Elmore John Leonard Jr. Author of Out of Sight and Get Shorty novels that led to sucessful film productions – a son of a General Motors (GM) worker, settled in Detroit, Michigan in 1934. Leonard, or "Dutch" has also been called "the Dickens of Detroit" because of his intimate portraits of people from that city. Leonard's ear for dialogue and ability to render dialogue on the printed page are uncanny and have been praised by many writers.