Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard wrote “The Odyssey,” the twelfth chapter of the collaborative novel Naked Came the Manatee. The book first appeared as a thirteen-part serial in the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine before Putnam published it in 1996. Leonard joined twelve other South Florida writers, among them Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan, Carl Hiaasen, Tananarive Due and Les Standiford, with each author continuing a plot passed on by the previous contributor. The round-robin experiment differed sharply from the crime novels and western stories for which Leonard became best known. In his solo work, compressed dialogue, shifting viewpoints and characters moving between criminal and law-enforcement worlds gave the prose its distinctive pace.