Classic Westerns - book review

 CLASSIC WESTERNS

Collected and introduced by Peter Haining, published 1998.

Haining brings together twelve Western short stories, many of which were the templates for movies.

Among these are: Three-ten to Yuma by Elmore Leonard, Stagecoach by Ernest Haycox, Hondo by Louis L’Amour, The Misfits by Arthur Miller, and A Man Called Horse by Dorothy M Johnson.

Other stories feature characters who subsequently appeared in TV or film: The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, and The Virginian.

My favourites, besides those film titles above are ‘The Caballero’s Way’ by O. Henry, ‘Dust Storm’ by Max Brand,  ‘The Great Slave’ by Zane Grey, and ‘One Man’s Honour’ by Jack Schaefer.

There’s a good amount of fine prose to be found amongst this selection of mostly moral tales.

Book of the film - LAST STAND AT SABER RIVER

 

Written by Elmore Leonard in 1959, my copy is published 2005. Leonard is famous for both his crime novels (Get Shorty, Mr Majestyk, Glitz, and Out of Sight) and also westerns (3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, Joes Kidd, and The Bounty Hunters) and many of his books have been filmed.

Last Stand at Saber River took almost forty years to be filmed, as a TV movie starring Tom Selleck, Suzy Amis, Haley Joel Osment, Keith Carradine, David Carradine and David Dukes.

The film and the book differ mainly in the beginning and end sequences.

The film starts earlier than the book, filling in background that is flashbacked in the book. The Civil War still rages. Reported killed in action, Paul Cable is a Confederate veteran returning home to surprise his wife Martha and two children (they lost a third to disease while he was away fighting; though in the book the child is alive [economising on young actors]). His family has been staying with her parents but now he is going to take them to their homestead in Arizona, which they left during his absence. However, in the book it begins with them arriving at the trading post which is near to their homestead. But the owner has passed away and it is now part owned by Janroe who lost a hand in the war.

Cable soon learns that a Union-sympathising family has assumed control of Cable’s homestead and land. This is the Kidston family: Vern, his brother Duane and his daughter Lorraine. Some of the Kidston cowhands are staying at the homestead. Cable chases them off. Thus begins an ongoing feud between the two families. In the book Cable suffers two brutal beatings at the hands of the Kidston crew and Duane (the film doesn’t impose this on Selleck, he is tougher and not averse to killing in self defence).

Janroe harbours a powerful hate for the Union and all who supported the North. He is intent on engineering further conflict between the two families, even while both Vern and Lorraine are about to talk rather than fight with Cable and Martha.

It is all brought to a head in the final pages and is taut and tense, as one is accustomed when reading any Elmore Leonard book.

However, the film moves beyond the book, stretching out the suspense, determined on inserting more action and conflict.

Both endings work for their different media.

If you like the actor Tom Selleck, then you should enjoy this film. If you like a novel with conflict, strong characterisation and a moral core, then you’ll enjoy the book.

Beginning – the hook

I’ve said it a number of times, but it’s worth repeating: beginnings of stories and novels are important. They’re the hook for the reader. 

Many film directors appreciate this too. Pull the audience in quickly and then never let go. I’ve sat through a number of movies where the start was inauspicious, plodding, revealing nothing about the characters, the environment or the story theme – and then found that eventually the story (at last!) takes hold. Nowadays, that leisurely approach rarely works in the written word. The audience, the reader, needs to be sucked in by the first paragraph or two. He or she isn’t going to invest precious time in something that doesn’t intrigue, excite interest or raise questions.

That doesn’t mean the writer should spend ages on the beginning, honing it, striving to ‘get it right’ – the beginning might well not resolve itself until the work is completed.

I’m pleased to announce that I have signed a contract with Crooked Cat Publishing for Spanish Eye, a collection of short stories about Leon Cazador, private eye. The image is taken from the Crooked Cat Facebook page announcement (it isn’t the cover): https://www.facebook.com/crookedcatpublishing

Spanish Eye makes a great companion volume to my book Blood of the Dragon Trees, set in Tenerife, also published by Crooked Cat.

These stories were previously published by Solstice, but the contract expired; an extra short story has been added, so now there are twenty-two first person tales, a couple of them award-winners, all of them previously published in magazines (though lengthened in most cases). Here below are samples of a selection of beginnings from the collection (this post would be too long to include all of them!).
 

Relic Hunters

Angel Ramos held his breath as he carefully unlatched then lifted the ornate lid off the rosewood box. A distinctive smell emerged like a palpable thing, together with a fine miasma of dust that floated in the sunbeams slanting through the hotel window. It was the aroma of old parchment or vellum that harboured the dust of centuries.

Night Fishing

Dusk fled quickly, as it does out here in the south of Spain. The warm night air was humid and still. The full moon’s reflection glinted from the calm Mediterranean. Behind me, cicadas chirruped but I barely heard them as I was concentrating on the little fishing boat out at sea, with its nightlight casting a circle of white around the stern. From the cliff top, I watched the three of them through 10x50 binoculars, and my fears were confirmed. Old Salvador Molina needed his strong sons to haul the net in because it seemed to contain a heavy object. My heart sank.
            Sometimes, the night of unreason lurks in dark recesses, waiting to cloak the good earth, and it would seem that even this honest fisherman was not immune to the importuning of this evil night.

Grave Concerns

The mass grave by the roadside was not the first in Spain to be unearthed in the last four years and it wouldn’t be the last. On each side were carobs and bright yellow and blue wild flowers, a tranquil contrast to the macabre sight before us. Men in the trench wore gauze masks over their mouths as they lifted out human bones and strips of clothing and placed them reverently on a length of tarpaulin. Behind them stood an idle mechanical earth-digger, while beyond the fields of rosemary and artichokes rose the rugged mountains, mute witnesses to what had happened about sixty-seven years ago.
        
Off Plan
I was wearing a false moustache, grey coloured contact lenses, and my hair was dyed black. My brother, Juan, wouldn’t recognize me. In fact, I had difficulty recognizing me. I was no longer Leon Cazador but Carlos Ortiz Santos. Sometimes it was necessary to wear a disguise and take on a fake name to hoodwink the ungodly. This was one of those times.

Endangered Species

He had large eyes, big ears and, surprisingly, his middle finger was very long on each hand. “He looks cute,” I said, lowering the photograph of the little aye-aye. His hair was black, and he had a long bushy tail. His eyes seemed to be expressing surprise at finding himself in a cage rather than the diminishing rain forests of Madagascar. Perhaps the daylight conditions affected him, too, which wasn’t strange really, as his kind is nocturnal. “But,” I added, shaking my head in mock concern, “my fiancée wants something a bit more exotic. Know what I mean?”

Big Noise

“You’ve come to the right person, Mr. Santos!” Darren Atkins said, speaking louder than was necessary in the tapas bar that overlooked the Plaza Mayor. “My product is the best on Spain’s south coast, take my word for it! I’m the big noise around here!” Every sentence tended to end with an exclamation. This self-styled important person was big in other respects as well. Even when I use my real name, Leon Cazador, rather than my undercover alias of Carlos Santos, I stand six feet high in my open-toed sandals; yet Atkins was a couple of inches taller than me. His Hawaiian-style short-sleeved shirt bulged because he had big muscles and shoulders. Because he had shaved his head, his big ears appeared more prominent and tended to press forward like little radar. I wondered if that feature prompted him to go into the acoustics business.

Duty Bound

A mountainous landscape populated by dragons strode out of the swathes of sauna steam and approached me. Hiroki Kuroda was tattooed over his entire torso and down to his wrists and calves. At a glance, he gave the impression that he was wearing long johns; instead, he was a walking exhibition of yakuza body art. Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man sprang to mind, but this was no fantasy. As a member of the yakuza, a Japanese criminal organization similar to the Mafia, Hiroki endured hundreds of hours of pain simply to show that he could. He waved with his left hand. The little finger was missing at the first knuckle.

Burning Issue

Landscape defines some towns and cities. And even the people and the small mountain town of Cocentaina were perhaps typical. So I thought as I drove Jacinto Alvarez and his wife Puri along the A7 on our approach. The town had been under siege more than once in its history and I reflected that that was how the Alvarez couple felt right now.

Pigeon Hearted

Fireworks in daytime are not particularly spectacular, but that doesn’t deter my Spanish compatriots from setting them off. The clear blue sky was momentarily sprayed with silver and red stars as the single rocket exploded above the town square. Minutes afterwards, a profusion of colours darted above our heads, but this display wasn’t the transient starburst of more pyrotechnics. The palette that soared in the sky came from garishly painted pigeons released from patios, balconies, rooftops, and gardens. In the next few minutes, the number of male birds increased to perhaps seventy.

I hope they've given you a taster for the book, due out later this year!

The late Elmore Leonard famously stated ‘never begin any story with the weather’. He meant get into the character or the action immediately. I’d agree with that – though there are other considerations. Raise a question that the reader wants answered, create a visual image that lodges in the reader’s head. The above examples probably do some of that, I believe.
 

So, that’s the end of the beginning – for now.

 

 

R.I.P. Elmore Leonard - dies, 87

Elmore Leonard, novelist and screenwriter, has been the inspiration for many writers. He authored  45 novels, and was in the process of writing his 46th.

Born in New Orleans in 1925, he lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis before his family settled in Detroit in 1935. He served in the US Navy during WWII and afterwards studied English literature at the University of Detroit, graduating in 1950. From 1949 to 1961 he worked as a copywriter in various advertising agencies and, apart from a few book reviews, he has concentrated on writing novels and screenplays since 1967. He started out writing western stories before turning to crime fiction in the 1960s.

He was renowned for his terse, no-nonsense style and sparse use of dialogue, stating at one time that he left out the bits that readers would skip.

Much of his work found its way onto the silver screen, for example: Last Stand at Sabre River (19590, Hombre (1961), Valdez is Coming (1970), 3.10 to Yuma (a 1953 short story, filmed in 1957 and 2007), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992, filmed as Jackie Brown), and Out of Sight (1996).

 

One of his more heroic characters, US Marshal Raylan Givens in the books Pronto (1993) and Riding the Gap (1995), inspired the TV series Justified, while his 1978 novel The Switch was filmed this year as Life of Crime.

His 10 Rules of Writing, published in 2001,contains some tongue-in-cheek advice but also some great common sense and salutary admonishments, viz: "Never open a book with weather" and "Keep your exclamation points under control".

He has many writing accolades: the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel, La Brava, 1983. In 1992 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. The F Scott Fitzgerald was awarded in 2008, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 and a further lifetime achievement prize, which he received at last year's National Book Awards.

He suffered a stroke earlier this month in Detroit and was in hospital. He subsequently died at his home in the city's Bloomfield Village suburb. He is survived by five children, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren; he divorced his third wife Christine last year.

Another great and influential writer bites the dust, but his words and characters live on.

Iwan Morelius 14 Nov 1931-21 June 2012

My wife Jen and I were saddened to learn that Iwan died suddenly last month, leaving his wife Margareta.


I only knew Iwan for the last four years of his life when I discovered by chance that he lived a half-hour’s drive away from me here in Spain.

Iwan was a consummate bibliophile. Margareta loves reading too – and music. Indeed, Iwan and Margareta’s home is a bibliophile’s heaven, with so many signed copies.

Born in Stockholm, Iwan and his family moved some eleven times in fourteen years. His parents owned a private library of about 400 books and Iwan caught the reading bug early. He devoured the translations of English and American authors and finally began collecting the Dennis Wheatley novels. In 1961 he wrote to Wheatley and struck up a lifelong correspondence. In 1971 Iwan was invited for dinner at Wheatley’s London home in Cadogan Square.

Iwan with Dennis Wheatley
Rather than wait for a Swedish translation of his favourite authors, Iwan bought the English versions and read those. He began writing to many of his favourites – Alistair MacLean, Helen Macinnes, Ian Fleming, Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes, Leon Uris, Joe Poyer, James Hadley Chase, James Leasor, Edmund Crispin, Georges Simenon among others. Almost all of them answered his letters and several continued to keep in touch over the years.

In 1968 Iwan brought out the first issue of DAST magazine – (Detective, Agent, Science Fiction and Thriller). In 1974 Iwan was commissioned by Lindqvist Publishing to acquire a strong list of thrillers and mysteries – Hedman Thrillers, publishing many Swedish translations of Iwan’s favourite authors, among them Jack Higgins.

Iwan became a good friend of Geoffrey Boothroyd – Ian Fleming’s and Bond’s armourer – and they visited each other’s home regularly. Indeed, he visited a number of authors in their homes in the US, including Joe Poyer and Raymond Benson. He interviewed Ray Bradbury at the time of Bradbury’s first mystery being published and kept in touch. Bradbury is one of Margareta's favourite authors.

Margareta with Ray Bradbury, 1988
The list of authors Iwan has met, interviewed and kept in touch with over the years is quite remarkable: Mickey Spillane, Brian Garfield, Isaac Asimov, Colin Forbes, Duncan Kyle, John Gardner, Tony Hillerman, Frederick Forsyth, Michael Avallone, Elmore Leonard and Ed McBain, to name but a few. He taped some interviews, for example with Jack Higins and Leslie Charteris, and I have copies.

In 2009 I wrote an article about Iwan for the Levante Journal: ‘The Bond Connection’, one of a planned series that didn’t get taken up. For some time Iwan had badgered Raymond Benson to set one of his James Bond books in Spain; Raymond duly obliged with his thriller Doubleshot, written in 2000, which is partly set here. It also features a number of acknowledgements, not least Iwan. And to top that, on p233 there is a ‘Dr Iwan Morelius, a Swedish plastic surgeon’ who works for the villainous organisation! (As an aside, I’ve included Iwan as a Swedish chef in my novel The $300 Man (Hale Black Horse Western, as by Ross Morton). I also dedicated my crime novel A Sudden Vengeance Waits to him.

Geoffrey Boothroyd
Iwan was a generous host and virtually ran a private lending library for his friends. He had so many fascinating tales to tell, often with that distinctive twinkle in his eye. He will be missed.

The Giant book of the Western

Published in 1991 as The Mammoth Book of the Western, this is a reprint dated 1995 with a slightly revised title.Superb cover!

Twenty-seven short stories. Great value. There are excellent tales by the late Elmer Kelton, Willa Catha, Max Brand, James Warner Bellah, Elmore Leonard, Jack Schaefer and Loren D Estleman – several of them actually Spur winners.

Of late, there’s been talk about how revisionist westerns now deal with the Indians in a more balanced way. Yet the issue of the noble savage had been around quite a while, as editor Lewis points out in his introduction. ‘… amplified by the decision of the Curtis magazine group that the Indian point-of-view must not be shown in its journals, a decision which stemmed from the audience outrage that greeted Zane Gray’s fictional attempt in 1922 to depict a love affair between a white woman and Amerindian man, in Ladies’ Home Journal. From the 1950s, however, the American Indian began to be more sympathetically – and realistically – portrayed in the popular western…’

This can be exemplified by the included stories of John G Neihardt’s ‘The Last Thunder Song’ (1907), Oliver La Farge’s ‘The Young Warrior’ (1938), Dorothy M Johnson’s ‘A Man called Horse’ (1949), and Steve Frazee’s excellent ‘Great Medicine’ (1953).

Recommended.