Free The Switch by Elmore Leonard Page A

wants? I didn’t have it. So, then I started weaving it into the narrative. I didn’t have to go back far, and I was on my way.
    Amis: I admire the fluidity of your process because it’s meant to be a rule in the highbrow novel that the characters have no free will at all.E.M. Forster said he used to line up his characters before beginning a novel, and he would say, “Right, no larks.” [Laughter] And Nabokov, when this was quoted to him, he looked aghast, and he said, “My characters cringe when I come near them.” He said, “I’ve seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves with terror at my approach.” [Laughter]
    Let’s talk about Cuba Libre , which is an amazing departure in my view. When I was reading it, I had to keep turning to the front cover to check that it was a book by you. How did it get started? I gather that you’ve been wanting to write this book for thirty years. It has a kind of charge of long-suppressed desire.
    Leonard: In 1957, I borrowed a book from a friend called The Splendid Little War . It was a picture book, a coffee-table book of photographs of the Spanish-American War — photographs of the Maine , before and after; photographs of the troops on San Juan Hill; newspaper headlines leading up to the war; a lot of shots of Havana. I was writing Westerns at the time, and I thought, I could drop a cowboy into this place and get away with it. But I didn’t. A couple of years ago, I was trying to think of a sequel to Get Shorty . And I was trying to work Chili Palmer into the dress business. I don’tknow why except that I love runway shows. I gave up on that. And I saw that book again, The Splendid Little War , because I hadn’t returned it to my friend in ’57. And I thought, “I’m going to do that.” Yeah, the time has come. So, I did.
    Amis: In a famous essay, Tom Wolfe said that the writers were missing all the real stories that were out there. And that they spent too much time searching for inspiration and should spend ninety-five percent of their time sweating over research. The result was a tremendously readable book, The Bonfire of the Vanities . Now you, sir, have a full-time researcher.
    Leonard: Yes, Gregg Sutter. He can answer any of your questions that I don’t know.
    Amis: Were you inspired by the research he put into this book?
    Leonard: He got me everything I needed to know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from Arizona to East Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had been in business over100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger book and copied it and faxed it to me.
    Amis: Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?
    Leonard: No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in Valdez Is Coming , which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.
    Amis: And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?
    Leonard: I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past