Elmore the Great

Last Stand at Saber River and Hombre from Westerns by Elmore Leonard.  Library of America.  pp. 1-278.  *****

I love the story of Elmore Leonard’s formation as a writer that Greg Sutter tells in his excellent chronology at the back of the Library of America volume.  Born in 1925, Leonard grew up in Detroit and attended Catholic schools (he credited the Jesuits with teaching him to think).  He was a precocious early reader, swiping books from his sister’s Book of the Month Club subscription, and credits For Whom the Bell Tolls with getting him started as a writer.  He was an athlete in school and loved jazz; he made a point of seeing jazz greats whenever he could.  He did a lot of underage drinking at the jazz clubs, and spoke often about the amount he drank.

On his eighteenth birthday he enlisted in the Navy and served for three years.  When he got out his father was about to take over a car dealership, and Elmore planned to enter a program that would enable him to inherit the dealership, but his father died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage.  He and a brother-in-law tried to save the dealership but weren’t able to.  He began working in the advertising business, writing copy and meeting with clients, doing his own writing on the side.  He decided to write Westerns, because he loved Western movies and there was a rich market for western novels and stories.  He hadn’t been to the West much, but he read some books and subscribed to Arizona Highways, which gave him photos of the terrain.

He was a success from the beginning, selling stories to pulp magazines and novels to major publishers.  The big prize in those days (as for William Faulkner) was getting a story into the Saturday Evening Post, because they paid well, and he eventually sold to them.  He was also, like any good Catholic boy, having children on a regular basis, and making sales to the movies; still, it was years before he had enough confidence to quit his job at the advertising agency.  Weirdly, he then lost his nerve and began doing freelance advertising and other kinds of for-pay writing.  There was a five-year hiatus in his fiction writing career.  When he took it up again, he began with Westerns, but saw the market starting to dry up, so he switched to crime fiction.  And he became one of the great crime fiction writers of all time.

I’ve read all of about five Westerns in my life (and they’ve all been by Larry McMurtry), but this volume was on sale for a drastically lower price when I bought it, so I snapped it up[1].  I consider Leonard to be one of the great storytellers of all time and wanted to take a look at his apprentice work.  (I’m also fascinated by a guy who reads good literature but takes up genre writing because it will sell.  Such things don’t usually work out.)

These novels are not quite apprentice work; Leonard was what I would call an established writer when he wrote Last Stand at Saber River.  It concerns a man named Paul Cable who is returning to Arizona with his wife and three children after having fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.  The war is still in its final days, but he’s ready for civilian life.  When he gets back, however, the general store where he had always traded has been taken over by a one-armed man named Janroe, also a veteran of the Confederacy, who somehow has a sinister air about him.  Cable’s ranch has been occupied by another group, who have taken over an adjacent place as well.  Their horses are grazing on his land, and the new squatters are not interested in giving the place up.

This is a High Noon story in the sense that Cable’s wife Martha is as strong and determined a character as he.  He’s not protecting the little woman; she’s as willing a warrior as he, though her first concern is her children.  Both of them worked hard to establish their ranch before, running off Indians with the help of some Mexican friends.  They’re bothered not just by the fact that somebody else has taken over their land but also by the injustice of the situation, though they’re badly outnumbered.  A complicating factor is that the occupiers sympathize with the Union army and are supplying them with horses.  Hence the large herd grazing on the land.  One of the two brothers who own the nearby place is a jingoistic former Union soldier who sees Cable as a rebel who has no rights at all.  Cable hopes that the man’s brother is more open to reason.  But if he has to get tough he will, and his wartime experience serves him well.

Janroe would seem to be an ally, but he has his own issues.  He was wounded in the war, both physically and psychologically, and hates Union sympathizers as much as they hate him.  He wants to get rid of them too, but not to help Cable.  He’s got his own agenda.

So Leonard takes the Good American Family vs. the evil usurpers and adds shades of gray.  Everybody’s got a viewpoint here, and nobody’s entirely right.  It’s mainly just a shoot-em-up, but there’s a moment toward the end when two men see the larger picture at the same time, and call off the warfare.  That’s when the story gets interesting.

Hombre is another thing altogether.  It’s what the editor calls a stagecoach drama; seven people head off on a coach (though in this case it’s a mud wagon rigged to look like one) to get from one place to another, and they’re robbed midway.  One man, named Mendez, in the owner of the vehicle; the people who most want to get away are a married couple, an older man named Dr. Favor and his younger wife; the narrator is a young man who works for Mendez, and another inhabitant is a rough bully named Braden who more or less kicked a veteran out of his spot as the man was heading home.  There is a good-looking young woman who was recently traumatized by being abducted by the Apache and is returning to her her home.  The sixth passenger is the title character, an enigmatic man named John Russell, but whom all his friends call by nicknames, most often Hombre.

He was Mexican-American by birth, but was abducted by the Apache when he was young and lived with them for six years.  A man named James Russell rescued him and gave him his adoptive name, but after a few years John went back to the Apache to work in law enforcement.  People have come to see him as an Apache, both because of his mixed heritage and because he lived with them and adopted their ways.  And the prejudice against the Apache is as great as any other kind.  Once the passengers hear his background, they don’t want to ride with him, so he has to ride on the outside with the owner.

John Russell is one of Leonard’s great creations.  I might even guess that the creation of this character marked a new stage in his career.  As it turns out, Braden is in cahoots with the men who are robbing it.  They all happen to know somehow that Dr. Favor, as an Indian agent, has been extorting money from a government program for years, and that he’s riding off to escape with it, $12,000, a tidy sum in those days.  His stagecoach mates are utterly unprepared for this situation and are about to be left in the middle of nowhere with no horses (the outlaws have taken them) and little water.  The one person who can step up in this situation is, of course, John Russell.

But he’s not the good guy with all the bad guys around him.  He believes the money to have been taken from the Apache, who would have used it for food; that’s why he’s interested.  He doesn’t seem to care about the safety of the others, who weren’t willing to ride with him.  He’s a warrior who is ready to take all the outlaws on.  And he doesn’t need anyone’s help.

This is a brutal story, moreso in its own way than Last Stand at Saber River, though both books end with a litter of corpses.  They are also both tightly plotted; there is hardly a spare word in them.  But Hombre is great because of the title character, an enigma if there ever was one.  It was made into a famous movie starring Paul Newman.  I’m not sure that’s who I would have picked.  But I haven’t (yet) seen the movie.  I’m planning on it.

[1] I’ve raved about Library of America before, but I should mention that, when you buy from them, they let you know about sales where books are considerably reduced.  I’ve gotten some great bargains.