Elmore Leonard's Sneaky Westerns

The earliest short stories of an eventual crime fiction master

Before Elmore Leonard became the king of crime fiction, with books like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Rum Punch, he was a young copywriter in Detroit with a knack for writing lean, tough prose. He started out submitting Western short stories to pulp magazines in the early 1950s, trying to break in anywhere he could. In an interview I found on YouTube, Leonard said he’d keep a legal pad in his desk drawer at his day job and sneakily hand write short stories on the company’s dime! The result was a string of clean, character-driven tales that showed even then what Leonard did better than almost anyone: write people in conflict with sharp dialogue and no wasted words.

The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard collects 30 of those early shorts, most written for publications like Dime Western, Argosy, and Zane Grey’s Western Magazine. There are cattle rustlers and lawmen, Apaches and scouts, drifters and buffalo hunters. But don’t expect the mythic moral clarity of Louis L’Amour. Leonard’s West is dirty, tense, and unpredictable. It’s noir with horses.

Stories like “Three-Ten to Yuma,” which was adapted by Hollywood twice, strip the Western down to its essentials: two men, a ticking clock, and a moral decision that doesn’t come easy. “Three-Ten to Yuma” is perhaps his most famous, a near-perfect tale of a deputy trying to escort a captured outlaw to the train, while surrounded by danger and doubt. There are no sweeping vistas here, just a man’s nerve stretched thin.

So why did Leonard leave the West behind? Simple: the market dried up like an Arizona gulch. By the early ’60s, Western pulps and digests were fading fast. Leonard was good at what he did, but he was also a realist and a working man with a family to support. He switched to crime fiction, starting with The Big Bounce (1969), and never looked back.

But what’s fascinating is how little his style changed. The best of Leonard’s crime fiction (Freaky Deaky, LaBrava, Swag) still plays by the rules he learned writing Westerns. He favored small-time operators, tough guys with sharp tongues and loose morals. He always wrote about people trying to hustle their way through a crooked world. And above all, he kept things lean with short chapters, clipped dialogue, and minimal exposition.

The only major difference? Setting. Instead of the Arizona Territory, it’s Detroit or Miami or the Florida Keys. Instead of horses, there are Cadillacs. But the DNA is the same. His criminals and cowboys share the same cynicism, the same code, and the same uncanny ability to talk their way into, and sometimes out of, trouble.

For fans of noir and pulp, this collection is a masterclass in character and economy of prose. Think of these not as strictly westerns, but a genre in itself, which is Elmore Leonard stories. That means they’re fast, smart, and tougher than your mother-in-law’s pot roast.