Feels Like Leonard

Well I was up at the old City Grocery Bar last night talking to Bill Boyle about this Don DeLillo book LIBRA. I quoted a line of authorial (close third-person) description - "He had that expression of where's the coffee." - and said it reminded me of Elmore Leonard... for, among other reasons, the punctuation, or lack of it, including the choice of the period over the question mark. This book had often been reminding me of something, and I finally realized, with that phrase, that it was Elmore Leonard. "In Leonard it would have been dialogue," Bill said of the phrase. And he was right. And I realized that a lot of the dialogue had been reminding me of Elmore Leonard, too... I think particularly the dialogue by members of the demimonde: gangsters, strippers, club owners (Jack Ruby). But there are a number of things I am too lazy to do, including looking for examples, researching the admiration (if any) DeLillo might have felt for Elmore Leonard (or George V. Higgins, as Bill suggested), checking to see if I used "demimonde" or "close third-person" correctly, so many things, so much laziness.