Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: If it sounds like writing by Rzepka Charles J.;

Author:Rzepka, Charles J.; [Rzepka, Charles J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119576693
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Korine Powers

In a 2007 interview with True West magazine, Elmore Leonard discussed his short‐story “Three‐Ten to Yuma” (1953), the imminent release of James Mangold's film adaptation 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and the possibility of returning to the western genre: “People ask me all the time, ‘Will I ever write another Western?’ I say, I do not know. If they pay enough, I suppose I will” (Leonard 2007, p. 26). Leonard did in fact return to the western several times in his career, and his crime novels and hybrid “eastern‐westerns” are peopled with cowboys, outlaws, and, more often, western wannabes. Still, Leonard's response figures his westerns as things of the past, echoing a critical sense that they were simply practice for his more interesting crime novels.

Leonard biographies portray Hombre (1961) as a means to an end: the novel – and its subsequent film rights – allowed Leonard to quit his day job in advertising and quit the western, too (Challen 2000, p. 66; Geherin 1989, pp. 8, 30–31; Sutter 2018, pp. 749–750). Hombre was published during a perceived “end of the line for Westerns” in print and on film (Sutherland 2014, p. 225), and its success allowed Leonard to work on what would become his first crime novel, The Big Bounce (1969) (Sutter 2018, p. 750; Rzepka 2013 pp. 75–76). The preference Leonard's mother had for his westerns over the darker, obscenity‐laced crime novels that followed is perhaps the most damning evidence against them; as she lamented to her son, “Why do not you write those Westerns any more? … They were so nice” (Sutherland 2014, p. 225).1 The “niceness” baked into the genre is precisely the problem: Leonard's westerns are simpler, less improvisational, and clumsier than the crime novels that followed. Hombre, for all its positive qualities, is still a western written before Leonard's mastery of free indirect discourse and his ear for vernacular would make his name synonymous with crime fiction.

When Leonard's westerns are praised, it is often for their cinematic flair. Leonard's love for western films far outpaces his interest in western novels (Geherin 1989, p. 19; Rzepka 2013, p. 45), and Hombre is written with an ear for the voice of his characters in an onscreen world. Hombre's main antagonist, Frank Braden, was partially inspired by Richard Boone's performance as Frank Usher in The Tall T (1957), an adaptation of Leonard's “The Captives” (1955). According to Leonard, “Richard Boone, he recited his lines exactly the way I heard them when I was writing the story. And then when I wrote Hombre … I said, ‘You ought to be in this because one of the guys in this is you’” (Leonard 2007, p. 24).2 However, Hombre showcases more than Leonard's ear for cinematic dialogue; it also reveals an intimate knowledge of the western genre. Beyond adaptations of Leonard's own work, Hombre is filled with references to the filmic western, including Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and The Searchers (1956). These references are more

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