Elmore Leonard’s Life in The Times

Dan Borris for The New York Times Elmore Leonard

The oldest reference I could find to Elmore Leonard, the master crime novelist who died on Tuesday at 87, in The New York Times’s online archive was a “Western Roundup” column from May 6, 1956: it “just doesn’t jell,” Hoffman Birney wrote of Mr. Leonard’s novel “Escape From Five Shadows.”

That judgment was not, obviously, an accurate harbinger. In 1969, Martin Levin called “The Moonshine War” a “near-perfect shotgun opera,” and said, “Mr. Leonard has a sense of place as keen as James M. Cain’s and a flair for timing to match.”

By the time Ben Yagoda profiled Mr. Leonard in The New York Times Magazine in 1983, the author’s M.O. was firmly established. “A typical tale,” Mr. Yagoda wrote, “populated by lower-depths denizens pursuing treacherous (and occasionally unintelligible) scams, has a lot in common with Hamlet’s view of the earth. It could be described as ‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.’ ” Reviewing “Freaky Deaky” in 1988, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote: “One takes his skill at plotting for granted by now,” and, “Some day Elmore Leonard’s novels are going to be cited in dictionaries of slang.”

Twenty-two years later, Janet Maslin reviewed “Djibouti” and expressed the consensus about Mr. Leonard, calling him “America’s hippest, best-loved, most widely imitated crime writer” and a “national treasure.”

In addition to his famous rules for writers, which appeared in The Times in 2001, Mr. Leonard also serialized a novella, “Comfort to the Enemy,” in The Times Magazine in 2005, and spoke to John Hodgman about the project on a podcast around the same time.

Below are links to more reviews of Mr. Leonard’s work in The Times:

“Raylan”
“Road Dogs”
“Up in Honey’s Room”
“The Hot Kid”
“Mr. Paradise”
“Tishomingo Blues”
“Out of Sight”
“Be Cool”
“Get Shorty”