Plots that crackle along

A SUPERIOR writer can bring a degree of freshness to the most tired of genres, and the book I read last week, Elmore Leonard's The Tonto Woman And Other Western Stories (Delacorte Press; subsequently published by Viking) is ample proof of this. Elmore Leonard is of course one of my all time favourite crime writers and is probably among the top two or three living crime novelists writing today.

In this mastery of dialogue and black humour he has no peers and stands alone. His plots crackle along at a tremendous pace and you can almost literally smell and feel the fear, frustration, hopes and ambitions of the small time Miami and Detroit drifters and con artists who make up Leonard's fictional world.

All this by way of an introduction, for this week we are not checking out Leonard's new crime novel, Be Cool, but rather his stories set in the Wild West. The American West in the early years of the 20th Century is part of the matrix of any schoolboy of the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s who read his share of J. T. Edson, Oliver Strange and Louis L'Armour, but of course there have been writers other than those who have given the Western strange and forbidding depths that make the rather bloodless gunfire of the western genre infinitely darker and more disturbing. Foremost among these writers is Cormac McCarthy, of whom you have heard enough about in these columns. But as I discovered last week, the master of the crime novel is no slouch when it comes to writing about the blood-and-guts West. There are cowboys and Indians, loose women with hearts of gold and stoic Mexicans, all ingredients that those who know their Westerns will be familiar with, but in these stories they are given a new and interesting spin.

In "The Tonto Woman", we meet Ruben Vega, an outlaw at confessional. Says Mr. Vega: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been 37 years since my last confession ... Since then I have fornicated with many women, may be 800. No, not that many considering my work. Maybe 600 only." And the priest would say. "Do you mean bad women or good women?" And Ruben Vega would say, "They are all good, Father." Ruben Vega prides himself on knowing the difference between right and wrong, except that his moral world is slightly aslant to conventional morality. No matter, the outlaw finds himself riding to the rescue of another of the world's marginalised people, a woman who has been captured and branded by the Mojave Indians. Therein lies the tale.

In another story "You Never See Apache", a callow, arrogant youth, Billy Guay, who itches to show how fast he is with a six shooter, makes the cardinal mistake of trying to mess with a ferocious Apache raiding party. Billy is part of a group that includes a veteran scout, who has earned a name for himself as a tough uncompromising warrior, worthy of the respect of both the Indians and his own breed. Naturally, Billy comes to a sticky end, but it is the way Mr. Leonard handles the story that sets it apart from conventional stories in the genre.

In "No Man's Guns", a discharged soldier who is about to be hanged for a crime he did not commit is saved at the very last minute by a thief and a robber who has a sudden change of heart. In "The Colonel's Lady", a bloodthirsty Apache warrior lets his guard slip for the merest instant to pay the ultimate price.

I enjoyed "Only Good Ones" where the racial bigotry and the unnecessary brutality of the West is brilliantly highlighted and "The Big Hunt" about the mayhem and madness that accompany the wholesale slaughter of buffalo. But the two best stories in the book for my money are "Saint with a Six Gun" and "Blood Money".

The first is about a young inexperienced sheriff's deputy who is given the task of guarding a hardened criminal who is due to hang a few days later; the boy almost pays for accepting the job with his life, but in a surprising twist he earns his right to manhood.

In the second story, a gang of outlaws are hardpressed by a posse and are finally trapped in a little hut near an abandoned mine. It is clear that this is going to their last stand and Mr. Leonard does a brilliant job of portraying how each of the men prepares to meet death.

With the exception of one story written in the 1990s "Hurrah for Capt. Early" which was written in 1994, the majority of these stories were written in the 1950s and the 1960s which would seem to indicate that the success of Mr. Leonard's crime novels have led him to abandon the Western.

That is a pity because this great writer brings so much more to the genre that he kind of makes me homesick for the time when Westerns ruled my world.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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