How crime novelist Elmore Leonard changed his biographer’s life

(This is the second in a two-part series on Detroit’s famed writer.)

C.M. Kushins was 11 when his mother gave him a copy of “Get Shorty.” It led to a life of writing. He writes in the postscript to his newly released biography of Elmore Leonard, “Cooler Than Cool,” that “I discovered the narrative voice that excited me.”

Kushins was an inveterate crime-fiction reader as a teen when he sent a short-story manuscript to Leonard. The unbelievable happened three weeks later when he received a manila envelope in the mail postmarked Bloomfield Hills. Leonard wrote the teenager back, making corrections and suggestions “carefully typed on his official letterhead,” Kushins recalled.

 “My hands shook while I read his suggestions,” Kushins writes in the book. “It was like we’d collaborated.”

Kushins has written major biographies of rock ‘n’ rollers Warren Zevon and Led Zeppelin. He spent three years researching his newest book at the University of South Carolina, which holds Leonard’s papers.

When Kushins was delving into Leonard’s “copious boxes” of fan mail and flipping through his daily planner for 1988, he came across an entry that stopped him in his tracks. “Leonard had written in his planner that he took time off to respond to me,” he said.

He recalled meeting Leonard six months later at a book signing in New York, where Leonard remembered him. Leonard inscribed his book “Tonto Woman,” saying, “Write every day, whether you feel like it or not.”

“That manila envelope changed the course of my life,” Kushins recalled.

Fast forward to 2025, and the young boy is now an accomplished biographer. He’s provided a 100th birthday gift posthumously to Leonard, a masterful biography of one of the world’s most famous, most prolific and best writers of crime fiction of all time.

This past Saturday, Kushins flew from his home in Berlin for a release party at the Detroit Public Library for his new book, which is a detailed examination of the writing life of a former adman from the Detroit area.

Kushins spent three years writing the book, starting by first rereading Leonard’s entire body of work. He moved to Columbia, South Carolina, to spend his days at state university’s Leonard archives.

“I read all his work in chronological order,” Kushins said — 47 books and countless short stories and movie scripts.

The vast collection of Leonard’s work includes everything imaginable, including a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, from the life of the noted author who wrote Westerns, gritty crime fiction, a writing guide and innumerable screenplays and treatments during his career.

Leonard saved everything from drafts, story ideas, research from his researcher Gregg Sutter and day books listing his meetings, along with journals.

Kushins found fan letters Leonard had squirreled away from Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), Sir Alec Guinness and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan.

Being around his five baby-boomer children influenced Leonard’s musical tastes, Kushins said. The writer blasted “the soundtrack of Woodstock in his home.”

“His favorite rocker was Joe Cocker,” Kushins said. Leonard developed a close relationship with the band Aerosmith.

Also included in the fan letters was a note from Jim Harrison, another renowned Michigan author. Of Leonard’s books, Harrison wrote: “You can cut your fingers and eyes on their lucidity.”

Another “dirty realist,” Raymond Carver, sent a letter in June 1988 telling
Leonard that he “loved” the book “Glitz,” his first New York Times bestseller.

“You can see the development of his writing over time and the internal struggles he had writing. He really woodshedded his work,” Kushins said.

“Dutch,” as Leonard was called throughout his life, was named after Major League Baseball pitcher Emil “Dutch” Leonard, a knuckleballer. That turned out to be quite fitting for a writer whose style was similarly unpredictable.

Kushins was also surprised to learn of Leonard’s philanthropy and personal generosity from conversations with his children.

Leonard’s writing traverses generations, Kushins observed, from 80-year-olds to younger generations who followed Raylan Givens, the protagonist in “Justified,” a modern-day Western that ran for six seasons on cable TV.

Kushins describes his new book as being “cradle to grave.”

It holds nothing back, from Leonard’s fight with alcoholism (he became sober in his 50s) to his favorite strain of cannabis (Blue Dream).

Maybe the best gift Kushins can give Leonard, he said, is that he’s working on his own crime novel.