Even though he’s been dead for 10 years, author Elmore Leonard is still intriguing audiences. His character, Raylan Givens, is due back Tuesday when FX premieres “Justified: City Primeval.”

The eight-part series features Givens, the stalwart U.S. Marshal that Leonard first created in his book, “Pronto.” The character endured through three more stories with “Fire in the Hole” transmogrified into TV’s popular “Justified,” which reigned for six seasons.

This time, the Stetson-clad hero finds himself in a new kind of badlands, Detroit.

“We were excited to embrace Detroit as a character in this piece,” said one of the show’s producers, Dave Andron. “Putting Raylan as a stranger in a strange land. And also, it’s the land of Elmore. ‘City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit’ is his first crime novel, and he really embraced Detroit.”

Leonard, who wrote such hits as “Get Shorty,” “Rum Punch” and “Out of Sight,” worked at an ad agency for 10 years while he was struggling to be a novelist.

His first successes were all Westerns like “Hombre,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “Last Stand at Saber River.”

But he grew up in Detroit. Shortly before he died he told me, “All my friends were blue collar. I was a street kid. I played sports all through high school — football and basketball. I loved sports and loved to read. And I listened to people talk, but was never aware of it, though, till — all of a sudden — reviewers are talking about my dialogue.

“I love books that have a lot of dialogue in them. Also they’re easier to write. I like the idea of a lot of white space. It’s a page turner; people are talking.”

People continued to talk about Leonard’s insightful pen. His characters, like Raylan Givens, jumped off the page full-fledged and always unique. He explained the method to his memorable portraits: “I feel more comfortable using the character’s point of view rather than my own,” he said.

“The character looks out and he’s going to have an attitude about that smog or that sunset, and you’re gonna hear it. You’re gonna hear that attitude. If I describe it, you’re going to hear a mediocre description. I always write from a point of view,” he said.

Timothy Olyphant, who plays Givens, says he had no compunctions about returning to his latter-day hero. “Elmore Leonard and (writerexecutive producer) Graham Yost gave us so much material to launch what I’ve always thought was potentially numerous stories,” says Olyphant.

“I thought as long as we were still in the Elmore Leonard world and the Graham Yost world that the two of them created, I just thought I’d love to be there for it.”

That Elmore Leonard world is both lethal and hilarious, often tickling the underbelly of society. “I learned how to write by studying writers that I liked a lot,” Leonard told me.

“Hemingway, I studied him so closely until I realized that the structure, the flow of it, the prose itself, that when I’m parodied I see Hemingway. But I didn’t share Hemingway’s attitude about life, about himself. I didn’t take everything that seriously. I saw a little more humor in life than he did. So I saw other others — John O’Hara, Steinbeck, Richard Bissell. His ‘7 1/2 Cents’ became ‘Pajama Game.’ I read a couple of his books (and thought), ‘That’s the sound I want.’

“All the time, from the very beginning, I was very conscious of style,” Leonard said, “developing my own styles. The way you write most naturally, most effectively, THAT’S your style.”

Calling FX’s “Justified: City Primeval” a sequel or a spinoff is not exactly accurate. “We weren’t trying to recapture the show that we did,” says executive producer and director Michael Dinner.

“We were trying to recapture the tone, Elmore’s tone. And this is a book — ‘City Primeval’ is a book that we really loved the characters in the book. And we thought it would be interesting to pick up with Raylan and catapult him into this story and see him some years down the road where his road is lot shorter in front of him than the road behind.

“So, we felt we could take this story that we really liked a lot, and we could inject Raylan into it and tonally do a show that’s similar, but also let the show that we did grow up a little bit,” says Dinner.

“We felt really good about that. We felt that what we’ve done is something that is true to the show, but not the same show. And we think it’s pretty entertaining.”

Leonard revealed what he thought was the secret to being a successful writer: “You have to have the desire,” he said. “You can have the desire without the talent and maybe you can get by; maybe you can learn enough. But if you have the talent, you have to have the desire to do it. To me, that’s where the satisfaction is, in doing it. A lot of writers don’t like it. I don’t call it work.”