Eric Spanberg at the
Christian Science Monitor offers a piece on a collection of Western stories
from one of my favorite writers, the late, great writer Elmore Leonard.
In the guise of a man named
Carl Everett Allen, who relates a harrowing tale of an attempted stagecoach
robbery in Arizona in 1884, author Elmore Leonard offers his philosophy of
writing – and reading. Allen, in a one-page prologue that introduces Leonard’s
Western novel “Hombre,” confesses an amateur’s uncertainty about where to start
his story.
Some of his thoughts at the
time the events occurred, Allen tells us, embarrass him in retrospect.
“But I was advised to imagine
I was telling it to a good friend and not worry about what other people might
think,” Allen says by way of introduction. “Which is what I have done. If
there’s anything anybody wants to skip, like innermost thoughts in places, just
go ahead.”
Allen’s sentiment echoes
Leonard’s beloved rules for writing, published by The New York Times in 2001
and, later, as a slim non-fiction volume. The final rule on Leonard’s list?
“Try to leave out the part that readers skip.” His rules also warned against
prologues, excessive weather descriptions, and adverbs, among other literary
maladies.
Leonard’s ear for dialogue
and laconic style, along with a droll sense of humor and just enough field
research, combined to make his crime novels endlessly entertaining (apologies
for the adverb). It took a while, but, by the mid-1980s, and through the end of
his life in 2013, Leonard’s books became source material for a slew of movies
and TV shows (John Travolta and Gene Hackman’s “Get Shorty” and Quentin
Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” among them) as well as consistent best-sellers.
Since his death, Leonard has
been celebrated by The Library of America in three volumes encompassing 12
novels, all from his contemporary crime era. Now comes a fourth entry, Elmore
Leonard: Westerns, harking back to where it all began. In Leonard’s writing
life, the beginning is in Arizona in the late-1800s and early-1900s, the setting
of his Western novels and stories, including several filmed for major Hollywood
productions (Paul Newman starred in the movie version of “Hombre” in 1967) when
Leonard remained a minor writer.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
