Elmore Leonard in film/TV gallery

Arguably the best of Budd Boetticher's B-westerns, The Tall T has the tick-tock, race-against-time pacing of a first-rate thriller. Loaded with harrowing performances and peppered with Leonard's down-and-dirty macho dialogue, the film pits Randolph Scott against baddie Richard Boone — who's taken Maureen O'Sullivan hostage and holds her for ransom. Leonard's genius is in showing us just how alike his hero and villain are despite the color of their hats. —Chris Nashawaty

A pair of well-intentioned attempts to adapt Leonard's voice to the small screen. Maximum Bob was crazypants wallow, with Beau Bridges as a redneck judge at the center of an eccentric cast. It was ahead of its time, which is probably why it only lasted for seven episodes. Give ABC credit: They tried again with Karen Sisco, an old-fashioned crime thriller starring Carla Gugino as the badass female Marshal played by Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight. Debuting opposite Law & Order, Sisco never stood a chance — although Gugino wound up kinda-sorta-pretty-much reprising the role for a Justified guest appearance. —Darren Franich

Four years after teaming up to make Hud, director Martin Ritt and Paul Newman reunite in this white-hot riff on John Ford's classic western, Stagecoach. Newman stars as John Russell, a brooding outcast who was raised by Apaches and who also happens to be the only hope that a coach full of flawed passengers (including Frederic March and Barbara Rush) have in surviving an attack by ruthless bandits. Tense and lean with a moral streak as wide as its Death Valley vistas, Hombre is top-notch Leonard. —Chris Nashawaty

Leonard served as an executive producer on the FX drama, which stars Timothy Olyphant as Stetson-wearing Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the lead character in three of his novels — Pronto, Riding the Rap, and 2012's Raylan (which would be his last, mined by the show's writers) — along with the novella Fire in the Hole, upon which the pilot was based. Showrunner Graham Yost, who gave his writers each a bracelet that read ''WWED'' (What Would Elmore Do?) when the series began, says that's the question the room always comes back to: ''It's Elmore Leonard, and that's why we're here — to do that peculiar dark, funny, exciting thing that Elmore does. In our best weeks we come close, I don't think we ever surpass. But that's our great gift, that we're all going the same way. It just wouldn't work if it was anything other than that,'' he told EW in 2012. The Peabody- and AFI-honored series has also earned Emmy nominations for Olyphant and costar Walton Goggins and statues for Margo Martindale and Jeremy Davies. —Mandi Bierly

Quentin Tarantino was a very vocal Leonard obsessive — so much so that, after Pulp Fiction, he got the film rights to three of Leonard's novels. He ultimately chose to adapt Rum Punch. The resulting film makes some fairly significant changes to Leonard's book — including transforming the lead character from Jackie Burke (a fortysomething white woman) into Jackie Brown, fortysomething black woman and walking homage to star Pam Grier's Blaxploitation past. But the result earned Leonard's stamp of approval, and is probably the best translation of Leonard's style to the big screen: Long leisurely dialogue scenes that gradually conjure up a web of betrayals, all of it ending with a very unexpected gunshot. —Darren Franich

How appropriate that the modern onscreen renaissance for Elmore Leonard on Film kicked off with Get Shorty, an adaptation of 1990 book about a small-time gangster who dreams of being a Hollywood big shot. A fresh-off-his-comeback John Travolta leads a dynamite cast that includes Gene Hackman, Rene Russo, and the late Dennis Farina, a man who seemed born to speak Leonard's dialogue. —Darren Franich

Added to the National Film Registry in 2012 and nominated for a 1958 BAFTA, Delmer Daves' take on Leonard's 1953 short story emphasized the pop psychology ethos of its day. Glenn Ford and Van Heflin serve up standout performances as ''devious persuader'' Ben Wade and cash-strapped rancher Dan Evans, respectively, their characters engaging in a battles both mental and physical while waiting for the titular train. Fifty years later, James Mangold directed a remake with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale taking on the lead roles. Mangold's Yuma picked up two Oscar nominations for Best Score and Best Sound Mixing and is generally regarded as elegant and exciting take on the Western, owing in no small part to Leonard's timeless story. —Lanford Beard

The pinnacle of Leonard adaptations, and not just because of the nonstop twisty plot and wall-to-wall dialogue. For all his dizzying stylistic brilliance, Leonard was a noir humanist, able to find the humor in his villains and the dark edge in his heroes — and nothing captures that better than the slow-burn romance of Clooney's bank robber and Lopez's U.S. Marshal, an impossible couple from two very different sides of the law. —Darren Franich