Getting even with The Odds

Leonard himself was lucky. When he was growing up in the Thirties,pulp fiction was getting ready to explode. Pulp was a catch-all term for black-and-white magazines printed on cheap,pulpy paper. They addressed the most colourful issues of the time,from how to make love in zero gravity to how to fight off giant zombie ticks swollen with human blood. By the Thirties,the genres incubated by pulp magazines were bursting out of their covers,spinning off into sub-genres like hardboiled detective Dashiell Hammett,aviation pulp Scientology and Dianetics founder L Ron Hubbard,yellow peril Sax Rohmer and weird menace Randolph Craig.

A decade later,the greatest sub-genre attained escape velocity: the Golden Age of science fiction was born. The July 1939 issue of the superpulp Astounding Science Fiction published the debut stories of Isaac Asimov and AE Van Vogt. August brought forth that rarity,Robert A Heinlein,a politically conservative writer who left an indelible mark. In the Fifties and Sixties,the stream widened into fantasy and science fiction and burst its banks. A huge global readership was devouring new writers like Ursula K Le Guin and Philip K Dick,who took the genre far beyond space opera and gizmo mania to explore philosophical issues like identity and humanity. Pulp had evolved into genre.

Genre was still street-level,but street cred was seeking a place in high culture. Scholars saw genre as a legitimate field of enquiry. What used to be dismissed as lowbrow pot-boiling was suddenly discovered to be at the cutting edge of philosophy. Its practitioners and fans had always known where it was at,of course,and dated the birth of the genre to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein,published anonymously in 1818.

Looking at the growth of genre through the prism of sci-fi,the powerful role played by cinema is obvious. Cult books were mainstreamed by screen versions,though these strayed far from the original. Solaris,Stanislaw Lems 1961 classic on human-alien communication,was a cult phenomenon translated into English via French from the original Polish. Three film versions,the most famous by Andrei Tarkovsky Cannes Grand Prix winner and the most recent by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron 2002,brought Solaris to a wider audience. But,as Lem wrote in response to US critics views on Camerons film,while it rekindled publishing interest in the book,there was a good reason why it had been titled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space.

Similarly,Philip K Dick was a cult writer restricted to a devoted fan base until Ridley Scott filmed his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 1968 as Blade Runner 1982. The film retained almost nothing of the original except its philosophical core: an attempt to reach an essentialist understanding of humanity by contrasting us with cyborgs. Its widely quoted dialogue owed to screenwriters,not Dick,and it even had a haunting love theme composed by Vangelis see YouTube clips. Despite diverging from the text,Scotts retelling was so visually innovative that its afterimage is still visible in advertising,cinema and comics. And naturally,it propelled Dicks book to new readers.

Would Leonard have reached a wide readership unless his first big hit,Get Shorty,was filmed? Probably,yes. Hardboiled is more accessible than sci-fi,and Leonard had reinvented the genre with pared-down storytelling,laid-back dialogue and credible women characters,rare in a genre bursting with dames and broads. Being in celluloid may not be essential,but being on time helps. In 1994,Pulp Fiction,perhaps the most influential film of the decade,marked the establishment of pulp in high culture. Its morally laconic gangster Vincent Vega,played by John Travolta,could have been a Leonard character. After shooting a man accidentally in the back seat of a car,Vega shrugs off the drivers hysterics with: You must have hit a bump or something. The deadpan delivery is identical with Miami shylock Chili Palmers conversation starter in Get Shorty,as he prepares to shake down clients: Look at me. The very next year,Travolta played Palmer in the screen version of Get Shorty. At the time,it felt like Elmore Leonard was setting the tone across media. His voice echoed everywhere. Now,that spare,low,engagingly cool voice will be missed all the more for it.