Challen admits many of the book's limitations in the prologue, but that doesn't make them any less disappointing. There's very little of Leonard's personal life for instance, and what there is implies that the subject's vivid imagination is compensation for a dull, middle-class existence. The guy's had three wives, the last many years his junior. He's a recovered alcoholic. If the cover on the Canadian issue is accurate, he's that pariah of modern morality: an unfiltered smoker. He can't have been a nice guy for seventy-five years straight.

There is some interesting professional stuff here though. Leonard's first short story sold for $1,000 without an agent. Good money in the 50's, but it went downscale from there, even with the help of a dedicated representative. Money earned from movie and television adaptations supplemented a living earned writing advertising copy, but wasn't enough to seriously consider quitting the day job. Leonard tried to quit advertising in the sixties on the strength of an advance for Hombre that was just slightly more than he received for his first story. He's been a superstar since Get Shorty, earning millions in book advances and movie rights, but he sold on the screen and the page from the beginning, when there were far more magazines publishing fiction. He didn't turn a decent buck until the 80's. Even the 1965 movie rights for Hombre, a western classic starring Paul Newman, were only $10,000. Writing's a tough gig.

In the course of listing Leonard's publishing and screen-writing history, Challen reveals the strengths of the writer's style. It's lean and adverb-free, backed by extensive research. Dialogue is witty, seems realistic (a quote from CBC reviewer and author Jack Batten provides a writer's insight here) and there's plenty of it. Plot advances through scenes instead of exposition. There's little narration. The scenes and stories are told from the points-of-view of the characters.

Leonard likes to say that he keeps himself out of the story, gets out of the readers' way. It's literature for an audience that consumes most of its fiction from movies and television, which helps to explain why so much of his work has been adapted for those media. The guy's practically a textbook on how to entertain and present information in the second half of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately Challen doesn't heed his hero's lessons. He's all over this book. Get Dutch could be subtitled: How I called up and met and talked to a lot of people who know or work with or study Elmore Leonard and his work and they're not even snooty like you'd think even though they knew more than I did, but they're really, really nice especially Dutch himself who I met twice, and I did all this neat research too. Get rid of that stuff, you've got a solid magazine article.

And get Get Dutch. It's a quick romp with a few solid nuggets of information. But not if it means you haven't enough cash left over to get Dutch himself. All the really good stuff is in the source.