It’s the birthday of crime novelist Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), known for crisp, spare prose, a phenomenal ear for dialogue, and his 10 Rules of Writing.

Rule #10: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Leonard was born in New Orleans but the family moved to Detroit at nine. After serving two years in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Leonard studied at the University of Detroit, then began writing for an advertising agency. At the same time he began writing westerns, including the stories that became the films 3:10 to Yuma (adapted in 1957 and 2007) and The Tall T (1957), and the novel Hombre (1961, adapted in 1967).

Leonard’s first crime novel was The Big Bounce (1969) and he went on to publish about 40 more (is that even possible?), including Glitz (1985), about a serial rapist out for revenge against the cop who put him away, and Get Shorty (1990), about a small-time mobster who winds up in L.A. trying to make a movie. Both novels were of course made into movies, and Get Shorty is also currently a television series.

Leonard, who was married three times (divorced, widowed, divorced), received the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 and a National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution in 2012. One of Leonard’s most successful adaptations to the screen—and one of the only ones he really liked—was the TV series Justified (2010-2015), based on his story “Fire in the Hole” and the character Raylan Givens, who appears in several novels; the show won a Peabody Award. Throughout Leonard’s career, he was praised by writers ranging from Martin Amis, who called him a literary genius, to Stephen King, who called him the great American writer. Leonard died at his home near Detroit at age 87, survived by five children from his first marriage and a slew of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

After Leonard’s death, critic Anthony Lane wrote that “a single page of [Leonard] made other writers, especially the loftier and more lauded variety, seem about as legible as wallpaper paste” (“The Dutch Accent: Elmore Leonard’s Talk,” August 21, 2013, The New Yorker).

Have an extraordinarily legible Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.