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Timothy Olyphant as US Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens

In the opening scene of FX’s hit series Justified, Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens, played with no small amount of charm by Timothy Olyphant, wears a full white suit and a white cowboy hat as he strides between Miami sunbathers and sits down across the table from gun-runner Tommy Bucks.  Leaning coolly back in his chair, Givens reminds Bucks he’s been given 24 hours to leave Miami.  Time is up in two minutes.  Bucks looks around wistfully.  “I’ve been coming here ever since I was a kid. […] And to tell you the truth I love it here.  I really do.  I loved it then and I love it now.  So I’m not gonna leave.”  Bucks goes for his gun.  Faster, cooler, and steadier, Givens puts three in his chest before Bucks can even blink. 

Following this dust-up, Givens himself is exiled from Miami, forced by the Marshal’s Service to return to his own childhood home in Harlan County, Kentucky, where he is eternally weary of, and wise to, the peculiar characters he’d been hoping to escape.  Whether it is his ex-wife Winona, his father Arlo, or his former coal mining partner, the devilish Boyd Crowder, Raylan can hardly tip his hat without running into his past along the “lonely road” of the show’s theme song.

Both the character of Raylan and the world of Harlan come from the pages of master crime-writer Elmore Leonard, who created Givens in two novels from the mid-90s, Pronto and Riding the Rap.  The Wild West duel in Miami between Givens and Bucks comes straight out of the final pages of Pronto, though it wasn’t until 2001 when Leonard wrote the story “Fire in the Hole” where the killing of Bucks is given as the reason for Raylan being sent back to Kentucky.  Perhaps it is a testament to Leonard’s interest in breaking new ground that he originally released the story as an e-book novella, well before e-readers were common, and despite the fact that, as he put it, “I won’t be able to read it - at least not in my home - since I don’t own a computer.”

Now Elmore Leonard is breaking a new kind of ground.  Raylan Givens is hardly the first literary character to leave the stories where he was born for the bright lights of film or television, but he may be the first to ever return home to print again. 

In his new novel, Raylan, published earlier this year by William Morrow, Elmore Leonard writes his first Raylan Givens story since 2001. It is an idea that he got from actor Timothy Olyphant.  Justified’s creator Graham Yost explains, “It started when (Leonard) was visiting the set in the first season and Tim said to him, ‘Hey, why don’t you write another Raylan short story?’”  It must have been a somewhat surreal moment for Leonard, his own character standing there telling him to write some more about him.

While many television characters drawn from literature exist on screen and in print simultaneously, these tend to be steadily diverging universes.  The pilot episode of Showtime’s Dexter closely mimics the opening chapters of Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter, but by the end of the first season the entire cast of characters has become radically different.  On the show, the villainous Ice Truck Killer is defeated, but in the novel he escapes after taking down another principle character.  Multiply this effect by five subsequent seasons and five more novels and the plot lines of the two Dexter universes have hardly a passing resemblance beyond the main character.

But Justified’s universes are not diverging; in fact, they’re tangled together more with every installment.  Because Elmore Leonard is an executive producer on Justified in more-than-name-only, he often feeds potential story ideas to the writers.  As Leonard explains, “I've never just taken money, I've always had to write something. So I felt I should, since I know these characters better than any of their writers. But I didn't want to interfere with them, any stories they might have in mind. I thought mine would be just filler. And they've been using them.”  In turn, the writers of Justified routinely consult Leonard’s novels for dialogue and tone, and allegedly have blue wristbands stamped WWED … What Would Elmore Do?

Justified’s creator Graham Yost explains, “In his new book, Raylan, it’s this weird back-and-forth thing we’ve got going on where he’s using characters we’ve created for the show in his new stories.”  Meanwhile, Leonard downplays his own role to some degree.  "I don't ask them what they're doing. I always keep away from them […] I'll do some episodes I think will work and they can use little bits then to sprinkle into thirteen episodes. I don't want them feeling that they have to use my stuff, because I'm not a screenwriter, and they have good writers. I think they have very good writers."  But as Yost describes it, the show relied a lot on Leonard. “He wrote this novel … and said, ‘Hang it up and strip it for parts […] And so we did. There were two big chunks that we took from it last year, and thematic things and characters. And there’s a couple of big things we’re taking this season. If there’s a fourth season, there’s a few more things we’d like to mine from the book as well.”

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Promotional Poster for FX's Justified, Season 2The result being that the character of Raylan Givens and the world of Harlan continue to evolve not just in two mediums, but between them in a way never before seen.

In Season 2 of Justified, Raylan is tangled in an old feud between his own family and the Bennett clan: Mama Mags and her sons Dickie and Coover run the General Store in town as well as the marijuana racket for a thousand acres in either direction.  Dickie and Coover appear in the Raylan novel as members of the Crowe family, and their father Pervis minds the store while his boys are off plotting to kidnap men, remove their kidneys, and sell them back – a plotline which arises in Season 3 of Justified.

On the show however it is Dickie Bennett and his neo-Nazi friend Dewey Crowe who are nearly the victims of the kidney thieves.  Lovably-stupid Dewey Crowe has been on the show since the pilot episode, where he is reprimanded by Givens for stepping into a lady’s home without knocking – a scene taken nearly verbatim from “Fire in the Hole”.  In both the episode and the story, Raylan chats with Dewey about having previously locked up one of his kin, a fellow by the name of Dale Crowe Jr., who Givens drives to jail in the opening of the novel Riding the Rap.  Justified’s writers closely-adapted this dialogue in the second episode of the first season when Givens transports Dewey to jail. 

Confused?  Then let’s not even get into the recent Season 3 appearance of Assistant Director Karen Goodall, played by Carla Gugino, who is based on Leonard’s character Karen Sisco from the novel Out of Sight, which was adapted into a Soderbergh film in 1998 starring George Clooney, and featured Jennifer Lopez as US Marshall Karen Sisco.  The film was far more successful than the briefly-lived 2003 television show it inspired, a cop drama that aired on ABC for one season called Karen Sisco, starring— wait for it— Carla Gugino as Karen Sisco.  Is Karen Goodall the Karen Sisco of the novel, the movie, the television show, or someone new entirely?  All we do know is that the writers seem to be enjoying themselves, inserting dialogue that practically winks at viewers-in-the-know, about how Gugino’s character married, changed her name, and got divorced.

Perhaps the most startling effect that the show has had on the book pertains to the brilliant character of Boyd Crowder.  Boyd is a spiky-haired chameleon: a neo-Nazi one episode, a bible-thumbing revivalist in the next, then a dusty-faced coal miner, then a suit-wearing bodyguard for the mining company.  His loyalties are forever-shifting and his diction is always precise, making Boyd the perfect foil for the laconic but constant Raylan.  Their odd bromance propels the show.  Each respects the other somehow, and whenever they square off against one another, you can see they hardly can bear to shoot (until they do).

Both the pilot episode of Justified and Leonard’s 2001 story “Fire in the Hole” end with Raylan shooting Boyd in a scene which eerily mirrors the duel with Tommy Bucks.  In the original story Boyd dies, but on the show his life is barely spared.  Graham Yost is quite grateful that they dodge that particular bullet on the show.  “We thank our lucky stars every day that we didn’t go through with that — and that was suggested by FX, by research and by Elmore. He said, ‘Oh, you should keep that Boyd around.’”  Leonard apparently took some of his own advice.  In the novel Raylan, Boyd is inexplicably alive again, resurrected thanks to the character’s success on the TV show.

How do we talk about a book, based on a TV show, based on a book?  A review at The New York Times chooses to take Leonard’s latest novel on its own merits and barely mentions Justified.  But pop-culture website The AV Club criticizes the novel specifically for failing where the show triumphs: creating cohesive episodic plots with consistent character development.  They conclude that Raylan is a “complicated culture artifact” where the adaptation almost seems more definitive than the original. 

But it was a review at Slate that put its finger on the real conundrum here, observing that “Justified may be the first show to inspire fanfic from its creator.”

The first, perhaps, but likely not be the last.  The close relationship between novelist and TV show seen with Leonard and Justified is an inevitable progression of the one formed by Jonathan Ames and HBO’s Bored to Death, which was based on a short story by Ames.  In the show, Jason Schwartzman plays a character named “Jonathan Ames” who pretends to be a detective on Craig’s List.  The real Ames continued to write for the show and at one point even guest-starred as a villain that the character-Ames had to defeat.  The show was just cancelled after three seasons, but HBO, along with producer Scott Rudin, has gone on an acquiring spree of late, signing contemporary writers left and right to produce new shows.  Mary Karr will be adapting material from her three memoirs into a new show.  Jonathan Safran Foer is due to write a new comedy that will star Ben Stiller.  Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! will also be brought to life on the small screen, and of course there is no better example of the altering landscape than Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. 

In 1996, before The Corrections was published, Franzen wrote distastefully about television in his famous Harper’s essay “Why Bother?” and viewing it as something that had moved Americans regrettably farther and farther from what he calls the substantial novel.  He wrote, “Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.”  Fast-forward sixteen years and today Franzen has not only sold his novel to HBO, but he’s said that he’s going to the casting sessions and is enjoying writing new backstories for main characters and fleshing out more minor ones.  In an interview last year with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Franzen noted that because the show is a series and not a miniseries, he even sees the potential to develop things beyond the original novel’s boundaries.

Why the drastic change in tune?  Because of course “It’s not TV.  It’s HBO.”  In the last sixteen years,[image error]
Olyphant as Sheriff Seth Bullock (HBO's Deadwood)  HBO has pioneered new kinds of novelistic storytelling in mainstream television.  A year after Franzen’s laments in Harper’s, HBO began airing Oz, and two years later, The Sopranos, both of which featured large casts of morally-complex characters from all walks of life, who are developed steadily through the intricate weaving of subplots.  Like many great works of literary fiction, some of these shows like The Wire could be challenging at first: occasionally slow, difficult to follow, and hard to stomach.  Favorite characters were apt to be killed off, while even small changes in others took multiple seasons to develop.  Yet audiences grew to appreciate the many rewards, including a feeling of seeing something realer than we’d thought television could express.  Since then the HBO model has left the nest and roosted at non-premium cable channels like AMC, with Mad Men and FX, with Justified.  It’s no coincidence that Timothy Olyphant learned his rogue lawman character first as Sheriff Seth Bullock on the set of HBO’s Deadwood, a historical Western drama about 1870s South Dakota. 

We forget that it was the dime novel cowboys and pulp magazine detectives of the 20s and 30s who eventually became the first radio heroes of the 40s and the television heroes of the 50s.  Slinging guns and cracking wise, characters like Gunsmoke’s Marshal Matt Dillon or Martin Kane, Private Eye walked the same lonely road between law and lawlessness that Raylan Givens goes down today.  So-called genre fiction has always broken barriers between popular and artistic cultures, and Elmore Leonard has long been a master with a foot in both camps.  His hardboiled storytelling is always surprisingly rich and never clichéd.  It exactly is why so many of his books have been adapted into such memorable films: Three-Ten to Yuma, Get Shorty, and Out of Sight.

While promoting Raylan, fans have asked Leonard whether or not he plans to continue writing more Raylan stories.  Leonard admits, “I'm tempted to put the character Raylan into my new book, and my agent in Hollywood says no, don't. And I'm not sure why, outside of the fact that Sony owns the rights to the character and I can't sell the book on my own to somebody else if Raylan's in it. So that's probably it. Well, he's an agent. I may put him in anyway.”  Even Leonard doesn’t quite seem to know who truly owns Raylan Givens at this point. 

But whatever road Leonard and Raylan go down, it is sure to interest both viewers and readers, and to shape fresh possibilities for the future of both television and literature.  If Justified is indeed a harbinger of things to come, then the further-entwining of television and literature is bound to raise many hackles, and critics will surely expend much ink (or many pixels) lamenting the selling-out of novelists, the deficiencies of television, or the death of literature forever and ever (amen).  But perhaps the education that HBO is providing television viewers is actually leaving more of us still hungry for more.  Perhaps an evening of watching FX will prompt a curious pause at a bookstore the next morning.  If television viewers continue to embrace rich, complex, novelistic storytelling, then yes, we can expect more writers like Leonard, Ames, Carr, Foer, Russell and Franzen to be drawn to the form.  But we can also anticipate that these shows will likewise draw viewers back again towards their tremendous literary works.

As more and more the lines become blurred, fresh possibilities are opened in both forms.  Readers will be on the look-out for changes, and thinking about how what they’ve seen informs what they read.  Viewers will be wary of how what they’re reading shapes how they view. 

For example, nothing physically defines the character of Raylan more than his hat.  It is inevitably the first thing characters mention to describe him.  In Pronto, bookie Harry Arno asks his girlfriend, Joyce, if she’s seen anyone odd downstairs.  She answers, “‘How about a guy in a cowboy hat?  Not the kind country-western stars wear.  A small one.  Like a businessman’s cowboy hat.’”  Harry replies, “‘I know what you mean, the Dallas special […] That Stetson, the kind the cops were wearing when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.”  Joyce agrees. “‘That’s the one.  Light tan, or sort of off-white.’”  By making the historical reference Leonard creates a kind of equivalence here in a reader’s mind between the morally-complex Raylan and this disturbing historical artifact of the police standing by as vigilante justice is done.

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Jack Ruby Shooting Lee Harvey OswaldIn Riding the Rap, Leonard describes Raylan again as he drives Dale Crow Jr. to prison. “He had on one of those business cowboy hats, but broken in; it looked good on him, the way he wore it cocked low on his eyes.”  This emphasis on his hat being business-like but worn down is echoed in “Fire in the Hole”, Leonard has Raylan’s boss, Art Mullen, reflect on the hat when they are first reintroduced.  “The kind Art Mullen thought of as a buisnessman’s Stetson, except no businessman’d wear this one with its creases and just slightly curled brim cocked toward one eye, the hat part of Raylan’s lawman personality.”

But in the pilot episode of Justified, the hat Olyphant wears is not what Leonard initially had in mind.  “The critics have been calling Raylan a cowboy with his hat. The hat came unexpectedly [with the show]. I had described kind of a businessman’s Stetson, a smaller Stetson. […] But evidently he found his own hat and design. It’s perfect. I don’t see him bareheaded.  He seems to need a hat to define who he is.”

Leonard here seems to defer his own vision of Raylan’s hat to the one on the television show.  Indeed,
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Cover of "Raylan" by Elmore LeonardCover of "Raylan" by Elmore Leonard his praise of Olyphant’s Raylan is always effusive in interviews.  “Tim Olyphant plays the character exactly the way I wrote him. I couldn't believe it. He's laid back and he's quiet about everything but he says, if I have to pull my gun, then that's a different story. And it works. There are very few actors that recite the lines exactly the way you hear them when you're writing the book. George Clooney [in the 1998 movie "Out of Sight"] was one. He was very good.” 

Clooney was very good, but Olyphant is exact.

So much so that his picture is even on the jacket of the Raylan novel, the broad hat pulled down low over his eyes as he points his gun over the reader’s shoulder.  It is the exact image used in promotions for Season 2 of Justified.  Open the book up and start reading, and you’ll find that there is no description of Raylan’s signature hat anywhere to be found.  There is no longer any need for it.