Elmore Leonard.

With Leonard’s reputation as a Western author growing, [Detroit-based advertising agency] Campbell-Ewald saw fit to match Leonard with their truck division, writing copy geared toward the same rough-and-tumble demographic that, essentially, would read like a Western paperback. “Truck ads I had an easier time with,” he later admitted. “You could be straightforward with a truck . . . I’ve never been any good at similes and metaphors.” Much like his father before him, Leonard was soon sent traveling around the country for company “field work,” gathering customer testimonials from satisfied truckers. “I would call on the Chevrolet dealer, who would then introduce me to a truck owner who had some fantastic story to tell about his trucks,” he would later claim, prompting the owner to “say something colloquial,” in the hopes of shaking loose some down-home phrases to tinker with. However, Leonard’s favorite–“You don’t wear that sonofabitch out, you just get tired of looking at it and buy a…