FT.com
30 June 2006 Friday 3:15:41 PM GMT
BYLINE: Angel Gurria-Quintana

THE COMPLETE WESTERN STORIES
by Elmore LeonardWeidenfeld & Nicolson 16.99, 528 pages

Now 80 years old, Elmore Leonard is a strong candidate for the title of most prolific living American writer. Today he is best known, however, for a handful of fast-paced crime novels made into films, including Get Shorty (and its sequel, Be Cool), Rum Punch (turned into the Pam Grier vehicle Jackie Brown) and Out of Sight.

Yet his association with Hollywood goes back a long way. Classic western movies such as 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre and Valdez is Coming were based on his early stories and novels.

Hardly surprising, then, to find that, as he embarked on his writing career, Leonard was inspired by the cowboys-and-Indians flicks of the 1930s and 1940s. “I looked for a genre where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time”, he remembers in the introduction to The Complete Western Stories. “I chose Westerns because I liked Western movies. From the time I was a kid I liked them.”

He began by submitting stories to pulp periodicals such as Zane Grey’s Western Magazine and Western Story Magazine. The going rate was two cents per word. His first published story, “Trail of the Apache”, appeared in Argosy magazine in 1951 and became a template for the pieces he would publish throughout the 1950s. Reading these stories, the reader is struck not only by the young Leonard’s talent for recreating the southwest frontier’s scorching atmosphere, but also by his skill for constructing plot and conveying character with unusual economy of means.

The setting is Arizona and New Mexico in the 1870s and 1880s - windswept and sun-scorched plains of sand-rock and alkali dust dotted with mesquite clumps. It is Apache territory, strewn with Indian agencies and frontier posts, inhabited by reluctant army officers and taciturn scouts. And Indians - Mescaleros, White Mountain Apaches, Chiricahuas, Sinsontes.

Leonard’s prototypical hero is neither the idealistic officer straight out of West Point nor the wronged and hostile Indian, but the grizzled scout, a white man who knows not only the Indians’ language but their wily ways and cunning survival techniques. “Mister, you watch the rocks, the trees, the men around you,” says Eric Travisin, an experienced campaigner to an eager new arrival in “Trail of the Apache”. “You watch until your eyes ache, and then you keep on watching. Because you’ll always have that feeling that the minute you let down, you’re done for. And if you don’t have that feeling, you’re in the wrong business.”

The introduction to this compilation sums up the formula that Leonard was zestfully feeling towards in the fifties: “Take the most dangerous Apache, the wisest scout, and the greediest outlaw, put them all together in the desert sun, and see who wins.”

One has only to read The Hot Kid, his latest Prohibition-era novel, to see that - with some tweaking to allow for different settings and time periods - it is a formula that continues to serve Leonard well half a century later.