Alternating the black gender and the western, Elmore leonard He forged that career as an entertainment writer that soon captivated screenwriters to achieve one of the most prolific film or series adaptations. An idyll that, however, kept him in the shadows, perhaps surpassed by that same transfer to a screen more in charge of honoring actors and directors than those who conceived the stories in the first instance.
Or at least that's the feeling from this side of the Atlantic. Because we all have here as Yankee references of criminal literature Chandler o Hammett, ignoring this particular creator who also throws us a suggestive invitation to the hard-boiled of a lifetime, the subgenre from which all the noir developed afterwards to exhaustion finally starts.
Perhaps it was because he was an author quite later than the two aforementioned geniuses, and abounded in a genre that already had its own authors in Europe such as himself. Vazquez Montalban in Spain or Camilleri in Italy, with its most recognizable autochthonous plots. The point is that rediscovering Elmore Leonard is always opportune, whether in a specific western from its initial phase or in its underworld affairs made into a novel.
Elmore Leonard's Top 3 Recommended Novels
A ruthless guy
The best demonstration of that crime novel without any ambiguity or squeamishness. A story where the western characters seem to relocate to new urban settings of the 20th century to mark the law of the strongest over the law itself.
It's the XNUMXs in old Oklahoma. These are the years of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, those mythical gangsters who filled the front pages of the press of the time and made rivers of imagination run.
Carl Webster, the son of a Cuban war veteran, whose veins runs Creek Indian and Cuban blood, at 21 is already a policeman recognized for the coldness and precision with which he shot a well-known robber to death. of banks, Emmett Long. His antagonist is a self-destructive young man, Jack Belmont, who, after blackmailing his father, an oil magnate, aspires to become "public enemy number 1" in a quest for notoriety.
With unparalleled narrative tension and corrosive, ironic, precise and forceful dialogues, Leonard paints us a fresco in sepia tones of that United States of depression and "dry law", plagued by bank robbers, corruption and illegal gambling dens .
Deadly pursuit
Being in the least suitable place at the least inopportune moment usually presents us with accidental protagonists looking into an unknown world. One of those stories where routine becomes survival and reality becomes a looming environment.
Wayne and Carmen Colson did not know how being at the real estate agency that day and witnessing extortion by two thugs would change their lives. One of the hit men, Armand Degas, of Ojibway Indian origin, could not let this incident go by and vowed revenge on the Colsons.
Not only because they had seen too much, but also, and most of all, because of Wayne's beating of him and his pal, Richie Nix. In the face of the Colson drama, the police in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the State of Michigan cannot do much to protect them, only recommend that they apply to the Witness Safety Program. Elmore Leonard, a living classic of the American crime novel, faithful heir to Hammett and Chandler, dazzles us again with this Deadly Pursuit.
The 3:10 Train to Yuma and Other Tales from the West
A large volume that summarizes those western stories by an author who closed that genre when it no longer aroused as much interest as initially, but that still served to bring to the cinema new stories about that side of America in a constant process of conquest and colonization, with its half-made laws and its mix of people in search of new fortunes and sinister outlaws.
Of the thirty western stories that Leonard wrote, the vast majority between 1951 and 1956, this volume brings together the first fifteen. Many of these stories, such as "The Trail of the Apaches", "Hell in Devil's Canyon", "The Colonel's Wife" or "Cavalry Boots", take place in the inhospitable landscape of Arizona between 1870 and 1890, and They have as protagonists the Apaches and the American cavalry.
But in Leonard's stories, in addition to these stories about Indian explorers, soldiers, and bandits, we find others focused on the lives and problems of ranchers, sheriffs, buffalo hunters, girls, miners, or tramps. Although initially Leonard had difficulty publishing his stories because they were too "crude", Hollywood was not long in taking an interest in them and in 1957 he brought to the cinema "The 3:10 Train to Yuma", which featured a remake in 2007 starring by Russell Crowe.
The story narrates the risks faced by Deputy Sheriff Paul Scallen, who is entrusted with the mission of transporting the dangerous outlaw Jim Kidd from Fort Huachuca to the city of Contention, where he must take a train to Yuma Prison.
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