Forty Lashes Less One(1972)
A hellhole like Yuma Prison does all sorts of things to a man. Mostly it makes him want to escape. For two men facing life sentences – Harold Jackson, the only black man behind the walls, and Raymond San Carlos, an Apache halfbreed – a breakout seemed nigh on impossible. That is, until the law gave them two choices: rot in a cell, or track down and bring back the five most ruthless men in Arizona.
New York Daily News: “Long before his slick, dark crime comedies, Elmore Leonard wrote some very tough and realistic Westerns.”
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“You want us to run twenty miles?”
“You’re an Apache Indian, aren’t you, Raymond? And Harold’s a Zulu. Well, by golly, an Apache Indian and a Zulu can run twenty, thirty miles a day, and there ain’t a white man in this territory can say that.”
“You want us to run twenty miles?” Raymond said again.
“I want you to start thinking of who you are, that’s what I want. I want you to start thinking like warriors for a change instead of like convicts.”
Gunsights (1979)
Brendan Early and Dana Moon have tracked renegade Apaches together and gunned down scalp hunters to become Arizona legends. But now they face each other from opposite sides of what newspapers are calling The Rincon Mountain War. Brendan and a gang of mining company gun thugs are dead set on running Dana and “the People of the Mountain” from their land. The characters are unforgettable, the plot packed with action and gunfights from beginning to end.
San Francisco Chronicle: “Classic Western fare.”
Chicago Sun-Times: “Leonard’s special kind of tough guys were born in the Old West.”
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Bren Early said to Moon, “Do you want to tell him to go stick it in his horse, or should I?”
Sundeen turned toward his partners. They were getting ready.
“I’ll give them three more steps,” Bren said and pulled his matched Smith & Wesson .44s. Moon drew his Colts.
Three more strides and that was it.
Sundeen was hollering something, and his two men on the ends fell dead in the first sudden explosion from the wall where Early and Moon stood with revolvers extended, aiming and firing.
Bren said, “He’s used to having his way.”
Moon said, “But he didn’t come prepared, did he?”
Cuba Libre(1998)
War in Cuba isn’t Ben Tyler’s concern. Still, sailing mares and guns into Havana harbor in 1898 -right past the submerged wreckage of the U.S. battleship Maine – may not be the smartest thing the recently prison-sprung horse wrangler ever did. Neither is shooting one of the local Guardia, though the pompous peacock deserved it. Now Tyler’s sitting tight in a vermin-infested Cuban stockade waiting to face a firing squad. But he’s not dying until he gets the money he’s owed from a two-timing American sugar baron. And there’s one smart, pistol-hot lady at the rich man’s side who could help Ben get everything he’s got rightfully coming… even when the whole damn island’s going straight to hell.
Miami Herald: “A wild ride through Cuba during the Spanish-American War… A good old-fashioned Western served with a sly grin and a side dish of scams.”
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Tyler arrived with the horse February eighteenth, three days after the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. He saw buzzards floating in the sky the way they do but couldn’t make out what they were after. This was off Morro Castle, the cattle boat streaming black smoke as it comes through the narrows.
But then pretty soon he saw a ship’s mast and a tangle of metal sticking out of the water, gulls resting on it. One of the Mexican deckhands called to the pilot tug bringing them in, wanting to know what the wreckage was. The pilot yelled back that it was the Maine.
Yeah? The main what? Tyler’s border Spanish failed to serve, trying to make out voices raised against the wind. The deckhand told him it was a buque de guerra, a warship.
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories(1998)
The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories is a raw, hard-bitten collection that gathers together the best of Leonard’s Western fiction. In “The Tonto Woman,” a young wife, her face tattooed by Indian kidnappers, becomes society’s outcast – until an outlaw vows to set her free… In “Only Good Ones,” we meet a fine man turned killer in one impossible moment… “Saint with a Six-Gun” pits a doomed prisoner against his young guard – in a drama of deception and compassion that leads to a shocking act of courage… In “The Colonel’s Lady,” a brutal ambush puts a woman into the hands of a vicious renegade – while a tracker attempts a rescue that cannot come in time… And in “Blood Money,” five bank robbers are being picked off one by one, but one man believes he can make it out alive.
Contains: “The Tonto Woman”; “The Captives”; “Only Good Ones”; “You Never See Apaches”; “The Colonel’s Lady”; “The Kid”; “The Big Hunt”; “Apache Medicine”; “No Man’s Guns”; “Jugged”; “The Hard Way”; “Blood Money”; “3:10 to Yuma”; “The Boy Who Smiled”; “Hurrah for Capt. Early”; “Moment of Vengeance”; “Saint with a Six-Gun”; “The Nagual”; Trouble at Rindo’s Station”
From the collection:
“The Captives”
He could hear the stagecoach, the faraway creaking and the muffled rumble of it, and he was thinking: It’s almost an hour early. Why should it be if it left Contention on schedule?
His name was Pat Brennan. He was lean and almost tall, with a deeply tanned, pleasant face beneath the straight hat-brim low over his eyes, and he stood next to the saddle, which was on the ground, with the easy hip-shot slouch of a rider. A entry rifle was in his right hand and he was squinting into the sun glare, looking up the grade to the rutted road that came curving down through the spidery Joshua trees.
He lowered the Henry rifle, stock down, and let it fall across the saddle, and kept his hand away from the Colt holstered on his right leg. A man could get shot standing next to a stage road out in the middle of nowhere with a rifle in his hand.
All excerpts from works by Elmore Leonard are copyright © by Elmore Leonard, Inc., in the year of publication. Reprinted here with permission.
The Big Bounce(2003). Announced director: George Armitage. Announced cast: Owen Wilson (Jack Ryan); Morgan Freeman (Walter Crewes); Sara Foster (Nancy Hayes); Gary Sinise (Ray Ritchie)…
Out of Sight(1998). Director: Steven Soderbergh. Cast: George Clooney (John Michael “Jack” Foley); Jennifer Lopez (Karen Sisco); Ving Rhames (Buddy Bragg); Don Cheadle (Maurice “Snoopy” Miller); Dennis Farina (Marshall Sisco); Albert Brooks (Richard “Dick the Ripper” Ripley); Nancy Allen (Midge); Catherine Keener (Adele Delisi); Isaiah Washington (Kenneth “Kenny”); Steve Zahn (Glenn Michaels); Luis Guzmán (Jose Portencio)…
Jackie Brown(1997), based on the novel Rum Punch. Director: Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Pam Grier (Jackie Brown); Samuel L. Jackson (Ordell Robbie); Robert Forster (Max Cherry); Bridget Fonda (Melanie Ralston); Michael Keaton (Ray Nicolette);Robert De Niro (Louis Gara); Michael Bowen (Mark Dargus); Chris Tucker (Beaumont Livingston); Lisa Gay Hamilton (Sheronda)…
Touch(1997). Director: Paul Schrader. Cast: LL Cool J (Himself); Gina Gershon (Debra Lusanne); Conchata Ferrell (Virginia Worrel); John Doe (Elwin Worrel); Christopher Walken (Bill Hill); Skeet Ulrich (Juvenal, a.k.a. Charlie Lawson); María Celedonio (Alisha, rehab receptionist); Chris Hogan (Scruffy Staff Worker); Anthony Zerbe (Father Donahue); Bridget Fonda (Lynn Marie Faulkner); William Newman (Court Clerk);Tom Arnold (August Murray); Breckin Meyer (Greg Czarnicki); Matt O’Toole (Bailiff); Richard Fancy (Judge)…