the Complete Western Stories Of Elmore Leonard (2004)

CONTENTS:

A Conversation with ELMORE LEONARD
.

Trail of the Apache
.

Apache Medicine
.

You Never See Apaches . . .
.

Red Hell Hits Canyon Diablo
.

The Colonel's Lady
.

Law of the Hunted Ones
.

Cavalry Boots
.

Under the Friar's Ledge
.

The Rustlers
.

Three-Ten to Yuma
.

The Big Hunt
.

Long Night
.

The Boy Who Smiled
.

The Hard Way
.

The Last Shot
.

Blood Money
.

Trouble at Rindo's Station
.

Saint with a Six-Gun
.

The Captives
.

No Man's Guns
.

The Rancher's Lady
.

Jugged
.

Moment of Vengeance
.

Man with the Iron Arm
.

The Longest Day of His Life
.

The Nagual
.

The Kid
.

Only Good Ones
.

The Tonto Woman
.

Hurrah for Captain Early!

*

*

Chapter
1
A Conversation with ELMORE LEONARD
.

ELMORE JOHN LEONARD, Jr., started his life of writing in the fift
h
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," h
e
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 b
e
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 Arg
osy, 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 wrot
e
about a gunsmith that made a certain kind of gun. I have no idea no
w
what the story was about when I sent it to a pulp magazine and it wa
s
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 becam
e
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 change
d
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 wa
s
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 to get up and go into the living room and sit at the coffee table with a yellow pad and try to write two pages. I made a rule that I had to get something down on paper before I could pu
t
the water on for the coffee. Know where you're going and then put the wate
r
on. That seemed to work because I did it for most of the fifties."

He'd also get a little writing done at the agency. "I'd put my arm i
n
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 thei
r
reputation as raiders and the way they dressed, with a headband an
d
high moccasins up to their knees. I also liked their involvement wit
h
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 Wester
n
novel. The result was The Bounty Hunters (1953), the prototype for many an
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 th
e
morning, Hollywood came calling and bought a Dime Western story
,
"Three-Ten to Yuma," and from Argosy, "The Captives," filmed as Th
e
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 no
w
regarded as minor classics.

Elmore reached his goal as a Western writer in April of 1956, whe
n
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 wa
s
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 pu
t
his ten years in. "The money would have lasted six months, and in tha
t
time I could write a book and sell it." Instead, the family bought
a
house and he wrote freelance advertising copy and educational films t
o
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 nonWestern novel, The Big Bounce.

But he wasn't through with the Westerns by any means. He had ye
t
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 classi
c
hero who is misjudged by the antagonist, "the ba
d
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 th
e
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 o
f
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
charts the evolution of Elmore's style and particular sound from the very beginning of his writing career. In five years, between 1951 and 1956, he wrote twenty-seven of the thirty stories in this volume. He carved out his turf in the Arizona and New Mexico Territories, from Bisbee to Contention, from Yuma Territorial Prison to the Jicarilla Apache Subagency in Puerco, creating dozens of memorable characters: good, bad, and really bad. (Those are the ones we like the most.)

Elmore Leonard wrote a total of eight Western novels before, during, and after his Complete Western Stories; he even wrote a few Western stories contained herein, after he began writing contemporary crim
e
novels ("The Tonto Woman" and " 'Hurrah for Captain Early!' ").

Over time, the suffocating heat and alkali dust of the Arizona deser
t
gave way to the mean streets of Detroit and the subtropical weirdness of South Florida. But Elmore will be the first to tell you, they're all derived from what he learned writing these Western stories; he just changed the setting and the century.

--gregg sutter, los angeles, 2004

*

*

Chapter
1 Trail of the Apache
.

Original title: Apache Agent
.

Argosy, December 1951
.

UNDER THE THATCHED roof ramada that ran the length of the agency office, Travisin slouched in a canvas-backed chair, his boots propped against one of the support posts. His gaze took in the sun-beaten, gray adobe buildings, all one-story structures, that rimmed the vacant quadrangle. It was a glaring, depressing scene of sun on rock, without a single shade tree or graceful feature to redeem the squat ugliness. There was not a living soul in sight. Earlier that morning, his White Mountain Apache charges had received their two-weeks' supply of beef and flour.

By now they were milling about the cook fires in front of their wickiups, eating up a two-weeks' ration in two days. Most of the Indians had built their wickiups three miles farther up the Gila, where the flat, dry land began to buckle into rock-strewn hills. There the thin, sparse Gila cottonwoods grew taller and closer together and the mesquite and prickly pear thicker. And there was the small game that sustained them whe
n
their government rations were consumed.

At the agency, Travisin lived alone. By actual count there wer
e
forty-two Coyotero Apache scouts along with the interpreter, Barne
y
Fry, and his wife, a Tonto woman, but as the officers at Fort Thoma
s
looked at it, he was living alone. There is no question that to mos
t
young Eastern gentlemen on frontier station, such an alien mean
s
of existence would have meant nothing more than a very slow way t
o
die, with boredom reading the services. But, of course, they were not Travisin.

FROM WHIPPLE BARRACKS, through San Carlos and on down to Fort Huachuca, it went without argument that Eric Travisin was the bes
t
Apache campaigner in Arizona Territory. There was a time, of course
,
when this belief was not shared by all and the question would pop up often, along the trail, in the barracks at Fort Thomas, or in a Globe barroom.

Barney Fry's name would always come up then--though most discounte
d
him for his one-quarter Apache blood. But that was a time in the past when Eric Travisin was still new; before the sweltering sand-rock Apache country had burned and gouged his features, leaving his gaunt face deepchiseled and expressionless. That was while he was learning that it took an Apache to catch an Apache. So, for all practical purposes, he became one.