Elmore Leonard's Biography

Elmore Leonard was born in 1925 in New Orleans. His family lived in Dallas, Oklahoma and Memphis before settling in Detroit in 1935.

During World War II, Elmore Leonard served in the US Navy with a Seabee unit in the South Pacific.

After the war, he studied literature at Detroit University.

In the 1950s Elmore Leonard worked as a copywriter in ad agencies.

He started writing novels and screenplays around 1967. Initially, he wrote Westerns.

He went on to write 45 novels, mainly crime thrillers and many of his works were turned into films such as 3.10 to Yuma, Get Shorty and Out of Sight.

In 2011, he published his 10 Rules of Writing, which was much cited and acclaimed.

Martin Amis said of Elmore Leonard: "...He just is very cool as a writer. He's a greater writer of what they would call popular prose than anyone in the genre. Far more stylish than for instance Raymond Chandler and incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence."

Elmore Leonard died in 2013, aged 87.