The popular American crime writer Elmore Leonard has died aged 87. He was born in New Orleans in 1925, after serving in the Navy during World War II, he graduated from the University of Detroit and began work as a copy writer with an advertising agency. Here he began his writing career firstly with short stories, with his first publication in 1951.He continued with short stories throughout his career, but moved onto writing Western novels, the first The Bounty Hunters being published in 1953. Through the years he went on to write crime and mystery novels, also screen plays. 19 movies and 7 television series have been adapted from Elmore Leonard’s short stories and novels, the best known are the crime-comedy Get Shorty, the western 3.10 to Yuma, adapted in 1957 and again in 2007, Hombre adapted in 1967 and The Big Bounce adapted in 1969 and again 2004. His last novel Raylan published in 2012 has been adapted, with several other Leonard works into the continuing television series Justified.

The well known fiction and screenplay writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has died in New York aged 85 years. Born in Cologne to Polish Jewish parents, the family moved to Britain in 1939, where she received her education. In 1951 she married an Indian Parsi architect, and spent the next 64 years living in Delhi. Her first novel, To Whom She Will was published in 1955. Eleven more novels and eight collections of short stories would follow, all much acclaimed and most set in India. Her novel titled Heat and Dust, published in 1975, was the Booker Prize winner for that year. The same year she moved to New York, and began working with film makers Merchant and Ivory, as a screen writer, producing 23 screenplays, winning two Oscars for A Room with a View in 1985 and Howards End in 1992. Her last published fiction was My Nine Lives in 2004, although she completed two screenplays after with the last in 2008.