Born 100 years ago this month, the great American crime writer Elmore Leonard left behind more than 40 novels, dozens of stories, his own screenplays, and numerous screen adaptations. His centenary has generated a flurry of activity, including a series of Penguin Modern Classics reissues and a new biography by CM Kushins, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, which carefully details the remarkable discipline Leonard brought to his craft.

After years writing westerns, in 1972 Leonard read George V Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle – “I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free” – and everything changed. Armed with a new sense of expressive dialogue, ambiguous characters and contemporary settings, Leonard turned to the place he knew best and set an unmatched run of novels in his hometown of Detroit, beginning with 1974’s 52 Pickup.

A decade into this creative burst, Time bestowed a moniker so enduring it’s on his tombstone – “the Dickens of Detroit”. Less snappily, a later interviewer called him a “scribe of the downside of the American dream”, which neatly captures his characters’ disappointments, their often desperate desires to be someone (or someway) else. Because his characters don’t speak in such terms, Leonard’s writing doesn’t say such things directly. Instead, even at their funniest, his novels’ persuasively untidy storytelling reflects the characters’ turmoil. Few places could have provided a more hospitable setting for such turmoil than Leonard’s Detroit, which has repeatedly withstood the