His first crime novel, The Big Bounce, was twice adapted for film, in 19. No one was more aware of, or blunt about, this disappointing onscreen record than Leonard himself. If the sheer number of Leonard adaptations is remarkable, what is more remarkable still is how few of them are any good. The Hollywood Reporter ranked him No. 2 on their 2012 list of “Hollywood’s 25 Most Powerful Authors,” behind Stephen King (who once called Leonard “the great American writer”). To date, more than two dozen of his novels and stories have been adapted for film or television-a few of them more than once.

Leonard’s influence was not limited to the printed page. Over the years, he honed his spare, dialogue-driven prose to a lethal leanness, and earned a reputation as the “Dickens of Detroit” for frequently setting his tales of cops and robbers (and kidnappers, car bombers, and other desperadoes) in the city where he had lived since childhood. Leonard started out writing Westerns in the 1950s and ’60s, but when the market for cowboy dramas began to collapse, he switched to the contemporary crime novel and rarely looked back. Martin Amis described him as “a literary genius,” and “the nearest America has to a national writer.” Many critics argued that, if anything, the reference to genre slighted his contributions. By most appraisals, he had long since dethroned Raymond Chandler as the greatest of American crime writers.

When Elmore Leonard died in August at age 87, he left behind more than 40 novels, a number of short stories, and one ongoing television show, Justified, which begins its fifth season in January.

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