Elmore Leonard, 1925-2013

The death has been announced of writer Elmore Leonard, who died this morning from complications of a stroke. He was 87.

Leonard was a novelist first and foremost, although he did do some Hollywood screenplays in the 1970s and 1980s. The real reason for blooging about his death on a movie blog, however, isn't because of the screenplays he wrote. It's because quite a few of his novels and stories were turned into well-known movies by other screenwriters. Perhaps the most classic of these is 1957's 3:10 to Yuma, based on a short story of the same name Leonard had written four years earlier. Another his short stories, "The Captors", was turned into the movie The Tall T, which just aired on TCM last night as part of Randolph Scott's day in Summer Under the Stars. Other Leonard works turned into films include Hombre and, more recently, Get Shorty.

As for Leonard's screenplays, the first of them was for The Moonshine War in 1970; TCM has in the past few weeks been running a featurette on the making of this one as part of its TCM Extras between movies.