Article: Elmore Leonard's biggest secret? `I keep my nose out of it and let the characters talk'.

Byline: Chauncey Mabe

At a time when he was not much older than Elmore Leonard is now, the late British novelist Graham Greene lamented to an interviewer that while he still loved to write, he no longer had the stamina to spend all day at the typewriter the way he did at 35.

By contrast, Leonard, who is 78 and in his 52nd year as a published author, still sits down at 9:30 in the morning and writes in longhand, as he has always done, for eight hours, producing five pages of sizzling crime fiction a day. He maintains the same book-a-year pace he established in the mid-1960s, when he left the advertising business to write full time.

"I'm so ...

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