Get Dutch!: A Biography of Elmore Leonard

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

The useful features of this breezy biography of the American crime
novelist Elmore Leonard are the year-by-year chronology of the
subject’s career and the bibliography. The text is amateurish, full of
clichés (“the silver screen” for the movies), and bad writing. The
tone is maddeningly colloquial (Leonard is a guy, people are folks,
interjections like “well” start sentence after sentence). Challen
admits that he is no critic and that he has relied on James Devlin and
David Geherin for his insights into the fiction. Leonard, a very
prolific and skilful writer of Westerns and crime novels, hardly
requires much analysis. Where, then, does the value of Challen’s work
lie? He does occasionally quote Leonard himself on various topics,
especially the movie treatments of the books, and those comments can be
interesting. There are some photographs. This is a book written for
Elmore Leonard fans, not a serious biography.