Stick Read online

  Amis:Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?

  Leonard:No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in Valdez Is Coming, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.

  Amis:And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?

  Leonard:I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.

  Amis:The really bad guys.

  Leonard:Yeah, the really bad guys....

  Amis:Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?

  Leonard:It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.

  Amis:Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]

  [Applause]

  Editor’s note: Martin Amis is the author of many novels — including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train — and many works of nonfiction, including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.

  About the Author

  Elmore Leonard has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Be Cool. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Valdez Is Coming, and Rum Punch (as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan, with his wife.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ELMORE LEONARD

  STICK

  “A writer with a deadly accurate ear and a lovely rhythm . . . A little beauty of a story . . . a hot, fast read with pungent characters and a particular code of honor as one of its central tenets. Above all, it feels real.”

  Los Angeles Times

  “Cream of the crime writing crop . . . Leonard’s dialogue and descriptions are so good that they . . . keep the reader glued to the pages.”

  Chicago Sun—Times

  “The hottest thriller writer in the U.S.”

  Time

  “Brilliant . . . Wonderful . . . Perfectly executed . . . Stick is the kind of book you spend days quoting to your friends.”

  Detroit News

  “No one writes better dialogue. No one conveys society’s seedier or marginal characters more convincingly . . . Leonard’s sardonic view of the world proves immensely entertaining, and not a little thought-provoking.”

  Detroit Free Press

  “A surprise on every page . . . Elmore Leonard keeps you guessing.”

  Boston Globe

  “Leonard gets better and better and better. He makes the rest of us mystery writers green with envy.”

  Tony Hillerman

  “Leonard is the real thing. . . . He raises the hardboiled suspense novel beyond the limits of genre and into social commentary; he paints an acute, funny, and sometimes very bitter picture of a world that is all too real and recognizable. . . . If thrills and amusements are Leonard’s principal stock in trade, it is also clear that Stick is a novel with more serious purposes. . . . Elmore Leonard has no tolerance for sham or pretense, in the prose he writes or the people he depicts. He’s a funny writer—all the best suspense writers are—and an incisive, unsparing one. He does honest work, and reading it is a great pleasure.”

  Washington Post Book World

  “The finest thriller writer alive.”

  Village Voice

  “Snappily paced . . . Admirably suspenseful . . . Leonard parlays a command of the vernacular into dialogue that never rings false.”

  Newsweek

  “No one can beat Elmore Leonard when it comes to mordant humor and shockingly bizarre situations.”

  Orlando Sentinel

  “His books defy classification . . . What Leonard does is write fully realized novels, using elements of the classic American crime novel and populating them with characters so true and believable you want to read their lines aloud to someone you really like.”

  Dallas Morning News

  “When Elmore Leonard’s people start talking, I can’t help myself, I have to listen.”

  Lawrence Block

  “Leonard’s cinematic grasp of scene and setting, his ability to arouse within us a helpless sympathy for even the lowest of his characters, his quirky pacing and plot twists, and his sly humor and artfully oddball prose sear our eyeballs and keep the pages turning.”

  Miami Herald

  “The reigning master of hard–action crime fiction . . . Few fiction writers match the artful ability of Elmore Leonard, first to persuade you to read his next sentence, then to draw you into reading his next chapter, and finally to seduce you into reading his entire book.”

  Cincinnati Enquirer

  “Leonard does crime fiction better than anyone since Raymond Chandler.”

  Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Delightful . . . Daring and original.”

  Arkansas Gazette

  “Elmore Leonard may be the last hope for the written word.”

  New York Observer

  “The man knows how to grab you.”

  Entertainment Weekly

  “Leonard writes crackling good dialogue. . . . He’s even more of an innovator when it comes to the moral arena of crime fiction . . . rejecting clear-cut and often simplistic notions of good and evil . . . His crime novels are grippingly true-to-life tales of double-cross and redemption, with a murky morality that seems to suit the times.”

  Chicago Tribune

  “Witty . . . Fun . . . Pops off the page in throbbing, fluorescent colors . . . This is a world into which the reader is delighted to be drawn. It’s the hip, fast-talking world of Florida’s Gold Coast, where everyone is angling for a piece of s
ome action.”

  New York Times

  “The greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever.”

  New York Times Book Review

  “Leonard is tops in his field. . . . In Leonard’s sleazy world you always meet interesting characters. . . . I’m an Elmore Leonard groupie.”

  New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “A giant among writers of crime fiction.”

  Columbus Dispatch

  “Elmore Leonard is a distinctive American artist, the way our great jazz musicians are. . . . There is his sound, and then everybody else’s.”

  Mike Lupica

  “A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”

  The New Yorker

  “While Leonard excels at low-life suspense, he’s also a master fiction writer whose gift for dialogue and cunningly meandering plots any novelist would envy.”

  San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “The King Daddy of crime novelists.”

  Seattle Times

  Books by Elmore Leonard

  The Bounty Hunters

  Cat Chaser

  The Law at Randado

  Stick

  Escape from Five Shadows

  LaBrava

  Last Stand at Saber River

  Glitz

  Hombre

  Bandits

  The Big Bounce

  Touch

  The Moonshine War

  Freaky Deaky

  Valdez Is Coming

  Killshot

  Forty Lashes Less One

  Get Shorty

  Mr. Majestyk

  Maximum Bob

  52 Pickup

  Rum Punch

  Swag

  Pronto

  Unknown Man #89

  Riding the Rap

  The Hunted

  Out of Sight

  The Switch

  Cuba Libre

  Gunsights

  The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories

  Gold Coast

  City Primeval

  Be Cool

  Split Images

  Pagan Babies

  And in Hardcover

  Tishomingo Blues

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  STICK. Copyright © 1983 by Elmore Leonard, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2002 ISBN: 9780061827235

  First HarperTorch paperback printing: August 2002

  First HarperCollins trade paperback printing: November 1998

  First William Morrow hardcover printing: February 1983

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