Peter Leonard knows the exact moment that he wanted his father Elmore Leonard's job. It was after a long, tense day at the ad agency, dressed in a suit, making pitches to a room of bored suits. Peter had gone over to his father's house to find the eminent crime writer lounging around dressed in a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, jeans and sandals. "I said, I have to have a job like this."

And so a second generation of Leonards went into mystery/crime writing.

The elder Leonard is, of course, the acknowledged master of the genre after 44 novels ("Swag," "Get Shorty," "Killshot," "LaBrava"), countless screenplays, novellas and short stories in a writing career that spans 60 years. His finely honed sentences can sound as flinty/poetic as Hemingway or as hard-boiled as Raymond Chandler. His ear for the way people talk — or should — is peerless.

Peter Leonard was talking about his career epiphany in a meeting room in the basement of the Baldwin Library in Birmingham, appearing with his father at a standing-room-only dual book signing Jan. 19. (Peter's latest: "Voices of the Dead.")

It was a rare appearance, one of only three the elder Leonard did to celebrate the release of his latest novel, his 45th, "Raylan: A Novel" (William Morrow, $26.99). The book makes a splashy debut Sunday at No. 7 on the New York Times best-seller list.

A longtime Bloomfield Village resident, Leonard could have moved to Hollywood several times over, he has so many fans and friends there. But he stayed in Detroit — why? "I like it," Leonard said. "Great music … lot of poverty. I wouldn't move anywhere else. Now, it's too late. I'd never be able to drive in San Francisco or Los Angeles."

The new novel, "Raylan," and the success of the hit FX series "Justified," in which actor Timothy Olyphant plays coal-miner-turned-U.S. marshal Raylan Givens, marks yet another career high for the author. "Justified" took the character of Givens from an earlier Leonard novella, "Fire in the Hole" (2000)....