The prolific novelist, best known for crime fiction, rarely held his tongue when it came to adaptations of his work. He was “completely in no way afraid of saying ‘this is a piece of s—,’” says screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez, who admits to writing “one of the worst film adaptations of an Elmore Leonard novel.”

That would be the 2004 remake of “The Big Bounce,” which earned as much ire as the original 1969 version, which Leonard walked out of 15 minutes into its premiere. As Leonard’s son Peter puts it today: “My father felt responsible for two of the worst movies ever made, from his one novel.”

Hollywood is littered with clumsy attempts at bringing Leonard’s work to the big and small screens. The notable film successes came in a swift burst in the 1990s: Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Get Shorty” (1995), Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” (1997) and Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” (1998). These were Leonard’s favorites, according to Peter. They comprised a “Leonard Renaissance,” in the words of Charles Rzepka, a professor emeritus at Boston University and author of “Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard.”

Then in 2010 came a television success: “Justified,” the FX drama starring Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, a hard-nosed, law-bending character from multiple Leonard novels. “Raylan,” the author’s final book before his death in 2013, was reportedly inspired by the show’s warm reception by critics and viewers.

On July 18, after an eight-year absence, “Justified” returns as an eight-episode limited series based on Leonard’s 1980 novel “City Primeval.” This time, the author is no longer around to pass judgment. But a question remains, and it has been asked for 60 years now: What would Leonard think?

In 2001, Leonard published 10 rules for writing. Among them: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters” and “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” Leonard did not write flashy prose. His true gift was in creating complex characters — often criminals out of their depths — with as few words as possible and usually through dialogue from his “Panasonic ear,” in the words of one critic. This made Leonard’s material seem ripe for screen adaptation.

“He had an uncanny ability to recreate the sound of a particular character he had in mind,” Rzepka says. Leonard “said many, many times, ‘When you read my books, you don’t hear me. I try to be invisible.’ He doesn’t want you to pay attention to him. He wants you to pay attention to his characters. The characters he creates are compelling, in part because their voices are so plausible.” These characters and dialogue are catnip for filmmakers, who have been adapting Leonard’s work since the 1950s. But something was often lost in translation, or adaptation, from page to screen.

“When I’m writing I see real people and hear people” but “when I view the picture I see, too often, actors acting,” Leonard reportedly wrote in his letter to Reynolds, according to CrimeReads. “I hear what seems to me too many beats between exchanges, pauses for reactions, smiles for the benefit of the audience, like saying, ‘Get it?’”

During the Leonard Renaissance of the ’90s, the directors “not only made an effort to catch the voice that they heard,” Rzepka says, but they also “understood his sense of humor.” And that is often where things go awry. Take “Stick,” a perfect example of a book that seems easy to translate to the screen. It’s slick. It’s fun. It moves.

And it’s funny, not because the characters are making great jokes but because of how ridiculous they are. The humor is often deadpan and baked in the writing. But in the film, “the actors almost deliver their lines with a wink, and then wait for a reaction like it’s a comedy,” Peter Leonard says, adding, “I think that is a recurring problem. The directors should play it straight.”

When Barry Sonnenfeld decided he wanted to adapt “Get Shorty,” Leonard’s 1990 novel about a loan shark who becomes a movie producer, the author hesitated. Sonnenfeld was fresh off directing “The Addams Family” and “Addams Family Values,” whose comedic tone was grandiose. So he called Leonard.

“What I said to Elmore, which allowed him to let us option the book,” Sonnenfeld says, “was ‘Look, the problem with most comedies is they try to be funny. The great thing about your book is you have dumb people in absurd situations, and what you want to do is play the reality of the situation.’ Never play the comedy. Let the audience find the comedy.”

In other words, Sonnenfeld was going to play it straight. And it worked. The $30 million movie, which starred John Travolta, Gene Hackmen and Rene Russo, was beloved by critics and grossed more than $115 million at the box office. Understanding Leonard’s tone and strictly adhering to the book, though, are two different beasts.

The film version of “Get Shorty,” for example, offers a cleaner ending than the novel. Sonnenfeld points out that “Justified” found six seasons of material in a few novels and short stories by taking the basic premise and running with it. “They were never slaves to the book,” Sonnenfeld says. “They used the situation.”

Davey Holmes hewed to this strategy in 2017 when he created the Epix television series “Get Shorty,” which is based on the general premise of the novel. It is more homage than adaptation. “I loved the tone so much that I had faith that love would keep me on track,” Holmes says.

“So I could really change anything I wanted, so long as I was true to what I loved so much,” specifically the violence of Leonard’s gangster characters juxtaposed with their “vulnerability and emotional pathos.” Says Holmes, “There is something very funny about tough guys who are processing emotions and trying to make their way in the world in which violence is not always the perfect solution.”

Jack Ryan, the main character in the novel “The Big Bounce,” threw out his back playing minor league baseball and was, as a result, rejected from enlisting in the military. “He’s a washout in baseball,” says Rzepka, the Leonard scholar. “He’s a washout as a veteran. He entertains himself with fantasies of fighting combat missions in Vietnam, when he really has a job in this little beach town in Michigan picking up trash. The bottom line is he is a total jerk. He is not cool.”

But in the first movie adaptation, in 1969, Ryan O’Neal portrays the character as a cool Vietnam vet. “What could be more contrary to the spirit of that book?” Rzepka says. “No wonder Leonard was appalled. When directors or screenwriters think they can do better, it’s the road to perdition. It ain’t gonna work.”

Thirty-five years later, Gutierrez says he hoped “to go back to the book and do it right.” He fell in love with Leonard’s work as a teenager, after moving from Venezuela to the United States, and wrote a script of “The Big Bounce” before even obtaining the film rights. “Elmore Leonard’s whole main thing was like the criminals wake up and have Cheerios in their underwear just like the quote-unquote ‘good guys,’” Gutierrez says. “There are no good guys or bad guys, and that is appealing.”

Eventually a studio picked up his script, assembled a cast featuring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman and Gary Sinise, and hired George Armitage to direct. Leonard was intrigued. Perhaps the film “renaissance” of his work would continue. But somewhere along the line — Gutierrez can’t pinpoint where — everything fell apart. Gutierrez says “the movie bears very little resemblance to what I wrote.”

“The Big Bounce” remake has the breezy tone and brightly lit look of the studio comedies Wilson often starred in, not the hard-boiled sizzle of Leonard’s novel. “Elmore was super excited his book was finally going to be done correctly,” Gutierrez says. “Somehow by the time I arrived on a set visit in Hawaii and saw dailies, a bunch of cooks in the kitchen had turned what was a super-lean crime coming-of-age story in Detroit into a sex surf comedy in Hawaii.”

The writers room for the original “Justified” series had a simple philosophy: What would Elmore do? Writers wore bracelets emblazoned with WWED. This ethos earned them the trust of Leonard and his son Peter, who years after his father’s death approached Michael Dinner, one of the “Justified” writers, and asked if he would be interested in adapting another Leonard property: “City Primeval.”

Separately, Olyphant and Quentin Tarantino, another Leonard fan, came up with the idea of mashing together the world of “City Primeval” and the world of “Justified.” The result, “Justified: City Primeval,” takes Olyphant’s Raylan Givens out of the hollers of Kentucky (where most of the original series was set) and drops him in the middle of a crumbling Detroit, even though his character does not appear in the original novel.

Why not? After all, it sounds exactly like something Elmore would do. “My father loved what they did” on the original series, Peter says. “The only thing he was concerned about before he saw the pilot was ‘Does Tim Olyphant know how to wear a Stetson?’ And of course he did, a little over the eyes the way Elmore’s fictional cowboys did.”

In the new series, Raylan Givens has a teenage daughter and finds himself grappling with the complicated racial politics of being a White officer in a predominantly Black city. “In Elmore’s world, all the characters are working an angle,” Dinner says. “They’ve all got their agenda, and they’re complicated. The cops are complicated in a complicated world for cops.”

The room tackled these complications as they did in the original series, Dinner says, by keeping to the mantra: “Know when to steal from Elmore, know when to emulate that voice, and know when to make it your own.” It is now impossible to know what Leonard would think, but his body of work illustrates what Leonard would do.