Elmore Leonard is best known today as a writer of crime and suspense novels, but he cut his teeth on westerns, publishing his first short story in 1951 (“The Trail of the Apache”). I recently purchased The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (Harper, 2007), planning to read them over time, between other books; however, the stories are so enthralling, it’s beginning to look like I’m going to wind up reading the whole thing straight through.
The tales take us into the desert country of Arizona and New Mexico, and introduce us to cavalry officers, scouts, outlaws, lawmen and those unparalleled guerilla fighters, the Apaches. Leonard has an exceptional talent for being able to make the reader feel as if he’s practically in the midst of the action, with his descriptions of brassy skies and choking alkali dust and narrow trails clinging to the wooded sides of low mountains, alive with danger. And the men he describes are the weathered and wary denizens of a savage world dotted with the occasional town that represents something only approximating civilization.
This volume includes “3:10 to Yuma”, which has been adapted for the movies twice, and “The Captives”, which was also made into the dark and violent film, The Tall T, a superb Randolph Scott vehicle. For fans of the western genre, you’d be hard-pressed to find stories more gripping than these.
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I have the entire Zane Grey collection. I just wish I had time to read this stuff. Could you get Obama to adopt a 36 hour day?
ReplyDeleteI like his westerns a lot, although they are a lot more postmodern and gray area than L'Amour, who I prefer.
ReplyDelete3:10 to Yuma is one of the rare movies that actually improved in the remaking...and the Glenn Ford original was excellent.
ReplyDeleteI hated the remake, with ninja Crowe teleporting around, the guys standing around like morons as a guy rides by, shoots one of them, then poses nearby, with the guy really being chained to a wagon instead of faking it, missing someone 2 feet away with his back to you, then being burned right in front of a fort with no response from the soldiers... I hated the "we have 70 miles to travel" then showing up within an hour or so anyway, and the fire of the wagon being visible from the supposedly short route. I hated the indians firing at the impossible to see targets in the dark, but ignoring the guys all around the campfire. I hated the way the railroad company executive was ignored by everyone who should have been terrified of him and his wealth and power. I hated how the Crowe character was so unbelievably evil yet we're supposed to like him because he reads a bible and draws pictures?
ReplyDeleteIt was just awful.
Don't be shy, Chris, tell us how you really feel.*g*
ReplyDeleteThe greatest Western of all time was "The Searchers", both the movie starring John Wayne, and the novel by Alan LeMay.
ReplyDeleteNext was "Hondo", another John Wayne movie based on a Louis L'Amour short story entitled "The Gift of Cochise".
John Wayne, for all his supposed evil, America-loving, rightwingnut sins, once said in an interview that he knew "everything there was to know about the American West." This wasn't actorly braggadocio. The man was a scholar and collector and did actually know what he was talking about.
However, that doesn't excuse the fact that the so-called "Comanches" and "Apaches" in those two movies actually spoke Navajo (I know this because I spent my tenth year of childhood in New Mexico, a hundred yards from the Navajo reservation, and made it my ten-year-old task in school to read and learn a few spare words of that fascinating alien civilization). Also, the singular gaffe of "The Searchers" is the scene where the captive Indians are fording a snowbanked river, and one of the blanket-wrapped women is wearing sunglasses, while in the far distance, you can spot the tiny, shiny blobs of automobiles traversing a highway.
Our American West has a romanticized, but astonishingly well-connected link to the present. Movies and novels don't begin to describe the reality.
Rebecca: Sunglasses? Automobiles? Wow! I can't wait to see that movie, again, 'cause I'll be looking for those anachronisms.
ReplyDeleteThe Searchers really is a great western; John Wayne at his most determined, relentless best.