[Straight Vermonter]

And I think, despite his facility with technology, what I liked best is that his ‘bad guys’ were well rendered.
Fiction works best when you can at least understand why the baddies feel and act the way they do and he had few equals at that. Even the bastards you wanted to see die, you saw how they came to believe and behave as they did.

That very succinctly describes why very few new movies are any good. The bad guys are usually just two dimensional monsters.

[firebrand]

Elmore Leonard’s bad guys were so well drawn they were almost the good guys.

He was quoted recently as having said about Hollywood’s treatment of his books that in one movie they had people laugh at the bad guys’ comments. He had told them not to do that, because these guys weren’t kidding.

That particular movie did not do well, I believe, not like the ones where nobody laughed (except the audience).