Richard Bissell, High Water (1954)

Elmore Leonard once said that he learned to write humor from this novel about Mississippi River bargemen. The plot of the novel is suspenseful, while its cast of 20 or so characters drives eight loads of coal upriver from St. Louis to St. Paul during a flood.

Bissell immerses the reader in the world of these workingmen, all of them nervous in the ever-rising waters and agitated in each other’s too-familiar company. The narrator is Duke, a first mate, who has known many years of commercial transport on inland waterways, a single man with a girl in every port.

There is a well-defined hierarchy of authority onboard from the towboat’s two pilots, Ironhat and Casey, down to the cook, engineers, mess boy, and deck hands. Duke and Jackoniski, the two mates, are often at odds.

Trouble creeps up on the crew in increments as they work their way from lock to lock, the pilots sometimes complaining that the boat is not steering well. Then one of the eight barge loads mysteriously sinks and a deck hand disappears, apparently drowned.

Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado (1954)

Elmore Leonard’s early western novels show a gifted short story writer learning how to master the longer narrative form. The Bounty Hunters (1953) is a sometimes awkward attempt to extend and enlarge characters and situations that would make sharply conceived material for short stories but thin out and lose focus over the length of a novel.

The Law at Randado shows him still learning, but he’s turning what he knows of the short story into what holds together well for its 250 pages and more than maintains our interest. The novel still reads like a series of short stories, but each flows smoothly into the next, with continuing characters, and a central thread linking two of them, a sheriff and a young deputy he has hired, Kirby Frye.

Plot. The premise of the plot concerns Frye’s having to deal with a cattleman, Sundeen, who prefers a vigilance committee to keep order in town. Matters come to a head when the self-elected vigilantes hang two Mexicans awaiting trial for rustling, and the young deputy is beaten up as he attempts to assert his authority as “the law at Randado.”

First edition

The main action of the novel involves an extended manhunt, as sheriff, deputy and a posse ride off in pursuit of the vigilantes to serve warrants and deal with any resistance to arrest, which they get more than a fair share of. The chief instigator, Sundeen, is chased to an abandoned mine camp (a scene found again in the novel Hombre) and from there all the way back to town, where he and Frye have a final showdown in the saloon.

The other thread linking the episodes of the novel concerns the sheriff and his deputy, as the younger man proves this worth on the job, despite the odds against him, and the sheriff’s initial judgment of his character and capabilities is confirmed. 

Hombre (1967)

Based on Elmore Leonard’s 1961 novel of the same name (reviewed here recently), this film offers an interesting example of adaptation. The basic plot is unchanged, but the screenwriters have introduced and substituted different characters. The result is a rather different story.

Plot. Leonard’s novel revisits the central situation in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). An assortment of stagecoach passengers gets into trouble while crossing a stretch of perilous desert terrain. Instead of a wanted man (John Wayne) who joins them, the pivotal character is a white man raised by Indians (Paul Newman). Instead of undergoing attacks by hostiles, the coach is held up by a gang of thieves.

Leonard's novel

The gang takes a hostage, the wife of an Indian agent, but Newman kills one of them, and a stolen bag of money is retrieved. Set afoot in the desert with little in the way of food and water, the passengers must reach safety before the gang finds them again to reclaim the money—and either leave them to die or kill them outright.

Characters. Newman’s character, John Russell, besides being twice the age of the 21-year-old created by Leonard, seems very close to the man we find in the novel. He is single-mindedly focused on survival—his own. What the others do, whether they stick with him or not, is their own business. Expressing nothing but cold, calm determination, he seems never roused to an emotion.

How to write like Elmore Leonard:Gunsights (1979)

2002 edition

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing have been circulated widely on the Internet, but they are more obfuscation than revelation about the art and craft of writing fiction. Reading one of his westerns, Gunsights (1979), you can begin to glean what makes his novels so good.

In this novel, two men are on opposite sides of a conflict between a mining company and a scattering of settlers on an Arizona mountainside: Apaches, Mexicans, and former 10th Cavalry regulars. The two central characters were at one time friends and partners, and the novel begins in Sonora with their retrieval of an Apache chief and a white girl.

While there, they are involved in the shooting of a gang who have been after the same chief to collect a large bounty. Now one of the two former partners is employed by the mining company attempting to drive the settlers out of their homes. The other is an Indian agent, defending them.

This could be a set-up for a conventional western novel, the two men now enemies—one of them turned villain as he works for the mining company, the other heroically serving the cause of justice until there’s a final shootout. Well, that’s not what happens. It’s much better, and here are some reasons:

Strong characters. Leonard’s characters are not the usual stock characters found in traditional westerns. You cannot anticipate what they are going to do or say. That’s because they are smarter than you and me, and their intelligence is mostly intuitive.

1979 edition

Characters in this novel get into trouble when they think too much. It may only be a split-second thought before firing a gun, and the delay makes the difference between life and death. The ones who survive act when the feeling is right and wade in without knowing what’s coming next, just trusting their instincts. Thus, when they act, we are likely to be surprised by what they do.

Part of their strength as characters is their age. They are not youths as is often the case in conventional westerns. Bren Early and Dana Moon, the two central characters, are in their 30s. They have already grown up.

Plot. Characters like this drive a plot. Leonard plays with this idea by casting a group of newspaper reporters who have come to Arizona for a particular story. For them, the “plot” they are after is the conventional one—an armed confrontation between two men who used to be friends and partners.

But the two men refuse to cooperate because they are not enemies and have other priorities. For one thing, they don’t want to be bothered. For another, they have a mutual enemy in a third man from that incident south of the border a dozen years ago—a man they thought was dead. Looking for the plot they expect to develop, the news reporters continually miss what’s going on under their noses.

Villains. Leonard’s villains eventually die because they are ignorant. They can be brutally cold-blooded and therefore scary, but confronting a foe who isn’t afraid of them, they are at a disadvantage. If that foe is smart enough to outwit them, they are stymied. And if they are dumb enough to make a stupid mistake, like pay too little regard to a woman with a shotgun, they are dead men.

The conventional western often uses vengeance as the motivation for the main character’s actions. And the villain is finally avenged for some horrible misdeed. In Leonard’s novel, revenge is what’s driving the villain. He wants payback for a nasty gunshot wound that narrowly killed him and left him with a disfigured face.

Elmore Leonard, The Bounty Hunters (1953)

This was Elmore Leonard’s first published novel, written in his late twenties. In it, already fully developed, is the trademark edge that he brings to his fiction. With its opening scene in a barbershop in Contention, Arizona, we get just that—an exchange of contentious dialogue that’s both bristling and funny. It’s the same mastery of verbal dispute between people at sharp odds with each other that makes “Justified” so much fun today.

Plot. Leonard’s central character is an Army scout, Dave Flynn, who escorts a fresh young lieutenant south of the border to bring back a renegade Apache chief. Flynn is a Civil War veteran who resigned his commission, disillusioned after witnessing a commanding officer’s act of cowardice. For the lieutenant, Bowers, the story tells of a fledgling officer learning how to use his wits and his own natural cunning instead of going by the book.

In Mexico, a bounty is being paid for Apache scalps. What the two men find is a gang of norteamericanos who are killing Mexicans and presenting their scalps for payment by chief of rurales, Lamas Duro. The rurales are a police force made up chiefly of untrained law enforcers and former bandits. Duro is a contemptible, terrified man, subduing his fears with steady drinking. The gang leader, Curt Lazair, is a soulless murderer of innocents, who has taken a young woman captive and is keeping her at the gang’s hideout.

Flynn rescues the girl. Meanwhile, Bowers discovers that Duro’s second in command, a veteran of the revolt against the French, is shamed by how he is being used as an instrument of injustice and incompetence. The novel’s climax involves both an Apache attack and armed retaliation by the men of the village against Duro. Motivation for all that happens in the closing chapters produces awkward and not so plausible complications.

Character. Flynn makes an enjoyable hero, much as Raylan Givens in “Justified.” He is sharply intelligent and steady, an individual too independent to take orders from men he can’t respect. He is his own authority, with a knowledge of the world and others learned the hard way. Yet he doesn’t venture all that far from social connections. Unwilling to give himself to a career in the Army, he still accepts a job as a scout for that same organization.

Flynn has seen it all. He’s witnessed the dishonorable behavior of men, shirking duty with impunity. Though disillusioned he could be utterly cynical, but he’s not. There is a man or two he still admires. Chief of scouts, Joe Madora, is one of them. He is astute, trustworthy, and a reliable friend. He also has a sense of humor. The Indian chief, Soldado Viejo, also wins Flynn’s respect. When the two meet, the scene evolves into a long match of wits that ends at best in a draw.

Commentary: Family values in the western

Two westerns have been on my mind lately: Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River (1959) and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead (1973). Add to that another, Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949). All of them concern small nuclear families on the frontier that are being menaced by villains.

In Schaefer’s Wyoming, the villain is a cattle baron who simply wants settlers off his open range. The mysterious stranger Shane, takes up residence with a settler family, the Starretts, then defends them by killing the cattleman’s hired gunslinger. The story is told by a boy, who has only a boy’s understanding of conflict and danger, so the violence is muted.

A decade later, Leonard’s novel, set in Arizona, whittles this story down to a long confrontation between a settler and a whole family of villains. Civil War veteran, Cable, has been off fighting for the Confederacy. After being wounded several times, he is sent home. There he finds that Union sympathizers have taken over his house and pastures. He has to evict them by force in chapter 1, and for the rest of the novel he must defend family and property. It’s kill or be killed.

L’Amour blends these two stories and sets his short novel in Colorado, where his family, the McKaskels, is protected from a nasty gang of villains by a Shane-like frontiersman and gunman, Con Vallian. The atmosphere from the start is another one of kill or be killed. While the killing in Shane takes place at a saloon in town, Leonard and L’Amour bring it right to the family’s doorstep.

Fiction, including westerns, is a product of the time when it was written. And put in chronological order, from 1949 to 1973, these three westerns make an interesting progression. While the central situation is the same—family vs. menacing villains—the escalation of violence from Schaefer to L’Amour is notable.

Shane. I have come to read Shane as a postwar story in tune with the reentry of WWII soldiers to the homeland. Trained to kill, many of them survivors of fierce combat, these returning veterans were not all successful making the transition to peacetime. We know now from modern psychology, especially after Vietnam and with wars in the Middle East, that the stress of life-and-death conditions can be traumatizing.

Shane can be read as a return from the killing fields to hearth and home. Like the combat veteran, Shane has a history he does not speak of, and he attempts to leave it behind by becoming another kind of man, a farmer like Starrett. Unlike the film, which preserves Shane’s identity as a gunman, Schaefer has him actually put away his gun belt, like a past he wants to disown.

The lesson of the story is that Shane is forever marked by his past. Like the returning veteran forever changed by his experience on the battlefield, he’s fated never to settle down into family life and the workaday world. Most of all, he can never find peace.

There is sadness and a sense of loss as he rides off at the end, but only after there is no longer need for his services as a gunman. His job is done. For Starrett, the range war and the killing are also over, and the novel ends with him at the center of stability and restored order—husband, father, and respected community leader.