Westerns (collected 2018) By Elmore Leonard

One of my summer reads was the collected Westerns of Elmore Leonard published by the Library of America.  It includes four books and eight short stories written in the 1950s and 60s by Leonard, before he switched to writing crime novels, for which he became better known (Get Shorty).  His Westerns though include some of the classics of the genre: Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and Three Ten to Yuma, all set in the Arizona Territory.  While I don’t consider myself a western aficionado, I rather enjoyed these.  

It would have been rather difficult to avoid Westerns when I was a child, they were an ever present cultural phenomena.  As kids my brother Randy and I could only stay up “past bedtime” if our father stayed up too.  Many a Friday and Saturday nights were spent sprawled on the floor in front of the family’s first color television watching Westerns on the late show – and if my father fell asleep on the couch, we’d sneak in the late-late show too.

And speaking of a by-gone era, most of these works were originally published in their whole, or serialized, in Argosy or Dime Westerns, staples of a magazine culture that has also gone the way of the dinosaur.  Leonard’s writing is flawless, and his story telling is perfectly structured (honed by magazine editors who bought stories based on the word count), and which may account for why so many of his works have been made into movies, some good, most not so good.

Trailer for Hombre starring Paul Newman

Trailer for Valdez is Coming starring Burt Lancaster

There is some difficulty reading books in 2018 that were written in the 50s and 60s.  The acceptable vernacular of the time, grates when read today, never more so than in Forty Lashes Less One, a prison story where two of the main characters are an African American and an AZ-born Mexican-Native American.  By the end of the novel, they will be known as “the Zulu” and “the Apache” though even that wasn’t where the conversation began.  Both are imprisoned for murder.  They are set up against each other by the “civilized” white men who control the prison, then “saved” (sort of) by a minister, eventually becoming allies.  Spoiler: they will get the last laugh.

Valdez is Coming is my favorite of the collected books.  The star of it is a town constable who, based on bad intel, shoots an innocent man and then tries to take up a collection of $200 for the guy’s “woman.”

The full-length novels included in the collection are: Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and Forty Lashes Less One.  The short stories are:  Trail of the Apache, The Rustlers, Three Ten to Yuma, Blood Money, The Captives, The Nagual, The Kid, and The Tonto Woman.

Recommendation:  Great “bedtime” reads, especially for those who no longer stay up to watch the late show.