Hurting people who don't pay shouldn't be necessary when all you have to do is look at them with that certain look. One last thing about Elmore Leonard books: there's always some moment in them where you don't understand something. Get Shorty is an old neon sign with five stars, the one in the middle blinking and threatening to leave two stars at any time. Folio commissioned Hokyoung Kim for the artwork, while the late author’s wife, Wendy Benchley, provides a fascinating new introduction.

Firstly, the film had exceptional casting – I cannot unsee John Travolta as Chili Palmer, which helped its case. Some of us are more organised than others, some less so, but that’s the crux of the job description. Harry finds Chili Palmer in his study, here as a favor to the Mesa Casino of Las Vegas, which Harry owes one-hundred fifty thousand on a Lakers-Pistons game. Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers made detective Wallander a household name and catapulted Nordic noir into the mainstream. The difference was, in the movie business, you didn't worry about somebody getting turned to save their ass and pointing at you in court.But when they revelled in those characters – in the TV show Justified, in Get Shorty, Jackie Brown or Out of Sight (far and away the greatest Leonard film adaptation) – they unlocked the secret to the man’s work. Something that was peppered throughout the text, that readers will piece together in bits slowly, was turned into a final reveal at the end of the movie. His list of clients includes Time, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Playboy, plus numerous advertising and design firms. This riffing on story, on how it’s created in all its fits and starts and wandering, forms the essence of the novel.

This story was a refreshing breath of fresh air in the sense that the writing and storytelling are so tremendous. Chili Palmer, the loan shark on a journey to reinvent himself as a film producer, is as much an Everyman for today’s world as Walter Mitty was for his. off with it, for which Chili Palmer shoots him in the scalp, for which Ray Bones never forgives him. To be born in a celluloid age is to be born with one’s myths arrayed all around one, as easy to touch as one’s own skin (which the myths often become).Here the book explores how crazy Hollywood can get, by taking an outsider and putting him right in the middle of it. Harry Zimm is a has-been pulp-horror film director trying to get a new project off the ground with finances from insalubrious sources. In the film, Bones not only beats Harry Zimm to a living pulp and shoots Ronnie Wingate -- both great scenes invented by the filmmakers that feel more "Elmore Leonard" than Elmore Leonard -- but threatens to derail Chili's film project far more viciously. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. He is the likeable character of the book, along with Karen Flores - the actress who got parts in scream movies at the start of her career (based on her looks at her scream), but doesn't get many parts now.