AS A boy Elmore Leonard was not a loner. He was not bookish. He and his friends played sports, and he loved baseball. One summer a group of them hitchhiked up to the Michigan Thumb—the part of the state that looks like the thumb of a baseball pitcher’s mitt—where they picked strawberries for pocket money, alongside the migrant workers. Another summer Leonard stole a real pitcher’s mitt from a sports shop; he later said it was the only crime he ever committed. His easy-going middle-manager father travelled a lot on business, so he lived for a long spell with the family of his baseball coach. Leonard was fascinated by the coach, who “didn’t say many funny things. He was pretty much all business”. These scenes from an American suburban childhood were part of Leonard’s imaginative storehouse. The struggle of small-time heroes trying to make themselves into something new; the theft of something of special value, beyond money; and above all a mentor who understood the seriousness of his craft, be it baseball, kidnapping or armed robbery. It took him a long time to become a writer (he began in advertising), and longer still to master his profession. But these were his seeds.

One more scene from his high-school days in the 1940s proved particularly fecund. There were three or four friends, up on the roof of an apartment in Detroit. Maurice, the oldest, suddenly gripped the metal guttering, and pushed himself out and over the edge. He hung there, three stories above the tarmac. And then he lifted himself back up. No words: he was cool.

For years Elmore Leonard had a recurring dream that he was falling down a flight of stairs, never reaching the bottom. After some professional success, this changed: he continued to fall from great heights, but somehow survived. Leonard associated great heights with visibility, with vulnerability. It was better to be at ground level, amid the flow of people, unseen and observant. Meanwhile his bad-guy characters fell from balconies, through windows or drove over cliffs.

Like a jazz musician, he returned to familiar scenes and motifs in his work, discovering novelty in the repetition. “I begin with characters … and see what happens.”

In fact Leonard began with westerns. He thought it would be easy to write a good one (“when I picked up Zane Grey, I could not believe it was so bad”), and he swiftly infused this moth-eaten genre with a new psychological tension. But television killed the market for westerns, so Leonard turned to crime writing.

By this time he was also writing screenplays, but incorporating mirrors and images and films and filmmakers in his work. His novel “52 Pick-Up”—one of a string of works from the 1970s set in Detroit, written as Leonard was struggling with alcoholism—was a turning point. A film used for blackmail is at the heart of the plot, but it is character that counts, and the characters constantly look at themselves, as if looking in a mirror or watching a film. Leonard had now fully mastered a technique of indirect prose, removing the author entirely from the page, making every description a reflection of character. His players were increasingly female, and from ethnic minorities. He was finally down at ground level, dissolved into his characters.

By the time he published “Get Shorty” in 1990 Leonard was writing fiction about fiction. Chili Palmer, a loan shark, has a large debt to collect from a deceased gentleman who is not really dead. This is more than enough plot, but then the book doubles back on itself and becomes a thriller about a film about the plot of the book.

Such metafiction is a common enough device, and easy to fumble. But by this time Leonard had total control, which he exerted without wasting a single word. He had achieved a state of grace.

Or as Chili Palmer says: “Don’t worry about it. I won’t say any more than I have to, if that”.