Rzepka Charles J. - Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: If it sounds like writing

Edited by Charles J. Rzepka

This edition first published 2020
2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Rzepka, Charles J, editor.
Title: Critical essays on Elmore Leonard : if it sounds like writing / edited by Charles J Rzepka.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : WileyBlackwell, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053464 (print) | LCCN 2019053465 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119576693 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119576686 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119576709 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Leonard, Elmore, 19252013Criticism and interpretation. | Detective and mystery stories, AmericanHistory and criticism.
Classification: LCC PS3562.E55 Z636 2020 (print) | LCC PS3562.E55 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053464
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053465

Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: A view of the Renaissance Center, downtown Detroit Linda Goodhue Photography/Getty Images

Frankie Y. Bailey is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany (SUNY). She is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of a number of nonfiction books, including Wicked Albany: Lawlessness & Liquor in the Prohibition Era (2009), and Crimes of the Centuries (2016). She is one of two 2018 Albany Literary Legends honorees of the Albany Public Library Foundation and the 2010 recipient of the George N. Dove Award for research on mystery and crime fiction. She has been nominated for several other awards, including the Edgar, Agatha, and Anthony, and is the winner of a Macavity Award for African American Mystery Writers (2008). She has five books and two short stories in a mystery series featuring crime historian Lizzie Stuart. Frankie's nearfuture police procedural novels set in Albany, New York, The Red Queen Dies (2013) and What the Fly Saw (2015), feature Detective Hannah McCabe. Her short story, The Singapore Sling Affair, features former World War II nurse Jo Radcliffe (EQMM, Nov/Dec 2017). Frankie is a former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America and a past national president of Sisters in Crime. She is at work on a nonfiction book about dress, appearance, and identity in American crime and justice. She is also working on a historical thriller set in 1939.

Philip Derbesy is a PhD candidate in English at Case Western Reserve University. He studies the impact of film on the postwar American novel, especially the work of Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, and Joan Didion. His dissertation posits a new theory for reading the scenes of moviegoing that appear in these novels. He has published articles on Shakespeare and the Catholic novelists C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries, and currently has an essay on Jack Kerouac that is being submitted for publication.

David Geherin is professor emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University, where he taught courses in modern and contemporary literature and in crime and mystery fiction for 40years. Born in Auburn, New York, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and his PhD from Purdue University. He is the author of nine books on crime and mystery fiction, including the first book of criticism ever written on Elmore Leonard, and two others The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction and Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction that were finalists for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award. His latest book Carl Hiaasen: Sunshine State Satirist was published just last year.

George Grella, retired professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Rochester, taught courses mostly in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, twentieth century British literature, and film. He is the author of Film in Fiction: The Real and the Reel in Elmore Leonard (1998), a seminal essay in Leonard criticism. His research and writing mostly deal with three major subjects: detective fiction and related subgenres, film, and baseball. He has published upwards of thousands of reviews of books and films in scores of publications and hundreds of essays and articles on those three topics, in both critical anthologies and peerreviewed journals such as Texas Studies in Literature and Language, NOVEL, and The Massachusetts Review. He is currently writing a study of the American noir novelist Ross Macdonald.

Kris Mecholsky teaches English and writing at Louisiana State University and is the author of James M. Cain: Hardboiled Mythmaker (Scarecrow Press) as well as numerous articles in peerreviewed journals and edited anthologies on