Kurt Andersen: Plenty of people die in an Elmore Lonard mystery novel, although seldom with much obvious grief. His novels crackle with dialogue and action, and best of all, to my mind, with great quirky, funny characters. So it's not surprising that a bunch of them have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and this year's Be Cool. He has just come out with his 40th novel, called "The Hot Kid." Unlike most of his books where actions takes place over the course of a few crazed weeks, "The Hot Kid" spans the 1920s and 1930s in Oklahoma, and it's filled with lawmen, bank-robbers, jazz musicians, hot chicks, and oil workers. There's even a pulp detective fiction writer mining all the action for material. Elmore Leonard, welcome to Studio 360.

Elmore Leonard: Thank you. Happy to be here.

K: So when you were a kid living around the south, in the midwest, in the 20s and 30s, that was the great golden age, if you will, of gangsterism, and I noticed as I was looking into when some of your characters, like Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger died, and Bonnie and Clyde died, it was all this five month period in 1934 when you were eight or nine years old, and I wondered, do you remember those people?

E: I know I do, because that summer in May, Bonnie and Clyde were stopped and shot 160 times in Northern Louisiana, and a few months later there was a picture of me standing next to an Oakland pointing a gun at a camera with my one foot on the running board, which was an imitation of Bonnie Parker cause she had her foot on the front bumper of a car, and a cigar in her mouth, holding a pistol, which was probably in every paper in the country in May of that year. And I know that's where I got it, you know, I didn't make it up. I'm cashing in on it, and have been for the last fifty years writing about cops and robbers.

Get Shorty drop-in:

Ray 'Bones' Barboni: Let me explain something to you. Momo is dead, which means that everything he had now belongs to Jimmy Cap, including you, which also means that when I speak, I speak for Jimmy, e.g., from now on, you start showing me the proper f---ing respect.

Chili Palmer: E.g. means for example. What I think you want to say is i.e.

Bones: Bullsh-t. It's short for ergo.

Chili: Ask your man.

Bones' Hitman: To the best of my knowledge, e.g. mean for example.

Bones: E.g., i.e., f--k you. The point is this, is that when I say, jump you say ok, ok?

Chili's Man: Yeah, Ray, ok.

Bones: Ok.

K: Now, dialogue is obviously so central for you, and you've said that a reader tends to go for the dialogue and skip over the prose.

E: Yes, I think so. The dialogue is not the parts that your reader is gonna skip. And yet literary writers tell practically everything. Because they like the sound of their own voice, the way they're telling it. Well, I don't show my voice, you don't hear me in my books.

K: Although over the span of them, clearly, one can tell an Elmore Leonard book.

E: Yes, because of my characters. They're probably all alike. And they're telling the stories.

K: As you say, you show rather than explain, you have your wonderful, crackling dialogue. That sounds like the movies, that sounds like screenplays, but you wrote some screenplays in the past, but really haven't done that in the last few years.

E: I quit. I quit in 1993, because I don't get any satisfaction out of it, and I don't get any fun out of it. It's work, and it's work for money. Thank god they pay you a lot of money or I wouldn't have done it. Richard Price, you know that name, he lives here in New York .

K: The novelist and screenwriter.

E: Right. He's turned down offers to adapt my books. He says "There's nothing I can do to em."

K: What's your favorite adaptation of one of your novels?

E: Well, I think that the closest one is Jackie Brown.

K: Really? The Quentin Tarantino?

E: Yeah, and that surprises you. You think he might wander off a bit.

Jackie Brown drop-in:

Ordell Robbie: They advertise this Tech-9 as the most popular gun in American crime. Can you believe that sh-t? It actually says that in the little book that comes with it. "The most popular gun in American crime." Like they proud of that sh-t.

E: So was Out of Sight and Get Shorty.

K: You had a good few years there of great movies made out of your books.

E: Very good, yeah, right in a row. Get Shorty sounded like my work because Barry Sonnenfeld told the cast, "Stick to the script. No ad-libbing." And I told him before he went into production, I said, "I hope you don't cut away to, when someone delivers a funny line, I hope you don't cut to another character to get a reaction. Because these guys are not being funny, you know? Let them wade in, if the audience wants to laugh, fine."

K: You're eighty.

E: Yeah, in October.

K: Has your sense of love of writing, your will to do this, your need to put out a new novel every year, waned at all as you passed through the 70s?

E: I've just become slower. This book took a year. I don't know why it took a year. Other books take six months. I've never taken more than six months.

K: And the New York Times is responding to this grand new literary ambition that they see in this book.

E: Maybe so. Maybe I'll have to, now, take a year for each book, for as long as those years last, and write some more. But I still get more satisfaction out of writing than anything, so I'm not gonna quit writing. I may start writing short stories, but I'm not gonna quit writing.

K: Elmore Leonard, thanks very much for coming in to Studio 360.

E: Thank you.

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