The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 2)

Commentary on LaBrava Elmore Leonard

The best time to begin writing a novel is when you least expect to. Otherwise you can prepare forever, plotting, researching, getting to know your characters — putting it off is what you’re doing — to the point that the act of beginning becomes a major event, if not a psychological hang-up.

On December 24, 1982, at about three in the afternoon — during a lull in preparation for Christmas Eve — and without giving it much thought, I began writing LaBrava. By five o’clock I was 2½ pages into a book I would be working on for the next four months at least, or until I had written between 350 and 400 manuscript pages. (The length isn’t planned; that’s simply the way it comes out.) I felt good about the 2½ pages in that I liked the sound, the attitudes of the two characters I had introduced, and also because I was now, unexpectedly, on my way — a week earlier than I had originally planned to begin.

“ ‘I’m going to tell you a secret I never told anybody around here,’ Maurice said...”

In that Christmas Eve opening Maurice Zola and Joe LaBrava come out of an old South Miami Beach hotel called the Delia Robbia, and I began to hear them: Maurice — a talker, an opinionated old guy; LaBrava — quiet, patient up to a point. A woman is mentioned, “The lady we’re gonna rescue...” They get in Maurice’s old-model Mercedes and drive off.

The opening of a book may or may not hold up under subsequent revisions. Within the next few weeks I wrote a new opening chapter to focus directly on LaBrava and identify him through his work as a street photographer; that is, by looking at the kinds of photos he takes. The Christmas Eve pages were then used to open chapter 2, reprinted here, and did survive pretty much as they were written. Maurice’s describing how you could always spot a bookie in the old days was added later; so were the Yiddish words in reference to the old ladies who live in the hotel. It’s like adding a pinch of this and a pinch of that: seasoning that’s thrown in while the story is cooking.

My main concern in this sequence, as it continued, was how to work in LaBrava’s background as a Secret Service agent. Driving along with Maurice seemed an appropriate time to do it, if I could pull it off without interrupting the sound and continuity of the story. So I referred to another time: “He had told Maurice about it one Saturday morning driving down to Islamorada...” presented his Secret Service history in a somewhat conversational manner, and this way maintained the tone of the scene, two men riding in a car together talking.

But even after I’d finished the book, I was concerned. I felt that the story didn’t reach its first dramatic conflict quickly enough, the plot developing too leisurely, and that it was the description of LaBrava’s background, though only three pages, that was causing the problem.

I asked my publisher, Don Fine, about it, and he said, “That works okay. You need it there; it’s your first chapter that’s too long,” I had my doubts. But I cut seven pages from the original thirteen, and that was it. Amazing. The pace of the entire book seemed to pick up.

Right now I’m planning another book, assembling characters and settings, gathering research material, gradually closing in on that day when, quite unexpectedly, I’ll begin to write.

I can hardly wait.