Quite at home on the range

“The world’s coolest crime writer” is how Salon describes Elmore Leonard. His most celebrated novels, set in contemporary urban America, are wry, smart and edgy. And, for that reason, they have attracted the attention of such Hollywood auteurs as Steven Soderbergh (“Out of Sight”), Barry Sonnenfeld (“Get Shorty”) and Quentin Tarantino, whose “Jackie Brown” is based on Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch.”

Yet Leonard spent the first decade of his writing career on the corniest of genre fiction, the western. Indeed, he churned out pulp fiction at 2 cents a word for such oat-burners as Dime Western Magazine and Zane Grey’s Western. Not until 1960 did he quit his Detroit advertising agency job and write “The Big Bounce,” his first nonwestern novel. Another 15 years passed before his break-out book, “Glitz,” made the bestseller lists.

To hear Leonard tell it, he wrote his first western out of calculation rather than any real passion. “I looked for a genre where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time,” he confesses in the preface to “The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard.” “I chose Westerns because I liked Western movies.”

A recent college graduate living in Detroit, he subscribed to “Arizona Highways” in search of authentic local color and filled a ledger with technical details gleaned from books on the Old West -- a reference tool that he maintained and used throughout his western period.

Leonard’s western canon is presented in its entirety in “The Complete Western Stories,” starting with the first one published, “Trail of the Apache,” which appeared in the December 1951 issue of “Argosy.” Although Leonard embraced the formulaic words and phrases of the Western (“And along the Gila, the war drums are silent again. But on frontier station, you don’t relax”), he displayed from the outset the angst and irony that have been a hallmark of his fiction.

“Mister, I’m here to kill Indians and keep Indians alive,” one character announces. “It’s a paradox -- no question about that -- but I gave up rationalizing a long time ago.”

At first, Leonard could sell only to pulp magazines, despite his ambition to write for such better-paying publications as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. With “Moment of Vengeance” in 1956, however, he broke into the Post and came to the attention of Hollywood, where two of his stories -- “Three-Ten to Yuma” and “The Captives” (released as “The Tall T”) -- were turned into movies in 1957.

In “The Complete Western Stories,” we can see Leonard’s calculating mind as he quickly masters his chosen genre. “Moment of Vengeance,” for example, opens with a line right out of a movie treatment: “At midmorning six riders came down out of the cavernous pine shadows ... then across the meadows and into the yard of the one-story adobe house.” And “Three-Ten to Yuma,” barely 15 pages long, sparks and crackles with foreboding as a dutiful lawman with a sawed-off shotgun, charged with escorting a prisoner to the lock-up in Yuma, stops along the way in a little frontier town called Contention.

“[W]hy all the melodrama?” asks the Wells Fargo agent who has arranged for a hotel room. “The man’s under arrest -- already been sentenced.”

“But he’s not in jail till he walks through the gates at Yuma,” replies Deputy Paul Scallen, who stands to collect $150 when he delivers the prisoner.

Nothing in the 30 stories collected here predicts the sharp urban sensibilities that Leonard would later bring to bear in such contemporary classics as “Freaky Deaky” or “Pagan Babies.” But it’s fascinating to watch a young writer fill his tool chest and work at his chosen craft. Hokey or not, even the earliest of his western yarns show Leonard to be a master storyteller. *