his twenties - and working in a Motown advertising agency writing scripts for Chevy commercials - when he first tried his hand at fiction. It was the early 1950s and crime writing was off the boil. Chandler, Hammett and all their young pretenders had been and gone. Television was the Great God of popular culture and it had dictated that the Western was where it was at.

So Leonard leapt into the saddle and started writing cowboy stories, not so much because he was a Western fan, more because he wanted to sell them to Hollywood. He fancied making a few bucks. The least of his ambitions was to get a story published in the Saturday Evening Post - and he did sell them one (just one). The rest of the pulp he pitched to nickel-and-dime Western magazines. By the end of the decade, he'd published a handful of cowboy novels. But, by then, television tastes had changed. Westerns had gone out of fashion. Leonard got the message when, in 1959, he wrote Hombre (later to become a movie with Paul Newman) and had to wait until 1961 to sell it for a meagre $4000 advance on the paperback rights.

So he switched to crime. A move for which we should all be eternally grateful. For the most part he sets his stories in either Detroit or Southern Florida.

''That's not just because I've lived in Detroit since 1934 and I've been going to Miami since 1950. It's also because there is always something going on in these places. I have close ties with the law enforcement people in both areas. Detroit was the murder capital of the USA in the 70s and Miami is wonderful because you have such a contrast in the people who live there. From the super-rich in Palm Beach down to the people who came over from Cuba in the Mariel boats when Castro opened up his prisons,'' he explains.

Leonard's crime capers have become the template for dozens of impostors down the years. In America today the mystery novel is probably the most popular genre in mainstream fiction. And, though essentially a modest man, Leonard is aware of his place in the scheme of things. Without his trailblazing work, crime writing would not be where it is today.

''Yes, I have heard that said. I've been told by younger writers that, if I hadn't paved the way, they probably wouldn't have been able to sell what they were writing. I suppose I opened it up a little bit, helped new writers to loosen up, be a little more free in the way they express themselves,'' he admits.

Leonard's golden rule when it comes to writing is that there are no rules when it comes to writing.

''I suppose I was different because I was using bad guys as the main protagonists. Bad guys are always so much more interesting.

''I don't make moral judgments because I don't make judgments. I am not in the book. I am not writing it. It's the characters who are writing. I don't want the reader ever to be aware of me. Therefore, I never use words that I might use. They're all words that are associated with the characters.

''I write from the point of view of the people in the story. It can also often be ungrammatical to some extent. I don't want proper usage to get in the way and ruin it. It is up to the reader to make a judgment, not me. It doesn't take me to point out that a guy is breaking the law, it is apparent that he is. The fact that I don't pass judgment is not an indication that I approve,'' he says.

So what makes Elmore Leonard run? Why does he write? ''I don't know. Just to tell stories, I suppose. It's a way to make a living because, right from the start, I wanted to make a living out of it. I never wanted to just write on the side.

''In the 1940s and 1950s I would read a lot of different kinds of writers to find out what I liked and who I could learn from. And, like thousands of others, I found Hemingway and he made it look easy. Mind you, I didn't share his attitude to life at all. But I looked around for writers who expressed a little humour and I've learned from all sorts of people. I read to learn how to write. I didn't get it from some sort of course run by a guy who has never published a thing in his life. And I never read a book on teach-me-to-write.

''I don't follow rules. You put it down the way you want it. I naturally put in cliffhangers at the end of a chapter or a scene, something that moves the story along,'' he explains.

Of course, you must forgive an old-timer like Leonard for not getting too excited about his recent Hollywood success. Over the years, he has been discovered by the motion picture industry more often than he cares to recall (although, until Get Shorty, every screen adaptation of an Elmore novel was an unmitigated disaster).

But he liked Get Shorty. ''It was directed by Barry Sonnefeld and originally Danny DeVito was supposed to play the Chilli Palmer role. But he was doing another movie then and he didn't have time to prepare.

''But Danny's company, Jersey Films, which was producing the film, was also producing Pulp Fiction and, though it hadn't been released by then, they saw the footage of John Travolta, and he got the part. DeVito eventually came in as Martin Weir,'' he recalls.

And Jackie Brown? ''Delighted with the way it came out. It is really close to the original book. The only criticism I've heard was that it was too long. But I don't think so. Tarantino thought he could take his time and structure the piece properly.

''When Quentin called me up he said to me: 'I've been afraid to phone you for the last year. I was worried that you wouldn't like me changing the title and making the lead role a black woman.'

''I told him: 'Hey, you're the film-maker. You do what you want. I don't care how close you stick to the book.' You see, the thing is that the book's still there. It's not going away. Personally, I'm not interested in writing screenplays. I wrote them back in the 70s and 80s because it supported my book-writing. I never wanted to be a screenwriter. You're employed by the studios when you do that and you have all those people telling you what to do,'' he says.

But, if nothing else, movie success has turned the spotlight on Leonard's body of work. He is currently writing his 35th novel. And 32 of them have been optioned (or bought outright) by Hollywood. Killshot, Bandits, Freaky Deaky . . . even an old cowboy screenplay, Forty Lashes Less One (about a prison breakout in Umah in 1909) has been dusted down. All of his books are being re-issued over the next year with same-format covers. So does writing get easier as you get older? ''No,'' he replies without a moment's hesitation. ''It gets harder. After all these books you have to find something new to say. How the hell do you make the next one new and different?''

Well, how he has made his next one new and different is to go back almost to where he started. Leonard's new novel is, to all intents and purposes, a Western. Set amid the backdrop of the Spanish-American War, Cuba Libre is a tale of period high adventure rather than present-day low-life. Three days before the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbour (the event which served as the excuse to spark off the conflict in 1897), ex-bank robber Ben Tyler arrives in Cuba with a string of horses to sell. He meets up with a rich American planter, falls for his beautiful wife, and makes an enemy of the local Guardia Civil boss.

I suggest that the Spanish-American War is not too familiar with European audiences.

''Not even Americans are that familiar with it, though they do know a bit more about it now since it's the 100th anniversary and there have been a lot of TV specials about it.

''It was the time of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, a private regiment attached to the US Cavalry. They went to Cuba but, by the time they got there, they discovered they didn't have any horses. But, because Roosevelt was such a strong character, most Americans believed he won the war single-handed. ''The newspapers portrayed us as the saviours of the poor oppressed Cuban people. But it was for purely economic reasons that we got involved. Big business wanted us to go in,'' he explains. Some things, it seems, never change.

So why did he decide to write about it? ''Well, I borrowed a book from a friend in 1957. It was called A Splendid Little War and it was a pictorial history of the war. And I liked that book and always had it handy. Then, having done crime for so many years, I thought it would be a good subject to write about. But to do it right required so much research. It took a year rather than just the five months it usually takes. But it was fun.''

The novel (which has been optioned for the screen by the Coen brothers) is an interesting departure for Leonard but, it being close to an historical romance, does it perhaps show worrying signs of the author growing soft in his old age?

''No way,'' he says. ''Just wait till you see he next one. It's a sequel to Get Shorty.''

In which? ''In which Chilli Palmer is looking for an idea for a movie. So he wanders into the music business; the record industry.'' Yes, this is Elmore Leonard's rock-and-roll.

''He meets a girl who is the singer in a group that she doesn't like but she can't get out because she's under contract and her manager is threatening her. So she meets Chilli and he helps her out.

''It started out with just an idea for the first chapter. Chilli is having lunch at an outside cafe with a guy he used to know from the early days. He's Mob-connected, owns a record company, and wants Chilli to produce a movie about him. Chilli doesn't want to. He goes in to the men's room. Comes back out and sees a car stop, a man get out, and shoot the guy he was having lunch with.

''You start a book not having any ideas. But it comes. Where I am now, I have about 270 pages written so I guess I've about 70 or 80 still to go,'' he says.

Don't let me keep you, Mr Leonard.

l Cuba Libre is published by Viking on May 28 at #16.99