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“... fiction is as competitive as prizefighting. The current champion of thriller writers in America is Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard. With the imminent release of the film Stick (a much-hyped but somewhat limp adaptation directed by and starring Burt Reynolds) he should make number one here, too. ...”

“... conscience, resist the tyranny of the faithful reader. If he had any sense, for instance, Elmore Leonard would continue pumping out more instalments of the life and adventures of his resourceful Ernest Stickley Jr, 89037 (i.e. Stick) or his burned-out IRS agent, LaBrava. Instead, Leonard has used his ...”

“... about the timing of the tempest, she can always be helped out. One theory, quietly articulated in Elmore Leonard’s new thriller, is that the North Americans blew up the Maine themselves in order to start the war. Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist ...”

“... mean, but wouldn’t that be pretty much tautological? Certainly readers of George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard would be surprised by the claim as it stands. Binyon also accepts without questioning the distinction between detective fiction and thrillers, or what he sometimes calls adventure stories. This is a familiar distinction, and in certain ways a ...”

“... writer, by which I do not mean a genre writer of cowboy tales like Zane Grey or the younger Elmore Leonard, but that her stories, with only a few exceptions, are situated west of the Great Plains or in Mexico. Berlin herself was born in Alaska and spent most of her childhood in Chile – a setting for several stories. The daughter of a mining ...”

“... girls has a period flavour. He revives a Bond-movie style of fast-action farce; Willeford – and Elmore Leonard, who also finds in Florida crime a source for anarchic chills and threats – are realists by comparison. Hiaasen is, on the other hand, very quick on new phenomena: the girl who works on a porn phone-in line gets literary and syndicates her ...”

“... readable. If you enjoy tough American thrillers Kakonis is less sentimental than the later Elmore Leonard, sharper and livelier than Sara Paretsky. In other words, the best ...”

“... the contours and issues of both films remain the same, and both are faithful in their way to the Elmore Leonard story where they started, which means the new work also has its share of moral suspense and complexity. I can’t tell the end of the story – not the same in the new movie, though all the ingredients of the old formulation are there ...”

“... a religion’. He’s bribing people left, right and centre, like he’s running a racket in an Elmore Leonard novel. He’s also designing and building his own house, to his own exacting specifications, like he’s Wittgenstein: ‘a huge, white beauty of a self-cleaning wonder with marble floors, a piece of the sky under every ceiling, and walls of ...”

“... have moved closer to the present, though, his plots have mutated from dark conspiracies into Elmore Leonard-ish capers. The tone has become sunnier: fewer good guys are killed off, and the hero usually ends up getting the girl. Most of all, the high-tech stuff has moved from fantasy to something more like punditry. Gibson often seems as interested ...”

“... We know what we are in for, just as surely as we do when we open an Agatha Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of ...”

“... which follow Sonny’s predicament. The book has something of the gloss of the tough thrillers of Elmore Leonard, but the texture is closer, the writing more artful. Hemingway is father of more than the toughness: Harry has been working as a game warden. ‘But it had all given rise to a feeling he had never had before, even late in the war, down to ...”

“... or even its Georgette Heyer: that is, the writer capable of lifting its clichés into art. Elmore Leonard might have done it, had he not decided to switch to crime ...”

“... of dog-fighting is convincing, without being excessive. The bigger the advance you receive, as Elmore Leonard has discovered, the bigger the research team you have to carry: until the novel disappears under its cargo of unassimilated information. Ely’s pitch is pastoral, but sour. All the drift is towards the pit bull combat that provides the ...”

“... 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 ...”