The thing about the death of most 87-year-olds is, their heyday is usually long past. The other day Kate was mourning the loss of Ray Manzarek, and I pointed out the Doors stopped making music more than 40 years ago. Acknowledge great work when its maker passes, sure, but don’t soak your pillow with tears. We live in the age of the internet. Everybody’s best work is right here at our fingertips.

Elmore Leonard, though — he’s an exception. At 87, he got a lot more years than our allotted threescore-and-ten, and made them count. He was working, and writing exceptionally well, until the very end. I don’t think “Raylan,” “Djibouti” or “Road Dogs” (his last three novels) belong in his very top rank, but they were still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction published today, still very entertaining reads. If I’m doing work like this past my 80th birthday, I will die happy.

Leonard has been dead less than 24 hours, and already I’m tired of reading his 10 tips for writing, which is a good lesson, but if you really want to learn how to write, just read his books. Figure out how he does it.

In “Unknown Man #89,” a process server is looking for a man and thinks he may have found his wife. She’s an alcoholic, drinking the afternoon away at he Good Times Bar in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. (Just those details alone — the name of the bar and the neighborhood — tells you something, at least if you’re a Detroiter.) See the way he captures a drunk’s speech patterns, how they laugh at their own jokes and go off on their little verbal jags. Less observant writers make it all about slurring. Later on, he sets up a showdown at a bar, deep in a black neighborhood, called Watts Club Mozambique. It’s midafternoon, hardly anyone in the place, when the shit starts to go down:

The manager and the lady bartender, in the pen of the U-shaped bar, standing by the cash register, didn’t move. It it wasn’t a robbery, they assumed it was dope business. The employee in the cloakroom stood by the counter of the hall door. No one in the place screamed; no one said a thing.

You go to work in a place called Watts Club Mozambique, you know how these things play out.

A friend of mine, an English professor, says that when the historians of the future want to know how we lived, the details of our daily lives, they’ll turn to the genre novelists to tell us. They will find a deep vein in Leonard’s work. Take “52 Pickup,” a great slice of ’70s life in Detroit. It’s about an extortion attempt on a successful businessman who’s been having an affair. He runs an auto supplier in Mount Clemens, lives in Bloomfield Village. The girlfriend was in on it, and has turned over some home movies to the two guys running the deal, one of whom is showing him the spliced-together film of him on the Bahamian beach with her, narrating the action:

“Here comes sport now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift, right?”

Loaded and he still drinks beer. Perfect. You can learn more about white-collar and blue-collar lives, and how they intersected in Detroit, from that novel than any dissertation on class boundaries in the Wayne State library.

There’s more, there’s so much more, but I don’t have time to pull down every book and transcribe long passages. I do want to hit some bullet points, though:

** He wrote great female characters, not the way women write them, but the way a man who likes women does. I interviewed him once, and commented on it. He said, “I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as people.” Quick, read “The Switch,” published in 1978, before Hollywood pollutes it forever.

** His villains are great, too. I’m with Matt Zoller Seitz:

His books were tough, but his heart was warm. He liked people. He felt for them. He was able to see through their eyes, no matter how naive or cruel or dumb or scared they were. He didn’t seem to believe in evil, only in stupidity: meaning, you have to be stupid, or stupidly selfish, to be evil. Most of his villains are pathetic and deluded. He never wrote a Hannibal Lecter or Tom Ripley. No masterminds, no puppet masters, no Corleone-style crime lords. His criminals were criminals because they were too dumb or greedy to do anything else, or because they’d fallen into crime a long time ago and never got out. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they had bad luck. Whatever the explanation, Leonard understood it, even if he didn’t condone it. He believed in free will, but he also had compassion. He got it.

** Speaking of Hollywood. For a writer best-known for his great dialogue, filmmakers hardly ever got his material right. Leonard told the story many times of how he coached Barry Sonnenfeld on how to direct his characters in “Get Shorty,” which many acknowledge as the first adaptation to be worthy of the source material. He told Sonnenfeld no reaction shots, medium shots only and tell your actors that they are saying funny things, but their characters don’t know they’re funny. Personally, I think “Get Shorty” is overrated as an adaptation; it can’t hold a candle to “Out of Sight,” which to this day remains my favorite EL movie, my favorite Detroit movie and my favorite George Clooney movie — the actor was just emerging as a heavy-duty movie star but didn’t act like it and (more important) director Steven Soderbergh didn’t shoot him like one. Can we also say that Soderbergh achieved the miracle of a fine performance out of Jennifer Lopez? Because he did. Her wardrobe in that movie was killer, too. Favorite scene:

And though “Out of Sight” is my No. 1, “Jackie Brown” was also very good. After that, it mostly sucks. Some profoundly so. “Freaky Deaky,” shot in Detroit two summers ago, went straight to video and who can be surprised, when it was uprooted out of its time period and cast with standouts like Crispin Glover? “Killshot” did even worse; thanks, Mickey Rourke and …Joseph Gordon-Levitt? As the bad guy?

** Leonard was refreshingly bullshit-free. About pretty much everything. He always told the truth about writing, anyway. Besides the 10 rules, mainly you just have to sit down every day and do it.

So, I have some links for you:

First and best of all, the Detroit News, bless ’em, re-ran a 1978 piece by the man himself, a deep embed with a Detroit homicide squad. It’s great:

Five a.m. on Terry Street, Detroit’s Northwest side. The fire equipment had left the scene. The gutted two-story colonial stood empty, with its door open, windows smashed, the smell of wet ashes filling its darkness, a faint sound of water dripping in the basement. Someone said the woman found down there, lying on a bed, had been “iced.” A curious verb to use. The woman had burned to death, or had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument. The fire had been started to destroy evidence.

Dick Newcomb, Executive Sergeant of Squad 7, came out of the house with his foot-and-a-half-long flashlight and a photo album of smiling high school graduates in red caps and gowns.

One of them, a 17-year-old girl named Michelle, was at that moment in intensive care at Mount Carmel. She had been found unconscious — severely beaten and bleeding from deep lacerations – in an abandoned house several doors north of the burned-out colonial.

“You can go in if you want,” Newcomb said, “but you’ll smell of smoke all day, have to have your suit cleaned.”

While we’re at the News, a seven-year-old piece by columnist Neal Rubin on EL’s relationship with Woodward Avenue, the city’s spine and east-west dividing line. Again, very good but maybe of less interest outside of Detroit.

A five-year-old profile by Neely Tucker at the WashPost.

Glenn Kenny, to whom I link because lots of you probably don’t know about him. A film blogger, but an appreciator of prose as well. I had to laugh because Abel Ferrara agrees with me about “Get Shorty:”

He rolled his eyes. “God. So studio-ized. Every time they shoot Travolta from a low angle they’ve got the fucking key light giving him a halo.”

I laugh because Ferrara was fired midway through a p.o.s. movie a friend of mine worked on here, and achieved the remarkable feat of being banned from every single restaurant in the Book Cadillac hotel in something like 10 days. And Kenny takes a look at a typical paragraph of EL text, and explains why it’s good.

Here’s an audio piece I did years ago, for WDET, a version of the blog I linked to yesterday. My takeaway: I hate the sound of my own voice.

Finally, the Onion. Because.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

Sorry no new post today; I was out last night and we had some big home-improvement projects going, and work and blah blah blah. But this morning I’m hearing that Elmore Leonard died, and it seems appropriate to have a moment of silence and think about what one might say about that.

For now, though, I think this old entry should suffice. He really was the very, very best.

When it comes to Mitch Albom columns, I’m getting harder to impress. I’ve become numb to week after week of hastily dashed-off I-was-just-thinkin’ or join-me-in-my-outrage-over-something-dumb or weren’t-the-good-ol’-days great, etc. I believe it’s been three consecutive Sundays that he’s been peeved about something having to do with the Internet, because the Internet is baaaad.

Sunday’s column, however, was beyond the pale. Couched as a ringing defense of celebrity privacy, pegged to Tigers first baseman Prince Fielder’s recently revealed divorce filing, it is positively Grandpa-Simpsonian, whining about “Internet morsels” and “cyberspace monsters” and how-dare-we (which is to say, you), and a truly bizarre section about the abuse of the Freedom of Information Act, which is weird, as the mere fact of looking up a person’s divorce filing has nothing to do with FOIA. You just go down to the courthouse and check the file. Never mind the irony of a guy who’s invoked his status as a professional journalist (as opposed to those wicked bloggers) who went to professional journalist school not knowing this.

But never mind all that. I read it and decided to just let it all go, or at least wait and see if I still thought he was full of shit after I went for a long bike ride. Fortunately, by the time I got back — 22 miles — someone else had taken it on. Very satisfying takedown. I’m glad he could do it, because 22 miles in the direct sun takes it out of you. Although I felt so good that I sprinted the last half-mile or so home. The pavement on my last leg was like glass, and I just felt like it. The app on my phone said I hit 19 mph. Take that, Lance Armstrong.

What a glorious weekend it was. Lovely weather, not too hot or cold, sunshine all the way. I failed to mow the lawn, but it’s stopped growing anyway. August. The driveway is covered with acorns, the markets are tumbling with peaches and tomatoes, and the light is coming in at a new angle. I want to enjoy every final minute.

So, bloggage:

I know lots of people run hot and cold on Bill Simmons, but when he gets rolling, I’m there for every word (if I understand what he’s talking about). His examination of a Showtime documentary on the Eagles is a great specimen. If you grew up in the ’70s, you will like it. Whether or not you like the Eagles.

Guess what I made for dinner last night? Corn and tomato pie. With a biscuit crust. Yum.

Forgive me, pals, but I had a long day and a long evening and I have very little to show you today. So, open thread? Or perhaps you’d like some cheesecake first.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that it was the 10th anniversary of the great midwest blackout, which I am not going to capitalize and you can’t make me. The Free Press headline writer asked where I was, and OK, I’ll bite:

I was at the pool at Veterans Memorial Park in Ann Arbor, enjoying some idle time before my Knight Wallace Fellowship commenced at the end of the month. Kate and her buddy were enjoying the water slide when suddenly the water stopped sluicing down the chute. There were a few moments of confusion, and then the lifeguards started whistling everybody out of the pool. Power was out, pool was closing. This was around 4 p.m. or so.

So we went home, just a couple blocks away. Power was out there, too. I turned on the battery-powered radio, and learned power was out in a whole lot of places. The NPR reporter’s voice was shaking; just two years after 9/11, it was plain she feared this was a terror attack, and if the terror was lacking for now, it would surely be on its way.

Alan came home, and we assessed the situation. We’d been intending to go back to Indiana in the next couple of days anyway, and with no juice for the foreseeable future, we packed up and hit the road, already low on gas. We pulled off the freeway in Jackson. No power, and hence no working gas pumps. Tried again around Marshall. Nope. On I-69 we dropped our speed to save fuel and crossed our fingers. There’s a truck stop just over the Indiana line with enough gas to fill an ocean. As it hove into view, it hove into view — we could see the lights and the warm glow of civilization.

We coasted in on fumes and filled ‘er up, then filled ourselves with Wendy’s. I reflected that Indiana is out-of-step with its neighbors on so many things, but I’d finally found something I could get behind — it’s even on a different power grid. But that time, it was one that worked.

Most people’s stories of how they weathered important events are boring, and I am no exception. Man, those Wendyburgers tasted good.

Bloggage:

So today, the same guy who did the Crisco Fist art prank pulled another — putting For Sale signs on street lights, public statues and other buildings around the downtown area. As jokes go? Pretty lame, but you can see how the media covered it dutifully. It went a little like this:

(God, I loved that movie.)

Second somebody-explain-this-guy request of the week: I don’t read sci-fi (with a few exceptions), and so know nothing about Orson Scott Card, but I thought he was a generally respected author in the genre, albeit one with a problem with gay people. Now it appears he is, instead, actually nuts. Do these crazy ideas get passed around in a newsletter or something? This is the second or third time I’ve heard the Obama’s Band of Urban Gangs theory.

Over and out. I’m thinking it’s Oberon time.

Not a terrible day. Got approval today to buy a new desk chair for my home office, and expense the sucker. Yes! This is the working life I always dreamed of. (Used) Aeron store, here I come.

Seriously, I have the worst office chair in the world, and I can usually last half a day before I have to move to the chaise in my bedroom (Ikea, not appreciably better) or our shameful recliner, or — even better — a stand-up rig at the kitchen table I do from time to time. Of course, I should be shoe-leathering it on the streets, but you have to write the damn stories sometime.

That was good thing No. 1. I also had time at the end of the day to take Wendy to our dog park, the Nancy’s Office Chair of Pointe dog parks. It seems every household here has a dog, but when it comes to welcoming them to the places you expect to take a dog — city parks — they all have NO DOGS ALLOWED signs posted. In order to take Wendy to our remotely located designated dog park, I had to first get her licensed, then present proof of at least $100,000 household liability insurance and pay $20 for a separate, bar-coded pass to the main park. It is four miles away. So to let her run, I first have to drive her there.

Needless to say, it’s not a very popular place:

Where are my friends?

She sorely needed some romping today, though. She got it, playing the Crabapple Game for the better part of an hour. By herself. Even the lame Labrador, the only other dog who’s ever been there when we were there, didn’t show today.

It’s a dog’s life.

So, any bloggage? A little:

The case for punishing parents — via charges or lawsuits — who refuse to vaccinate their children.

Why do peahens dig peacocks? Now we have an idea.

Watch the video, and tell me if “Jesus Christ” is an appropriate reaction.

And I’m thinking I’m going to catch up on “The Newsroom,” so over and out.

Someone is going to have to explain Elon Musk to me. I know the basics — founder of Tesla, fighter with New York Times auto writers, etc. — but beyond that, all I have to go on are a few clues. I’ve noticed he seems to be very popular with a certain sort of young libertarian male, who believes all we have to do is cut the chains that keep our young geniuses from soaring, and man, will they ever soar! Etc.

But I read this the other day, and I have to say…well, you tell me:

Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk is announcing his plans for the “Hyperloop” Monday — a high-speed transportation system that, ideally, could take passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles for a fraction of the cost and faster than the $68 billion high-speed rail system scheduled to begin running in 2028. Musk has said the Hyperloop, as he envisions it, could get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minutes, traveling at about the speed of sound.

As exciting as all of that sounds, the key word here is “ideally.” Musk described the Hyperloop at the D11 conference in May, and the outline was less than scientific.

“It’s a cross between a Concord and a rail gun and an air hockey table. If they did a threeway and had a baby somehow,” said Musk, you’d have a kicking, screaming Hyperloop.

O rly? There are other buzzwords in the piece, including my fave (“he is publishing the plans as open source”) and my other fave (he “requested ‘critical feedback’ from the general public via Twitter”). It’s all very something-something-and-then-a-miracle-happens, although I suppose there is room for people like that in the world. In the Henry Ford museum, you can walk through Buckmister Fuller’s Dymaxion house, which he envisioned as a sort of metal yurt that could be easily collapsed and transported to another site, should you want to move but not necessarily live in a different house. It was all very futuristic, except that reality intruded and the miracle never happened.

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris, why by ’76 we’ll be A-OK…

So, I needed to get out of the house for a while today, and chose to work at the library. What’s this, the American Spectator? God, it’s been years; the editorial page editor used to subscribe, and I used to read it regularly. Let’s see how this once-proud journal of the conservative movement is attracting the next generation. OK, the cover:

Yep, that’s a paean to AM radio, and that cover says so much, doesn’t it? Gathering around the console in some fantasy of the past — how old do you have to be to even get the cultural reference of a living-room radio? (My age at the absolute youngest.) How old do you have to be to give a fat rat’s ass about a radio band you only subject yourself to if you’re…well, that you never subject yourself to, because who cares?

But that was just the cover, which could be excused as a nostalgia piece. What else is in the July/August issue? This:

Those are the movie reviews, by the way. “Reminders of America’s decline.” OK, so, anything else?

And this:

Yep, that’s Ben Stein, taking his Diary column into its 4,821st year. Because the life of a Hollywood whatever-he-is is nothing but fun. Finally, Taki, also a contributor of many years, winds up and takes a swat — because that’s what he does, slaps like a little bitch — at that menace to society, Barbara Walters:

I used to read this rag and get angry. Pity is a new feeling.

Out walking the dog today, and spied a large prescription pill bottle sitting in the grass of the park strip. Litter is unusual here, so I picked it up. It was large because it originally held 120 (!!!) hydrocodone tablets, generic for Lortab. Very similar to Vicodin. Basically, an opiate-based analgesic pain reliever, highly prized on the street, a player in the opiate-misery complex of Rx drug addiction.

But of course this bottle was empty. The name had been torn off the label, as had the prescription number. Only part of the address showed, a street on the west side of Detroit, many miles from here. I checked the date the prescription was filled. Yesterday. But of course.

Alan said I should have kept it and given it to the police, but I didn’t. Just another day in addled America.

Besides, it was a pretty sweet weekend, which is to say nothing terrible happened, and some wonderful weather happened, and I rode 20 miles on my bike and hit the weight rack and the Eastern Market and Whole Foods, and the worst thing I can say about it all is that Whole Foods was out of Green & Black white-chocolate bars. What’s more, there was no empty shelf slot for same, which makes me fear there’s been some sort of coup in Madagascar or something, and the supply has been cut off. That? Would be a disaster.

Speaking of which, I guess everyone has seen the story about the extremely religious family who fled the U.S. to get away from “abortion, homosexuality, in the state-controlled church,” not to mention being “forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don’t agree with.” So they got into their “small” boat — thanks, AP, for not nailing down the length and beam numbers while you were bringing us data about the population of Kiribati (their destination) — set sail for Kiribati, “a group of islands just off the equator and the international date line about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. The total population is just over 100,000 people of primarily Micronesian descent.” They thought that would be the furthest thing they could find from the oppressive, abortion-havin’ U.S. of A.

Only it didn’t work out. Bad weather damaged their boat, and they ended up being rescued by a Venezuelan fishing vessel. The U.S. embassy was arranging their travel home. What a bunch of maroons. The last thing they did before setting sail was welcome an infant into the world.

It takes all kinds, don’t it?

Here’s one kind it takes, too: The rodeo clown dressed as the president, taunting a bull into chasing him while a Missouri state fair crowd howls with laughter.

I’m getting into my Monday head early, aina?

With that, I’m tapioca on bloggage, and “Breaking Bad” is about to start. Because nothing’s as entertaining as the drug trade.

I try to be polite to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who regularly pass through our neighborhood, really I do. They have to do their thing, and I have to do mine, but I don’t see any reason for us to be shitty to one another. Usually they retreat gracefully with a “we have our own church, but thanks for coming, and best of luck. Have a nice day.” A small lie, that, but a pretty pale one. Today’s couple was pushier, though:

“I was shocked by these statistics about internet pornography,” she said, opening her Watchtower. “It says that a new pornographic movie is released every two hours, and someone accesses porn on the internet every minute.”

“Doesn’t really surprise me,” I said. “It’s everywhere.”

“But that means someone could be accessing porn on this very street,” she said. “One of your neighbors.”

I don’t know why that was the tipping point.

“We’re First Amendment absolutists in this house, thanks,” I said. “You have to take the bad with the good.”

The phrase “First Amendment absolutists” shut her mouth, shut the Watchtower, and got off my porch pretty damn quick. We’re the worst sort of heathens.

So. A former college football star — not of one of the big schools, but Grand Valley State — was found dead in the woods a few weeks ago, and today the autopsy reports came back. Cause of death:

LANSING — A former Division II college football star who disappeared in the Michigan wilderness during a late-evening fishing trip died of pneumonia caused by inhaling his vomit, according to an updated autopsy released today.

The report also suggests Cullen Finnerty’s disorientation and paranoia in the woods May 26 may have been exacerbated by a combination of the painkiller oxycodone and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Remember a few years ago, when gay intellectuals started talking about same-sex marriage, and you thought it wouldn’t happen in your lifetime, if ever? Someone said the other day that we’d see the demise of football — at least played at the prep level and especially below — within fewer years than you think. No longer betting against that.

Finally, I leave you with this fine Dahlia Lithwick take on Ken Cuccinelli and his almost unbelievably creepy anti-sodomy crusade:

His critics, including the ladies of The View and Jay Leno, have responded to Cuccinelli’s quest to reinstate Virginia’s anti-sodomy or, “Crimes Against Nature” law, with snickers and winks. The law is plainly unconstitutional—according to both a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision and a federal appeals court—and giggling about the attorney general’s creepy preoccupation with Virginians’ consensual oral sex makes for an easy comic target. But that focus obscures the real—even original—sin undergirding Cucinelli’s latest legal push: It’s a call for judges to read statutes to mean what they don’t say; a call for outright judicial activism, for freewheeling judicial interpretation—qualities legal thinkers on the right usually deplore.

A really good piece. Read.

Finally, I keep forgetting to pass along a remark someone made at the party last weekend. Some of my old neighbors read the blog, and one said, “There are two of your commenters I want to ask you about.”

Guess which two?

I’ll let you think about it. Answer, eventually, in comments. Have a great weekend, all.

Kate’s going away for a few days over the weekend, so last night we went to the movies. No action tentpoles this time, but “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” an engaging documentary about a handful of great background singers. Like? Like Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear (to exhaust the ones I’d heard of), as well as Judith Hill, Lisa Fischer, Tåta Vega and many others (whom I hadn’t heard of).

Most Stones fans know who Clayton was: The voice doing the wailing-woman breaks in “Gimme Shelter.” Whenever I listened to that song, I pictured her as a Tina Turner manqué, but the reality is both funnier and more mundane — rousted at bedtime and told to get down to the studio p.d.q., she showed up in her pj’s, a scarf over her curlers, and was handed a lyric sheet that said, Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away. Mick Jagger wryly observes that sometimes, when you record at 2 a.m., you don’t know something is good until you listen the next day.

The film bogs a bit toward the end, when we examine how these talented women failed to make it as soloists, but it’s a small complaint. I was touched a bit by Lennear, whom we first meet as one of the sexiest Ikettes and later see touring with the Stones. She now teaches Spanish and didn’t look how you say fulfilled by it. It all ends on a certain lamentation for talent, period, in pop music, now that so much can be auto-tuned and fixed in the mix.

Human beings — can’t live without ’em, although some people would sure like to.

So. Unlike many people, I don’t block ads from the news sites I visit, although I do practice some avoidance. Embedded-text links I avoid like potholes, and Mac Keeper can kiss my elderly ass, but I understand ads pay salaries, so I will let them play, most days. (Besides, I’ve found if you allow one to play, you can avoid more later.) However, lately I’ve been thinking about what’s fair, ad-wise. Fifteen seconds, I think. A 15-second ad is fair, but a 30-second ad is not. Most web videos are less than two minutes, and I think asking for 25 percent more in the form of a Toyota ad is an ad too far. What say you?

As for me, I think I’m going to bed. Enjoy the end of the week, but I still have a lot to do.