The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [1]
He’d also get a little writing done at the agency. “I’d put my arm in the drawer and have the tablet in there and I’d just start writing and if somebody came in I’d stop writing and close the drawer.”
Elmore began to focus on a particular area of the West for his stories. “I liked Arizona and New Mexico,” he said. “I didn’t care that much for the High Plains Indians, I liked the Apaches because of their reputation as raiders and the way they dressed, with a headband and high moccasins up to their knees. I also liked their involvement with things Mexican and their use of Spanish names and words.”
The Complete Western Stories begins with Elmore’s first five shorts: Apache and cavalry stories set in Arizona in the 1870s and ’80s.
“I was disappointed by rejections from the better-paying magazines, The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers,” Elmore says. “They felt my stories were too relentless and lacked lighter moments or comic relief. But I continued to write what pleased me while trying to improve my style.”
The next direction for Elmore’s writing was obvious: write a Western novel. The result was The Bounty Hunters (1953), the prototype for many an Elmore Leonard Western. Take the most dangerous Apache, the wisest scout, and the greediest outlaw, put them all together in the desert sun, and see who wins.
As he spun out novels and short stories from five to seven in the morning, Hollywood came calling and bought a Dime Western story, “Three-Ten to Yuma,” and from Argosy, “The Captives,” filmed as The Tall T. Elmore was excited but in both cases “saw how easily Hollywood could screw up a simple story.” Both films, released in 1957, are now regarded as minor classics.
Elmore reached his goal as a Western writer in April of 1956, when The Saturday Evening Post published his story “Moment of Vengeance.”
In less than five years he had entered the pantheon of Western writers. But the Western was on its way out. “Television killed the Western,” Elmore says. “The pulps were mostly gone by then too, the market was drying up.”
In 1960, Elmore took his profit sharing from Campbell-Ewald—$11,500—with the intention of becoming a full-time writer. He had put his ten years in. “The money would have lasted six months, and in that time I could write a book and sell it.” Instead, the family bought a house and he wrote freelance advertising copy and educational films to pay the bills until the movie version of his novel Hombre was bought by a studio in 1966, and he finally had the money to write his first non-Western novel, The Big Bounce.
But he wasn’t through with the Westerns by any means. He had yet to write what many consider to be his masterpiece.
Just before his five-year fiction-writing hiatus, in 1961, he wrote a story for Roundup, a Western Writers of America anthology, called “Only Good Ones,” the story of Bob Valdez, soon to be the classic Elmore Leonard hero who is misjudged by the antagonist, “the bad guys realizing too late they’ll be lucky to get out of this alive.”
Six years later, in search of an idea for a novel he could sell to the movies, Elmore picked up “Only Good Ones” and, in seven weeks, expanded it into Valdez Is Coming (1970) which was brought to the big screen with Burt Lancaster three years later.
“Look what I got away with,” Elmore says. “In the final scene of Valdez there is no shootout, not even in the film version. Writing this one I found that I could loosen up, concentrate on bringing the characters to life with recognizable traits, and ignore some of the conventions found in most Western stories.”
The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard charts the evolution of Elmore’s style and particular sound from the very beginning of his writing career. In five years, between