Unjustified

Or

Author in the Hole

Or 

Be Cold

Or 

Out of Sight

Elmore Leonard, a prolific crime novelist dubbed a master of the genre for novels like “Get Shorty,” “Freaky Deaky” and “Glitz” by people who didn’t read “Pronto” and “Raylan,” has died at the age of 87. Credited with elevating the crime genre by those who failed to realize he was really just Mickey Spillane Redux, Leonard did create Deputy US Marshall Raylan Givens, who is so much cooler as embodied by Timothy Olyphant on the Peabody Award-winning FX original series Justified than he’s ever been on paper. Others among Leonard’s 45 novels are “Be Cool,” “Out of Sight,” “Hombre,” and “3:10 to Yuma,” and “Rum Punch,” which was turned into the movie Jackie Brown. Although he acknowledged his approval of Justified, and cashed the checks for the rights to his novels that became movies, he was generally dismissive of adaptations of his work. When his novel The Big Bounce was made a movie in 1969, he declared it “at least the second-worst movie ever made.” Once he saw the 2004 remake, he said he knew what the worst one was. His spare style was exemplified with his 10 rules of writing, which included: “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip,” and “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”