In this episode of First Edition, Dutch talks about his loners who get misjudged and have to stand up, his love of dialogue over description, and how he lets a story find itself chapter by chapter. He’s frank about taking construction from Hemingway but not the attitude, why he doesn’t overdo violence, how his wife, Joan, helped sharpen his women characters, and how after twenty years of writing as a chore, it finally became fun.
“I want my dialogue to show who these people are,” he says. “I keep my nose out. You won’t hear me in the book.”
Honoring First Edition
Because First Edition saw Elmore Leonard as far more than a genre writer — placing him alongside literary heavyweights to seriously talk craft, at the peak of his mid-eighties popularity.
From the original press release:
First Edition was a PBS television series in the early 1980s hosted by John Leonard, with Nancy Evans and Clifton Fadiman. It gave writers a rare chance to talk about their work in depth, without the usual TV packaging.
Launched by WNET/THIRTEEN New York and distributed by the Interregional Program Service (IPS), First Edition was a twelve-part weekly series that began airing on public television on June 14, 1984. Each episode centered on a “Portrait” segment with Leonard and Evans interviewing the featured author, exploring the ideas behind the books, the larger body of work, and the forces that shaped it. Clifton Fadiman, longtime Book-of-the-Month Club judge and host of Information Please, delivered “Uncommentary” segments that aired literary grievances — sometimes crotchety, always sharp.
Norman Mailer opened the series talking about the different demands of journalism and fiction. Dutch followed, discussing La Brava. Then came John Updike, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, William Kennedy (fresh off his Pulitzer for Ironweed), Barbara Tuchman, Joe McGinniss, Janwillem van de Wetering, Paul Theroux, Lewis Thomas, and Joseph Heller. The show also featured new book reviews by Leonard and Evans, and combined six new episodes with six re-edited from an earlier Hearst/ABC Arts cable run.
The reviews were clear. The Los Angeles Times called it “a first-rate book show... a joy.” The Christian Science Monitorsaid it was “one of the most intellectually stimulating shows to be seen.” The New York Times wrote the conversations were so good you wished they ran longer. It put writers on screen as writers — not products — and it deserves to be remembered.
The twelve authors:
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