Start with Get Shorty. Leonard published around forty-five novels and they are very nearly all standalones, so there is no sequence to protect — the only real question is which book teaches you how to read him, and this is it. Chili Palmer's loan-shark skills transfer to Hollywood without modification, which is a joke about both businesses, and the whole method is on display: no weather, no throat-clearing, no scene that exists to set up another scene.
The obvious alternative is to start at the beginning, and the beginning is twenty years of westerns nobody would recommend to a new reader. The other tempting entry is Rum Punch, because of the film, but it is the best-plotted book here and plotting is the least interesting thing Leonard does. Take Get Shorty first and Out of Sight immediately after; both are around 300 pages and almost pure dialogue, so they read at roughly twice their page count.
Start here
Get Shorty and Out of Sight, ten days for the pair. The only thing that slows people down is the opening chapter of Get Shorty, which drops you mid-conversation with no orientation at all — that is deliberate, and it is the first thing to get used to. Point of view moves chapter by chapter and always sits inside whoever is currently mistaken about something, which is where the comedy comes from. The trunk scene in Out of Sight is the most-quoted passage he wrote, and it is two people talking in the dark with no action in it.
The core: the Florida novels
LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky, Rum Punch. Five or six weeks, roughly a book a week. LaBrava is where the mature style locks in and it won the Edgar; Glitz is the most conventionally thriller-shaped of the four and the bestseller that finally made him famous after thirty years of work; Freaky Deaky is the funniest thing he wrote; Rum Punch is the clockwork, with Jackie Burke playing the ATF, a gun runner and a bail bondsman against each other at once. Freaky Deaky has more moving parts than the others and rewards not putting it down for a week in the middle.
The deeper cuts: Detroit and beyond
City Primeval is the hinge of his career — a Detroit homicide novel with the structure of a western, published as he was leaving westerns behind, and the book where Raylan Givens's world begins. Killshot is the coldest thing he wrote, and it is genuinely frightening; it works best read quickly over a few days rather than picked up and put down, and its subject is not the two hitmen but what being hunted does to an already strained marriage. Tishomingo Blues is late, relaxed Leonard, with a plot that wanders because the author is enjoying himself.
The completist tail: the westerns
Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, Last Stand at Saber River. All three are short — the first two are under 200 pages each — and they read in a sitting or two. Leonard wrote westerns for roughly twenty years before anyone called him a crime writer, and the discipline of the form is where the famous economy was learned. Hombre is regularly named one of the best westerns ever written and reads exactly like a Leonard crime novel in period dress. Strip the period detail from any of the three and the dialogue could sit in Rum Punch.
Where to stop, and what is missing
There is no wrong stopping point, because nothing here depends on anything else. Most readers who bounce do so on the westerns, and skipping them costs you nothing but the origin story. This route is twelve books out of about forty-five, chosen for range rather than coverage — the Raylan Givens novels, the Detroit crime books of the 1970s and the later historicals are all absent from our catalogue, and after this path you can tell from a first page whether you want any given one. Browse Discover for other single-author routes.
Follow the full ordered path here: Best Elmore Leonard Books, in Reading Order.
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