I’m not deeply immersed in the work of Elmore Leonard yet. But I’m heading in that direction.
He’s best known for his gritty crime novels, many of which have been adapted to film or television and have done well commercially and critically. Jackie Brown, the 1997 big-screen adaptation of Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch, written and directed by Quentin Tarentino, comes to mind. It’s an excellent film with an incredible ensemble cast.
But the part of the Leonard’s body of work that I’m familiar with is the earlier part – the part that’s not as well known. For the first ten years of his writing career, beginning in the early 1950s, he specialized in westerns – mostly short stories, but a few novels too. This is where I took the deep dive a few years ago, and only more recently have I started to make my way forward in his bibliography.
It was a matter of research more than anything else. At the end of 2022, I committed to writing two western short stories for anthologies that would be published just a month apart during the following summer. One of the story collections was Spurs & Six-Shooters: Tales of the Old West from Ohio-based Stormgate Press, and the other was Six-Gun Legends: Ten Rounds of Wild West Action from Flinch Books, the small press I co-founded in 2015.
I say research because western fiction was a genre that I wasn’t terribly comfortable writing. I’m still not, to be honest, and maybe that would be painfully obvious to anyone who might read either or both stories. But writing is rarely about comfort. More often it’s about diving in and seeing what happens and where things go.
But I had to get some kind of handle – however tenuous – on the proper vocabulary and tone. How does one write about cowboys and horses, sheriffs and outlaws, ranches and saloons? Before I could hope to write a single word that sounded even remotely authentic, I needed to spend a good three months diving into several dozen short stories by three well-known western writers: Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Elmore Leonard.
Leonard’s stories were all in one book, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, published by Harper in 2004. Probably the most famous story in the entire collection is “3:10 to Yuma,” which was adapted to film in 1957 and again in 2007.
I was immediately impressed by Leonard’s level of detail, his mastery of the language and flavor of the American West in the years after the Civil War and before the dawn of the 20th century. The men were hard and hardworking, and sometime mean. The land and the elements were unforgiving. The women were steadfast. The indigenous people were fierce but proud. I was even more impressed when I discovered that his origins had little to do with the West.
He was born 100 years ago this week – on October 11, 1925 – in New Orleans, Louisiana. His family relocated to Detroit in 1934. Although not exactly steeped in the culture and tradition of the Old West, Detroit would be Leonard’s home for much of his life. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, then attended the University of Detroit, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy in 1950.
He sold his first western story to Argosy in 1951, then spent the next several years immersing himself in the genre and churning out more than a half-dozen novels and nearly thirty short stories. Like “3:10 to Yuma,” several other of his western were adapted to the big screen
He started his pivot to crime novels in 1969 with The Big Bounce, a story of a drifter named Jack Ryan who falls in with a young woman – his boss’ girlfriend – who gets her kicks via breaking and entering and robbery. I read this one about a year ago. It’s a short burst of a story in which Leonard creates a protagonist struggling at the crossroads between getting seduced – literally and figuratively – into a criminal lifestyle or getting on the straight and narrow.
His bibliography following The Big Bounce until his death in 2013 includes some of the most popular crime fiction of the past half-century, including Mr. Majestyk (1974), 52 Pickup (1974), City Primeval (1980), Glitz (1985), Get Shorty (1990), Maximum Bob (1991), Rum Punch (1992), and many others.
Obviously, there’s still plenty of Elmore Leonard territory that I have yet to cover, but the trip westward was a good place to start. And when I put down his books and do some writing of my own, I’ll do my best to remember some well-known advice he left behind for young up-and-coming writers as well as seasoned veterans of the craft:
“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”