Cooler Than Cool by CM Kushins

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard

By C. M. Kushins

Mariner Books 2025

The beloved and best-selling author of Westerns and crime novels, Elmore Leonard, is now the subject of his first full-length biography, Cooler Than Cool, written by CM Kushins, not unconnectedly the previous author of rock ‘n’ roll lives (Warren Zevon and Led Zeppelin). The US cover of Cooler Than Cool features a black-and-white photo of Leonard wearing a dour expression and a regulation trench coat, and although Kushins enjoyed enormous amounts of access granted by Leonard’s family, it’s clear right from the beginning of the book that he’s also keeping one eye cocked on the image of Leonard in the mind’s eye of his reading public. Elmore Leonard was for decades a member of that most rarified of all clubs: cool writers.

A good deal of this has come from the most predictable source: Hollywood. The movies (and TV, most lately with the delightful “Justified,” among other things) have always loved Leonard’s work – unsurprisingly, considering how many of his books read like shooting scripts. Comparatively early in Leonard’s career, his novels started to carry the cache of an Detroit pool hall. They were almost aphoristic in their light weight, and yet they bristled with bare-knuckled toughness. Reading an Elmore Leonard novel often felt like stumbling across a murder threat in a Hallmark Card.

Kushins is charmingly careful to preserve this ephemeral atmosphere of cool, and his subject doesn’t always make it easy. Leonard was a serious, insightful writer, far weightier than outsiders looking at titles like Freaky Deaky, Killshot, or Glitz would credit. But he was also, at recurrent intervals, a creepy manipulative jerk and, as he grew prematurely older, a doctrinaire bore. The challenge these things present to the aura of “cool” are well-reflected in the fact that so many “cool” public figures make the wise tactical decision to hop into their coffins early. Leonard stuck around until he was almost 90.

In Cooler Than Cool, readers follow him from struggling obscurity to the busy life of a popular writer. And this is a very writerly book; not only has Kushin invaluably combed the extensive record in order to line up a sumptuous selection of contemporary reviews of each subsequent book as it appeared, but he’s generous in quoting Leonard about the craft of writing, a subject on which he pontificated with equal measures of abandon and nonsense. Writers are virtually never trustworthy when writing about their ragged-nailed scrabble to success, and that trust is further thinned when their biographer is on their side, so readers should squint a bit at, for instance, the book’s account of Leonard in a basement office in 1952, pounding on his typewriter on the brink of his career:

Nearly half of his complete Western short story output would be penned in his new basement office over the next two years – as well as his first novel, which he would begin the following spring. In later years, Leonard would always credit his work ethic and early morning hours for his eventual success. “You have to write well enough to get someone’s attention,” he claimed. “The writer has to have patience, the perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out. And if it’s not worth doing that, then he doesn’t want to write. Hemingway said, “Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t.”

This naturally leads to the most celebrated example of Leonard’s craft-of-writing nonsense, his idiotic decalogue:

1.        Never open a book with weather

2.        Avoid prologues

3.        Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue

4.        Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”

5.        Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6.        Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

7.        Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly

8.        Avoid detailed description of characters

9.        Don’t go into great detail describing places and things

10.  Try to leave out the parts that readers skip

The craft-of-writing passages can thus feel both threadbare and exhausting, but they at least partially shelter under the umbrella of Leonard’s own indisputable talent. Not so much the personal elements, which are predictably often seedy and vaguely repulsive, as when he waits all of four months after his beloved wife Joan’s death in order to start dating his new gardener, marrying her four months after that. Joan has told him, “If I die before you, you’ll get married again right away to a younger woman,” and he’d scoffed while simultaneously ogling the nearest waitress.

Likewise another element that tends to exercise the creative powers of our biographer. Perhaps a sharp-eyed reader can spot it in a representative passage:

Leonard’s ongoing international travel may not have led to the film projects he had planned, but that time period did inspire him in other important ways – both personal and professional: “I sat around the lobby drinking for a week, waiting for the meeting,” he later wrote. “I stopped off in Paris on the way home and drank some more and came home. The same year, a few months later, I went to Israel to adapt one of my books for a film set in Israel, which didn’t make any sense at all to me. But the producer was paying and it was an opportunity to see Israel. I drank as soon as I got on the plane. I drank in Tel Aviv, where there are only two honest-to-God saloons in the whole town … I picked a country where nobody drinks to do my drinking.”

“Professionally inspired” – yes indeed. Sounds about right.

Even given the sustaining arm of Hollywood, it’s at least likely that Leonard’s crime novels will gradually drift into the same slow neglect as so many works of crime fiction from the previous century. Given the thus low likelihood of another full-dress biography, it’s a shame Kushins didn’t allow himself to be more critical more often, both of his subject and of his subject’s body of work. But considering the source of that subject’s appeal, it’s fitting that Cooler Than Cool is so effortlessly enjoyable to read.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News