Before he became “The poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers” (New Musical Express), Elmore John Leonard, Jr. was “The sage of sagebrush” (The Budapest Times). Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, on October 11, 1925, Leonard began his illustrious career by writing Westerns – yarns about cowboys, indians and lawless frontier towns with sheriffs, outlaws, stagecoaches, scouts, pioneers, six-shooters and the like.
The Leonard family relocated from New Orleans to Detroit when Elmore was about nine years old, and it was as a fifth-grader – 10- to 11-year-olds – at Blessed Sacrament Grade School that the youngster wrote a play and staged it. This was inspired by a Detroit Times serialisation of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the war novel by German World War One veteran Erich Maria Remarque. Classroom desks were deployed for no-man’s-land.
After high school Leonard served in the US Naval Reserve from 1943-46 then enrolled in the University of Detroit, majoring in English and writing a few experimental short stories. Soon after graduating in 1950 he decided he wanted to be a full-on writer.
Leonard joined the Campbell Ewald Advertising Agency in Detroit, and while copywriting and composing scripts for advertising and educational films he worked on his penmanship, entering short stories in contests and submitting them to magazines. He concealed his writing pad in a drawer and put his arm in to write, and if someone came in the room he would stop and close the drawer.
The budding author had looked for a genre where he could learn how to write and be selling his stories at the same time. He chose Westerns because he had liked such films since he was a kid, citing as influences “The Plainsman”, directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1936 and starring Gary Cooper, “My Darling Clementine” by John Ford in 1946 featuring Henry Fonda and Linda Darnell, and “Red River” by Howard Hawks in 1948 with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift..
Also, the market for such stories was thriving among publishers in the early 1950s. As Leonard noted, from The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers down through Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book and probably at least a dozen other pulp magazines, the better ones such as Dime Western and Zane Grey’s Western Magazine were paying two cents a word.
First, sitting in big city Detroit, Leonard needed a sense of the West. He began to research, reading “On the Border with Crook”, “The Truth about Geronimo”, ”The Look of the West” and “Western Words”, plus subscribing to Arizona Highways monthly. Suitably armed, he submitted his first Western story, “Tizwin,” the Apache name for corn beer, to the pulp magazine Argosy In April 1951. The editor passed it on to another of the group’s pulps and they bought it, changing the title to “Red Hell Hits Canyon Diablo”.
The editor encouraged Leonard to send more, so he sat down and wrote “Trail of the Apache,” which became his first to be published, appearing in Argosy’s December 1951 issue. He wanted to be credited as “Dutch Leonard”, Dutch being his Navy nickname after a Detroit Tigers baseball pitcher named Dutch Leonard. But Argosy used the byline “E. J. Leonard.”
Argosy fiction editor James B. O’Connell cautioned him not to give up his job, advising: “You ought to know right at the beginning that writing for a living is a most hazardous occupation.” With a growing family and his full-time job as a copywriter at the advertising agency, Leonard did not have a lot of time to write, and realised he needed to get up at 5am.
At first the alarm would go off and he’d roll over, he recalled. Finally he started to roll out, go into the living room and sit at the coffee table with a yellow pad and try to write two pages. He had to get something written before he could make the coffee. It was a routine he followed for most of the 1950s, plus the clandestine writing at work.
One of the early stories was “Three-Ten to Yuma,” a short story , published in Dime Western Magazine in March 1953 and now republished by Penguin Random House. Being only 15 pages it has been added to the longer effort “Hombre”, from 1961. Also republished by Penguin at the same time are two of his other Western novels, “ Last Stand at Saber River” from 1959 and “Valdez Is Coming” from 1970, in nice bright new covers.
“Hombre” tells the story of a white man raised as an Apache, John Russell, who is shunned by his four fellow travellers in a stagecoach but then is depended on by his “superiors” to lead them through the desert to safety after they have been attacked by outlaws.
Leonard sold “Three-Ten to Yuma” to Dime Western Magazine for USD 90. “I had to rewrite one of the scenes and do two revisions on my description of the train,” he recalled. “The editor insisted on it. This guy made me work. ‘You can do it better. You’re not using all your senses. It’s not just a walk by the locomotive. What’s the train doing? How does it smell? Is there steam?’ He made me work for my ninety bucks. Which was good.”
Many of Leonard’s stories have been filmed over the decades, with “Three-Ten to Yuma” having the distinction of appearing twice. In 1955 his agent, Marguerite Harper, working with Hollywood agent H. N. Swanson, negotiated a deal with Columbia Pictures, and two years later “3:10 to Yuma”, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, opened to strong reviews. It was remade with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in 2007. “Hombre” was filmed in 1967 with Paul Newman as the outcast Russell.
Campbell Ewald grew to realise they had someone special on staff, and in 1956 took out a full-page advertisement in The New Yorker showing the author at his typewriter with a cow skull, two six-shooters and a rifle on the wall behind him. The headline: “Meanwhile back at the agency.” The ad described him as “a rising young writer of Western novels” whose “gunsights never become entangled in fancy verbal foliage.”
He kept the position for several years, writing on the side. But three years after the accolade, publisher Harper urged him to switch genres because of the declining market for Western fiction. The remainder of his career was devoted mostly to crime fiction, usually set in Detroit or Florida. He continued to publish occasional Westerns into the 1980s and many of his early works remain popular with readers and critics, hence the latest three reissues.
All told, Leonard wrote 30 Western short stories and seven Western novels. His debut novel, “The Bounty Hunters”, was published in 1953 and was followed by six more Westerns, “The Law at Randado” in 1954, “Escape from Five Shadows” in 1956, “Last Stand at Saber River” in 1959, “Hombre” in 1961, “Valdez Is Coming” in 1970 and “Forty Lashes Less One” in 1972. His first non-Western novel, “The Big Bounce”, appeared in 1969.
At The Budapest Times we love Leonard. We’ve read all seven Western novels, not to mention “The Complete Western Stories” containing 30 short tales and a good chunk of the 35 or so crime books that followed the early efforts. The legacy of “The poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers” and “The sage of sagebrush” continues to endure beyond his death aged 87 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States on August 20, 2013.
