Crime novelist Elmore Leonard has just published his 43rd book, Road Dogs. (Vince Bucci/Getty Images)

Frank Zappa once said of blues guitarist Elmore James that he “kept playing the same lick over and over, but I get the feeling he meant it.” You could also say that about author Elmore Leonard. He’s been working the same lick – the crime story – since the 1960s, but nobody else plays it with as much feeling.

It’s impossible to discuss Elmore Leonard’s books without talking movies. Hollywood has been harvesting his prose since the 1950s.

Now 84, the prolific Leonard has just published his 43rd book. Road Dogs will hold special appeal to the author’s fans. It brings back not one but three Leonard characters from previous novels: Jack Foley, the charming bank robber in Out of Sight (1996); Cundo Rey, the Cuban go-go dancer-cum-killer of LaBrava (1983); and Dawn Navarro, a shady psychic from Riding the Rap (1995). Their lives intersect when Cundo befriends Foley in a Florida prison and, later, when Foley is released and keeps a promise to go to Venice, Calif. and keep an eye on Cundo’s girlfriend, Dawn.

Once again, Leonard displays his skill for writing without seeming to write. His characters spring to life with a minimum of description, their personalities revealed through his signature rat-a-tat dialogue. The unpredictable plot doesn’t fall into place so much as it just happens – it’s an organic thing that could stretch its tendrils in any direction. It’s these rare qualities that have endeared Leonard to serious literary stylists such as Martin Amis, who recognize an original craftsman when they read one.

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The thing about Leonard is that he’s never let the highbrow praise go to his head. He still comes across as a guy hustling to make a buck in the writing racket. Just ask him why he’s doing a spate of interviews to promote Road Dogs, when his age and reputation would entitle him to be a little aloof.

“I think there’s a chance to make this book a little more successful than the last few,” Leonard explains by phone from his house in Bloomfield Village, just north of his native Detroit. Speaking in a kindly, old-granddad voice (the opposite of hard-boiled), Leonard admits he has an ulterior motive for wanting a bigger bestseller: He’d love to see it turned into a film, with George Clooney reprising the role of Jack Foley.

Clooney played Foley in Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film of Out of Sight, one of Leonard’s favourites of the more than 20 movies made from his works. Although Clooney has shown no interest in a sequel, Leonard isn’t daunted.

“A couple of weeks ago, I sent him the published book with an inscription in it: ‘George, Jack Foley’s looking for you,’” Leonard says with a sly laugh. “He’s said he didn’t want to do another bank robber – but [Jack]’s not robbing banks in this one. So I think if he’d at least look at it, we might have a chance.”

Although the book Out of Sight revolved around U.S. marshal Karen Sisco (played onscreen by Jennifer Lopez), in the movie, Clooney’s gentleman thief became the main focus. Seeing it made Leonard realize Foley deserved his own novel.

George Clooney stars in the 1998 film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's thriller Out of Sight. (Getty Images)

Like an improvising musician, Leonard dives headfirst into a book with a handful of characters and no idea where the story will take him. “The idea was to go with Foley, see what happens to him, if he robs any more banks," he explains. Out of Sight ended with Foley returning to prison to continue his 30-year life sentence, so the first catch was to get him sprung. “Then I got the idea: He and Cundo Rey have become buddies in prison – ‘road dogs’ – and then Cundo puts up the money for a very smart young lady attorney, and she gets [Foley’s] 30 years reduced to 30 months and he’s out.”

Early on, Leonard toyed with bringing Karen Sisco back and resuming her affair with Foley. But when Dawn entered the novel she ended up captivating both Foley and her creator. A beautiful, cunning con artist, Dawn drives the novel with her schemes to use Foley and fleece Cundo. If Road Dogs ever gets made into a movie, Leonard would like to see Naomi Watts cast as Dawn. “That is not who you would ordinarily picture as playing her,” he admits. “But for some reason I see Dawn as Naomi Watts – with darker hair.”

It’s just about impossible to discuss Leonard’s books without talking movies, too. Hollywood has been harvesting his prose since the 1950s, when it bought his western novella Three-Ten to Yuma and turned it into a film starring Glenn Ford. (It was recently remade with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.)

Although he studied English and philosophy at the University of Detroit, and was a young devotee of Ernest Hemingway, Leonard has always written for the mass market. He broke into the business in the '50s penning western tales for the pulp magazines. At the time, the horse opera was all the rage on the big and small screens. “There were 32 of them on prime time [TV] in a week,” he recalls. After his novel Hombre was turned into a 1967 movie with Paul Newman, Leonard was able to quit his day job as an ad copywriter and craft fiction full-time.

By the 1960s, however, westerns were falling out of favour. So Leonard ditched them for a life of crime writing. His first effort was The Big Bounce – filmed in 1969 with Ryan O’Neal (and again, in 2004, with Owen Wilson). His steady output continued to provide fodder for motion pictures in the 1970s and '80s. Leonard didn’t become a critical darling till the 1990s, however, when his terse, witty writing started getting serious respect, luring hot young filmmakers like Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino (who turned Leonard’s Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown).

Leonard became hip the right way – and maybe the only way – by not trying. Even now, he’s still an old-school writer who composes in longhand, bangs out his clean copy on a typewriter and cheerfully admits to being computer illiterate. The author’s next novel, however, will be surprisingly topical. It’s about the pirates currently plaguing the Horn of Africa. Leonard says he saw the subject as a good excuse to write a book called Djibouti.

“All my life I’ve loved that name, and all of a sudden it occurred to me, a few months ago, 'my God, I can call the book that,' I’m mentioning the word in my manuscript on almost every other page," he adds with relish. "To me, it’s such a good word.”

That kind of whimsicality is what separates Leonard from his mass-market peers – it’s his touch of poetry. It also suggests the pleasure he gets from writing. That, as much as the money, is why he keeps turning out novels like beautiful guitar riffs.

“I really have fun writing a book,” he says. “And I have no higher aspirations. So why not keep doing it?”

Road Dogs is in stores now.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.