Word: leonid
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...written that Leonid is your first hardboiled character. How does that work for someone who has written in the genre for as long as you have...
...Leonid McGill also has a family, but it's a whole different thing. One of the things about hardboiled is that the line between good and bad is blurred. Not for Easy Rawlins. But for Leonid, he's been on one side and he's trying to get to the other side, and it's not so easy once you've had a whole life in this other thing...
Which is why as complex as your plots can be, it's such a delight to actually see what seems to be a fully fleshed out character. Leonid McGill goes well beyond the typical, fairly bland mystery novel protagonist. Do you try to focus on character over plot...
People skip over names. But names have lots of meaning. I had troubles in the beginning. People were saying, "You're going to name a black character Leonid? How can you do that?" And I'd say, "Why not? Does it make any more sense to call him John? I mean, if black people came from Africa, I should give my characters African names, you know?" But as a writer, as a novelist, names help to identify a character, and place a character in the world...
...still don't know it. I just finished this morning the first chapter of the third Leonid McGill book. And I'm still learning about him. And I will be learning about him until I come to the last book, which I think will be number ten. And if I wrote an eleventh, I would find out even more about him. That gets back to the whole notion of character development. I see each book as a novel, but then I see the whole series as a novel - one big long novel. And so the character is always growing...