The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard Book

In the 1950s, Elmore Leonard was married with children and working as a copywriter on a Chevrolet account at Campbell-Ewald Advertising in Detroit. What he really wanted to do was support himself with his fiction. Already a fan of western movies, Leonard discovered he could get paid while he learned his craft by trafficking short pieces in a genre that was enormously popular on newsstands, as he recounts in the foreword, "from Saturday Evening Post and Collier's down through Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, and probably at least a dozen pulp magazines, the better ones like Dime Western and Zane Grey Magazine paying two cents a word."

Leonard is a writer whose craft and facility with dialogue (as well as black, Hispanic and female characters) are qualities I've long admired. I'm not a big fan of the crime stories he'd become world famous for cranking out in the '80s and '90s, many of which fell into formula and self-parody. As for a gaggle of pulp westerns written during the Eisenhower administration, I expected them to be rigid and silly, full of good guys wearing white, bad guys in black and shrieking women tied up on train tracks.

The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard is a treasure trove, a Christmas gift for lovers of pulp fiction. Thirty short stories, twenty-seven of them published during the '50s, are included, three of which Hollywood would get hold of: Three-Ten to Yuma (released as 3:10 to Yuma in 1957 and 2007), The Captives (released as The Tall T in 1957) and Only Good Ones (released as Valdez Is Coming in 1971).

Each short story is prefaced by their original titles -- if an editor opted for a more sensational one at publication -- as well as the magazine they appeared in and date. My favorites:

The Big Hunt (original title: Matt Gordon's Boy) in which buffalo hunter Will Gordon is victimized by some unscrupulous men who once took advantage of Will's father in the same manner. After losing his hides to these men, young Will devises a novel plan for getting his valuables back.

The Boy Who Smiled in which an Apache named Mickey Segundo watches his father lynched for a crime he didn't commit. Years later, working as an unassuming guide by the name Peza-a, Mickey is contracted by his father's killers to lead them on a hunting party.

Saint with a Six-Gun (original title: The Hanging of Bobby Valdez) in which Lyall Quinlan gets his break in law enforcement when hired to guard incarcerated gunman Bobby Valdez the week leading up to Valdez's hanging. Both sides of the law underestimate the green youngster.

The Longest Day In His Life in which Steve Brady spends his first day on the job as a stageline rep being robbed of his new suit and gun, being drawn on with a shotgun by the daughter of a business client, being recognized by a bandit he shot and testified against seven years ago and proposing marriage to the woman who almost shot him earlier.

The Kid (original title: The Gift of Regalo) in which an opportunistic horse trainer finds a mute Indian boy and decides to keep him as an indentured servant, until a young prospector determines the boy was stolen by Apaches at one time and now deserves humane treatment, even if it means shooting the kid's master.

Even this early in his career, Leonard demonstrates a sharp ear for character and dialogue. These aren't stories about some guy in a hat and something happens to him(!), but a guy in a hat who was a certain sort of man (!) and something happens to him. With this focus on character, I was invested in even the average stories. The historical detail is impeccable. Leonard specialized in a very specific place and time: the Arizona Territory of the 1880s. Cavalry garrisons, stagecoach runs and Apache resistance offer a different look and feel than most westerns; it's war territory, not the stock landscape of the wild west town.

At 528 pages, this mother lode took me two weeks to finish, but the stories are bite sized and a couple of them can fit into your commute or lunch break. If you don't cotton to the pulp western, or to the Elmore Leonard of Get Shorty, I recommend giving these pieces a try. Not every story is a keeper, but Leonard delivers what I crack open fiction for in the first place: vivid landscape, terse storytelling, character, dialogue and social justice.