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 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 nonWestern 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 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 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 crime novels ("The Tonto Woman" and " 'Hurrah for Captain Early!' ").
Over time, the suffocating heat and alkali dust of the Arizona desert 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
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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 when their government rations were consumed.
At the agency, Travisin lived alone. By actual count there were forty-two Coyotero Apache scouts along with the interpreter, Barney Fry, and his wife, a Tonto woman, but as the officers at Fort Thomas looked at it, he was living alone. There is no question that to most young Eastern gentlemen on frontier station, such an alien means of existence would have meant nothing more than a very slow way to die, with boredom reading the services. But, of course, they were not Travisin.