Elmore Leonard, 87, breathes his last Tuesday.

Leonard was a well-known author who excelled at crime novels. The crackling dialogues and stark pose of the crime novels have been influencing numerous authors. Those have already inspired multiple adaptations of film and TV.

Leonard died at home in Bloomfield Township. His family was with him when he breathed his last. The death was due to age and a stroke that happened weeks back. He was working on the 46th novel of his prolific career as an author.

Leonard loved writing even at the ripe age of the late 80's. According to an interview which he gave in 2012, he was not someone to sit and enjoy the greenery. Justifiably, he continued to write as his novels have been responsible for transcending commercial fiction on an entirely new height.

Leonard won over a dozen of literary awards in his lifetime. Those include the lifetime achievement felicitation which was given by the National Book Foundation. Over 8 million copies of Leonard's books have already been sold in print.

Michael Morrison considers Leonard a legend of its true sense. Morrison thinks that Leonard was incredibly talented with an unpretentious approach. He will always be remembered as "the coolest dude", according to Morrison, the president of HarperCollins which published Leonard's books.

Way back in the '50s, Leonard started his career in publishing. He was a copywriter in an ad agency during that period. Leonard was supposedly extremely bored while doing the job. It was the boredom of the profession that encouraged him to wake at 5 in the morning for writing fiction of his choice.

In his earlier days as a writer, Leonard wrote Westerns which were targeted toward pulp magazines. Later, he shifted to writing crime novels as the popularity of Westerns got dried up. Ernest Hemmingway influenced Leonard in his younger days. On the contrary, he found Hemingway humourless later in his life.

Out of Sight, Rum Punch and Get Shorty are among his novels which have been strongly influential on writers in terms of style and dialogue patterns.