Elmore Leonard Tells Imus About 'Djibouti,' and For Some Reason Mike Lupica Was There Too
Famed writer Elmore Leonard dedicated his latest novel, Djibouti, to Mike Lupica, Imus’s pal and a revered author in his own right. Seated by his idol’s side today, Lupica described first meeting Leonard back in 1987.
“My book editor at the time said, ‘Esquire wants you to do this piece on Elmore Leonard, and I told them you were too busy,’” Lupica said. “I said, ‘No, no. I can find the time to do that.’”
The two spent a few days together in Detroit, Michigan, where Leonard lives, and attended a Detroit Tigers baseball game together. “The fellow who was selling cokes came up the aisle with a big tray of them, and said, ‘Are you Elmore Leonard?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’” Leonard recalled. “And he looked at Mike and said, ‘Who are you?’”
But Leonard’s book Djibouti centers on a world far removed from Detroit. “It’s about a woman who is making a documentary film about today’s pirates off the East Coast of Africa,” he said. She travels to Djibouti with her assistant, a large black man and former mariner who “has been around the world 50 times,” as Leonard put it.
A romance blossoms between the woman and her 72-year old assistant, requiring him to take some sort of pill that Leonard named “horny goat weed.” Leonard did not travel to Djibouti to do any research, he explained, because “it’s not a pleasant city,” and he doesn’t believe in tedious detail.
“I’m not very good at descriptions,” Leonard, who wrote a book called Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, told Imus. “So why do it?”
In keeping with that motto, Leonard also doesn’t care much for illustrating the way his characters look, relying instead on dialogue to provide clues about somebody’s appearance. “Some people say, ‘His eyes were close together,’ and go through the whole description of the face, which you never remember,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything. But if you had one thing—if he had a big mole on the end of his nose—you would say that, and that would take care of it.”
Though Imus and others find Leonard’s writing comical, he pointed out that no one laughs in his books. “They’re all being serious, and they don’t know they’re funny,” he said.
Since Lupica insisted on tagging along this morning, Imus raved to his guest about Lupica’s forthcoming young adults book Hero, which Leonard has not yet read. Like Leonard, Lupica does not go into much detail about his characters looks.
“Well, he’s read my rules,” Leonard said. “He’ll use fewer exclamation points now.”
Leonard turned 85 years old yesterday, and said it’s been a good run, so far. “We don’t know how long the run will be,” he noted.
It was soon revealed to Lupica, however, how long his run on the Imus in the Morning program would last today. To his question, “Would you like me to hang around for the rest of the show?” Imus quickly replied, “We want you to get the hell out of here.”
-Julie Kanfer
Reader Comments (1)
I love Mike Lupica... It's always so much fun when he's on and he's just the most relevant guest...