The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [0]
WESTERN
STORIES
OF
ELMORE
LEONARD
CONTENTS
Map
A Conversation with Elmore Leonard
Chapter 1 Trail of the Apache
Chapter 2 Apache Medicine
Chapter 3 You Never See Apaches…
Chapter 4 Red Hell Hits Canyon Diablo
Chapter 5 The Colonel’s Lady
Chapter 6 Law of the Hunted Ones
Chapter 7 Cavalry Boots
Chapter 8 Under the Friar’s Ledge
Chapter 9 The Rustlers
Chapter 10 Three-Ten to Yuma
Chapter 11 The Big Hunt
Chapter 12 Long Night
Chapter 13 The Boy Who Smiled
Chapter 14 The Hard Way
Chapter 15 The Last Shot
Chapter 16 Blood Money
Chapter 17 Trouble at Rindo’s Station
Chapter 18 Saint with a Six-Gun
Chapter 19 The Captives
Chapter 20 No Man's Guns
Chapter 21 The Rancher's Lady
Chapter 22 Jugged
Chapter 23 Moment of Vengeance
Chapter 24 Man with the Iron Arm
Chapter 25 The Longest Day of His Life
Chapter 26 The Nagual
Chapter 27 The Kid
Chapter 28 Only Good Ones
Chapter 29 The Tonto Woman
Chapter 30 “Hurrah for Captain Early!”
About the Author
Also by Elmore Leonard
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
A CONVERSATION
WITH ELMORE LEONARD
ELMORE JOHN LEONARD, Jr., started his life of writing in the fifth grade, when as a student at Blessed Sacrament Grade School in Detroit, he was inspired by a Detroit Times serialization of All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote a play, and staged it at school, the classroom desks serving as no man’s land. He did not write again until his college years at the University of Detroit, where he majored in English. He wrote a few experimental short stories while spending most of his free time reading and going to the movies. “I was discovering who I liked to read,” he said. “I wasn’t reading for story, I was reading for style.”
Sometime shortly after college Elmore decided he wanted to be a writer. “I looked for a genre where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time,” he recalls. “I chose Westerns because I liked Western movies. From the time I was a kid I liked them. Movies like The Plainsman with Gary Cooper in 1936 up through My Darling Clementine and Red River in the late forties.”
There was a surge of interest in Western stories in the early fifties, Elmore notes, “from Saturday Evening Post and Colliers down through Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, and probably at least a dozen pulp magazines, the better ones like Dime Western and Zane Grey Magazine paying two cents a word.”
His first attempt at writing a Western was not a success. “I wrote about a gunsmith that made a certain kind of gun. I have no idea now what the story was about when I sent it to a pulp magazine and it was rejected. I decided I’d better do some research. I read On the Border with Crook, The Truth about Geronimo, The Look of the West, and Western Words, and I subscribed to Arizona Highways. It had stories about guns—I insisted on authentic guns in my stories—stagecoach lines, specific looks at different little facets of the West, plus all the four-color shots that I could use for my descriptions, things I could put in and sound like I knew what I was talking about.”
He distilled all this valuable detail into a ledger book, which became a constant reference for his story writing throughout the decade.
Properly armed with a sense of the West, he wrote his first Western, Tizwin, the Apache name for corn beer. It didn’t sell immediately. “The editor at Argosy passed it on to one of their pulp magazines at Popular Publications,” Elmore remembers, “and they bought it.” And changed the title to “Red Hell Hits Canyon Diablo.” “The Argosy editor said, ‘If you have anything else about this period, we’d like to read it.’ So I sat down and wrote ‘Trail of the Apache,’ which was the first one that was published.”
A growing family and a full-time job as a copywriter on the Chevrolet account at Campbell-Ewald Advertising in Detroit did not give Elmore a lot of time to write.
“I realized that I was going to have to get up at five in the morning if I wanted to write fiction. It took a while, the alarm would go off and I’d roll over. Finally I started