“... and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.’ Quentin Tarantino cited Willeford as one of the major influences on Pulp Fiction. There can be something a little suspect about being so well respected by fellow ...”

“... her sentence: ‘I think what you did ... was so romantic.’ Tarantino says he was trying to be Elmore Leonard in this script – ‘although I’m not saying it’s as good’ – and he does get something of Leonard’s pace and complication; something of his sense of the world of cops and robbers too, a place ...”

“... only from the current stars of hardboiled lite, the Florida ecologist Carl Hiaasen and grizzled Elmore Leonard (as cannibalised by Quentin Tarantino), but also from Mosley. The Griffin books won’t reduce to exploitable Hollywood storylines, they’re much too rich and strange for that. Villains don’t have to be land-grabbing corporate monsters or ...”

“... James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after all, was the logical outcome of her loyalty to those beliefs, and to the people and events that ...”