Elmore Leonard - RIP. 

I posted this answer to somebody in an online forum, but want to repeat it here, because it think it part of the many reasons why so many readers recognized the brilliance of Elmore Leonard, and because it is a large part of why I enjoy his stories:

Elmore Leonard was the first author since Samuel Richardson ( 1689 – 1761) to understand how conversation actually sounds ... who understood its flow - its pauses, its stumblings, its extemporaneous freshness - how it works. After all, no single conversation has ever happened before. Of course the conversations (and character thought-processes) were of a different time and thus have a different flavor than Richardson's. But they are time-separated colleagues in observational perception and brilliancy.