And...maybe? A movie that hit all the main beats of the book would have been a weird mix of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Super Fly, and The Days of Wine and Roses. The last of those is because Leonard joined AA around the time he wrote the book. I could sort of rough out who might have been well cast in the main roles. The predatory ex-con Virgil Royal seems like a good fit for the late Yaphet Kotto, for instance.
The main problem is that the set pieces, the most visually arresting scenes, tend to happen when the two lead characters aren't around. These include a shooting in a hair salon and a crooked debt collector being dangled out a window. But again, the two main characters are elsewhere. The screenwriter would have had to do some patching to fix that.
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I've read some of Elmore Leonard's books but unfortunately, since I haven't read this one, I'll have to take your word about it being good enough to praise and to wish Alfred had got round to filming it. I've wondered a couple of time why it is that the Coen brothers never got around to making one of my favorites, Tishomingo Blues. It would have been a perfect fit for them but, much like Alfred at the time, the brothers appear to have retired or at least their best work is behind them now.
Oh I see what you mean about Yaphet Kotto playing the Robert Mitchum role of the ex-con who decided to rat out his 'friends' in order to stay out of prison but to keep on supplying weapons for a bank robbery in the meanwhile. Kotto could likely have played a similar character in a different film. We'll never know.
Per Jer: Any Elmore Leonard book would make a good crime movie and they would have had to reduce or eliminate the AA stuff but there were enough interesting characters.
You might try looking up the wiki page for films based on the work of Elmore Leonard. 3:10 to Yuma was made twice and both are excellent movies but it looks like nobody had more books and stories turned into films than him.
It's an interesting what-if. Also an open question whether this would have been a good project for him in the latter 70s or whether he'd be better off doing something else. Kind of a moot point, of course. As for the Coen Brothers, they actually did plan at one point to film a Leonard novel called LaBrava with Dustin Hoffman starring. They're of course better off working together but it's been a while since they got around to collaborating. Elmore Leonard seems to mesh most with Quentin Tarantino's style, although Jackie Brown is kind of an oddball among his films.
Kotto was a very good actor and also physically imposing, which is a good and maybe necessary combination for the part. He'd played the ship's engineer in Alien as well as doing James Bond villain duty.
There's some interest in the AA stuff, mostly because the lead female character has completely different personalities depending on whether she's drunk or sober. But recovering alcoholics do sometimes overestimate how fascinating it will be for others.
He was already a successful Western novelist in the 50s, which was when the first 3:10 to Yuma was made. Breaking into crime fiction really extended and expanded his career.
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