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Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s

City Primeval | LaBrava | Glitz | Freaky Deaky

Edited by Gregg Sutter

“[Elmore Leonard] was hailed as one of the best crime writers in the land. High praise, but not quite high enough, and some way off the mark. He was one of the best writers, and he happened to write about crime. Even that is not entirely accurate. . . . Crime—more than anything, even politics—allows men of all ages to disport themselves across the full range of human ineptitude.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

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News & Views

Overview

News “Where Were You?”: JFK’s Assassination in the Annals of American Literature
November 22, 2023

News | Story of the Week Flashback: When Elmore Leonard, a “rising young writer of Western novels,” debuted (sort of) in The New Yorker
May 3, 2018

The Moviegoer Dark, sexy, funny: What makes Out of Sight the best film version of an Elmore Leonard novel
October 6, 2016

Save $30 when you buy all three Elmore Leonard volumes of crime novels in a boxed set.

The 1980s was the decade when Elmore Leonard came into his own as the most popular and critically acclaimed crime writer in America. The four novels collected here show him at the top of his game. Each in its own way displays his unique ear for the jazzy cadences of American speech, his ability to create extraordinary characters on both sides of the law, and his genius for exhilaratingly unpredictable stories that slide on a dime from hard-edged menace to unexpected comedy.

For three months in 1978, Leonard shadowed detectives from Detroit’s homicide squad for a profile commissioned by The Detroit News. From that experience came the inspiration for City Primeval, perhaps his greatest Detroit novel, a modern-day showdown between a lawman and an outlaw filled with echoes of the Westerns that were Leonard’s early specialty. (This volume presents, as a special feature, “Impressions of Murder,” the brilliant piece Leonard wrote for The Detroit News Sunday Magazine.) LaBrava moves the action to a steamy, seamy Miami, as a Secret Service agent turned photographer finds himself embroiled in a scheme involving a long-forgotten, but still alluring, film noir actress. Old-time movie lore, local Florida history, and the intricacies of a complex extortion plot are interwoven in one of Leonard’s richest and most entertaining works.

Glitz, the novel that marked Leonard’s breakthrough as a best-selling author, plunges into the casually corrupt world of Atlantic City casinos—“an old seaside resort being done over in Las Vegas plastic”—populated by small-time hoods and hustlers. A police detective looking into the death of a cocktail waitress finds himself following the twisted trail of the unforgettable Teddy Magyk, perhaps Leonard’s most indelibly chilling bad guy. Freaky Deaky, one of the author’s own favorites, returns to Detroit for a carnivalesque ’60s flashback in which festering grudges left over from counterculture days are churned up in a brew of blackmail, bombs, and sex.

This volume, the second in The Library of America’s Elmore Leonard edition, contains a newly researched chronology of Leonard’s life, drawing on materials in his personal archive, and detailed annotations, which include early drafts of passages from City Primeval and LaBrava, and an account by editor Gregg Sutter of the research that went into the writing of these novels.

Detroit native Gregg Sutter first met Elmore Leonard in 1979 and began working for him in 1981. He is currently at work on a biography of Leonard, from his unique perspective as his full-time researcher for more than thirty years.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is published with project support and kept in print through the Guardians of American Letters Fund by the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation in honor of Walter Cliff.
News & Views

News “Where Were You?”: JFK’s Assassination in the Annals of American Literature
November 22, 2023

News | Story of the Week Flashback: When Elmore Leonard, a “rising young writer of Western novels,” debuted (sort of) in The New Yorker
May 3, 2018

The Moviegoer Dark, sexy, funny: What makes Out of Sight the best film version of an Elmore Leonard novel
October 6, 2016

Interviews The career zenith of Elmore Leonard, “the most cinematic novelist in the English language”
September 23, 2016

Influences Lorenzo Carcaterra: Elmore Leonard “brought his characters close enough to life they could be touched”
July 20, 2016

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-412-2 1010 pages

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N° 267 Library of America Series

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