As if Detroit needed another kick in the slats this summer.
The death of Elmore Leonard, the bard of the bankrupt Motor City, should be seen as a loss but not a tragedy. He was, after all, 87 years old, the celebrated author of more than 40 novels, most of them snapped up by Hollywood for good (recently) and ill (most of the time before that).
As far as I can tell, all of his works are still in print, most recently in Day-Glo trade paperbacks with blunt cover images that only hint at the mayhem within. All you really had to know about the books was that Leonard had written them, deploying his unmatched ear for lower-depths jabber and a low-burning moral fervor.
If you wanted to find a central theme in his work, it might not be anything more profound than the one conveyed by the bumper sticker that reminds us "Bullies suck" — a message he shares with those other language-drunk, raffish, ritualistic masterworks of postwar America, the adventures of Bugs Bunny.
The bullies in Leonard's novels aren't cackling supervillains — you won't find a Hannibal Lecter among them — but puffed-up brutes, Yosemite Sams who think they're smooth. They tend to resort to violence not out of necessity but from wounded pride.
His heroes, including those on the far side of the law, drive the villains up the wall less for what they do than for how they carry it off without fuss or self-aggrandizement: for being cool without the need to advertise it.
His prose has the same quality, elegant without fuss or ornamentation. Among his famous rules for writing, my favorite was his disdain for the use of anything but said to introduce a line of dialogue: If you needed exclaimed, moaned or pleaded to color the emotion of the line, you were better off rewriting it.
The encomiums that will follow Leonard's death shouldn't obscure his weaknesses, which in a career of his length and output are to be expected. His famously corkscrew plotting often spun out of control in the final act, a chaos that was probably closer to the way the underworld functions but occasionally left the reader feeling like the author was driving with his knees. He talked about writing the books without knowing what the characters were going to do next, but some of his books feel like even they were at a loss.
I've read almost 20 of his novels, beginning with "Stick" when I was 17. Reviewing "Killshot" a few years later in my college paper, I said the book was sufficiently unputdownable that it had probably cost me at least one letter grade in a Russian midterm.
I am among the scores of critics blurbed on the inner flap of one of his best later books, "The Hot Kid." And I am the proud owner of several disreputable looking, mass market paperback editions of his stone-classic Western novels, including "Hombre" and "Forty Lashes Less One."
So that's roughly 30 years of reading. The only comfort after his passing is that I still have about 20 Leonard titles still unread, plus scores of the early Western stories.
If I pace myself, I could live to be almost as old as Leonard did before running out.
Casey Seiler's email address is cseiler@timesunion.com.