THE (hard-b)O(i)L(e)D WEST

by Jim Doherty

It was recently announced that Elmore Leonard, who is regarded by many as the best currently active practitioner of hard-boiled crime fiction, is getting his third Lifetime Achievement Award this June. He is already the recipient of the MWA's Grand Master Edgar and the CWA's Diamond Dagger. Since, over the last 30-odd years, Leonard's been best-known for his crime fiction, it may come as a surprise to many of you that this third Lifetime Achievement trophy is the Owen Wister Award, given each year by the Western Writers of America.

Of course, if you're a Leonard aficionado, you're probably already aware that, before he started writing excellent hard-boiled crime novels like Split Images (Arbor, 1981), LaBrava (Arbor, 1983), and Out of Sight (Delacorte, 1996), he was writing equally well-regarded frontier fiction.

The recent movie hit, 3:10 to Yuma (LionsGate, 2007), for example, was a remake of an identically titled film released by Columbia in 1957. And both films were based on Leonard's short story, “ Three Ten to Yuma ” ( Dime Western , March 1953).

That's not the only one of Leonard's western novels to make it to the big screen. The Tall T (Columbia, 1957), the second of seven near-legendary collaborations between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, was a very faithful adaptation of Leonard's short story “The Captives” ( Argosy , February 1955). A 1966 film adaptation of Leonard's novel Hombre (Ballantine, 1961) was released by 20 th Century Fox, with Paul Newman in the lead. And Burt Lancaster had the starring role in Valdez Is Coming (United Artists, 1971), based on Leonard's penultimate western novel (Gold Medal, 1971), which, in turn, was expanded from his penultimate western short story, “Only Good Ones” ( Western Roundup , Macmillan, 1961, edited by Nelson Nye).

You could say that Leonard gave up western stories for contemporary crime, but, on the other hand, you could also say that Leonard never really left the West. What some might regard as his breakthrough book, the urban police novel City Primeval (Arbor, 1980), was, after all, subtitled “High Noon in Detroit .” Raylan Givens, the cop protagonist in Pronto (Delacorte, 1992) and Riding the Rap (Delacorte, 1995), is a Deputy U.S. Marshal who wears a wide-brimmed Stetson instead of a fedora and sees himself as following the same tradition as frontier peace officers like Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok. And two recent novels, The Hot Kid (Morrow, 2005) and Up in Honey's Room (Morrow, 2007), are both period novels (the first taking place during the Prohibition era and the second during World War II), set in the Southwest, and featuring another federal marshal, Carl Webster, who, like Givens, sees himself as carrying on a tradition of frontier law enforcement.

Leonard's far from being the first hard-boiled writer to switch from westerns to crime, nor the first whose crime fiction seems tinged with western motifs.

A case could be made that the first was W. R. Burnett. Famous for gangster novels like Little Caesar (Dial, 1929) and The Asphalt Jungle (Knopf, 1949), and regarded one of the pioneers of hard-boiled crime fiction, spoken of in the same reverent tones as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, he interspersed his crime fiction with western novels that were just as tough and hard. His initial entry in the genre, Saint Johnson (Dial, 1932), was possibly the first fictional depiction of the events leading up to the gunfight at the OK corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and the titular hero, U.S. Marshal Wayt Johnson, is clearly modeled on Wyatt Earp. Adobe Walls (Knopf, 1953), was a western military novel about the Apache wars, and the protagonist, Army Scout Ed Bannon, is loosely based on the legendary real-life Chief of Scouts Al Sieber. Both were filmed, Johnson as Law and Order (Universal, 1932) with Walter Huston as Johnson, and Walls as Arrowhead ( Paramount , 1953), with Charlton Heston as Bannon.

And, as with Leonard, there seems to have been a lot of cross-pollination between Burnett's crime fiction and western fiction. Colorado Territory (Warners, 1949) was a film version Burnett's gangster novel, High Sierra (Knopf, 1940), but set in the Old West instead of contemporary California, and substituting a train robbery for the hold-up of a ritzy resort hotel. The Badlanders (MGM, 1958) was a similar “westernizing” of The Asphalt Jungle . And, just to show it went both ways, The Beast of the City (MGM, 1932), filmed from a script co-written by Burnett himself, released on the same day as Law and Order , and featuring the same lead actor, Walter Huston, is a contemporary version of Saint Johnson , with Chicago substituted for Tombstone, a fictionalized Capone mob for the fictionalized Clanton gang, and Johnson (now renamed Jim Fitzpatrick but still played by Huston) transformed from a frontier marshal to a big-city police chief.

Donald Hamilton will always be remembered for creating Matt Helm, the hero of, arguably, the best series of espionage novels to come out of the Cold War (James Bond and George Smiley not excepted). But Hamilton , like Leonard, served his fictioneering apprenticeship by writing western novels and stories. An early novel, Smoky Valley (Dell, 1954), became the big-budget western The Violent Men ( Columbia , 1955), with Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. And The Big Country (Dell, 1958) became the Oscar-winning film of the same name (United Artists, 1958), with Gregory Peck, Chuck Connors, and Best Supporting Actor winner Burl Ives.

Interestingly, Hamilton rather deliberately evoked his westerns when he created Helm. In the first novel of the series, Death of a Citizen (Gold Medal, 1960), Helm is not an active duty counter-espionage agent as the story begins. Once upon a time, he was the country's top operative, but that was during a stint of wartime military duty. Since leaving the service, he's been a happily married husband and father, living in Santa Fe , NM , supporting his wife and kids, and his decidedly non-violent lifestyle, as a free-lance photojournalist and, of all things, a western novelist!

It recycles themes Hamilton had explored earlier in his western novels. For example, Smoky Valley 's protagonist, rancher John Parrish, is a Civil War veteran who tries to leave his violent past behind and settle down, but when he is pulled, against his will, into a range war, the lethal skills he developed as a soldier immediately come to the forefront. But not without some personal loss. His decision to fight, however reluctantly he's reached it, costs him the woman he loves, who leaves him for someone else.

Similarly, in Death of a Citizen , Helm thinks his life in the world of cloak-and-dagger is part of his never-to-be-returned-to past, but when he is pulled, against his will, into an espionage plot, the lethal skills he developed in wartime are also immediately recalled. And when his wife finds out about his violent past, his heretofore happy marriage to a women he truly loved ends. So, for that matter, does Helm's life as an ordinary citizen, the metaphorical “death” of the title.

It's worth noting, while we're on the subject of Hamilton and westerns, that, while Hamilton's suspense novels were short-listed several times for, the only award he ever actually won wasn't an Edgar, or a Dagger, or a Shamus, but a Spur from the Western Writers of America, for a very traditional, but exceptionally well-done, short story called “The Guns of William Longley,” which first appeared in an anthology of western fiction called Iron Men and Silver Stars (Gold Medal, 1967), an anthology that Hamilton himself edited.

In case you're interested, the original versions of some of Hamilton's western stories and novels, including the magazine serial appearances of Smoky Valley and The Big Country in, respectively, Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post , and the Spur-winning “The Guns of William Longley,” have been reproduced here:

http://homepage.mac.com/mmtz/dh/

Just scroll down to the story or serial installment you're interested in and click.

Loren Estleman, inarguably one of the finest currently practicing crime writers, is also one of the finest currently practicing western writers. He's won something like a half-dozen awards for his mystery writing, including four Shamuses, and something like a half-dozen awards for his western writing, including five Spurs. And that's to say nothing of his dozens of nominations. What's interesting is how different are the styles he brings to each genre. Detroit private eye Amos Walker, the star of nineteen of his novels, and Page Murdock, a Deputy US Marshal operating out of the US District Court in the untamed Montana Territory , the star of seven of his novels, are similar in a lot of ways. But read the first person narration of both characters and you'll be amazed at how different are the narrative voices.

Estleman has also written one of the very best fictional treatments of the conflict between the Earp family of lawmen and the Clanton family of outlaws, the excellent Bloody Season (Bantam, 1987).

Robert J. Randisi is probably best-known as the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America , the organization that gives the annual Shamus awards, and he's a highly regarded PI writer in his own right, having created such series characters as New York State Racing Club investigator Henry Po, Manhattan prizefighter-turned-PI Miles Jacoby, and Brooklyn ex-cop-turned-PI Nick Delvecchio. He's also the author of a very fine series of police procedurals featuring Detective Joe Keough, a serial killer expert operating out of the St. Louis area. And he's edited, or co-edited, nearly twenty excellent crime fiction anthologies, including The Eyes Have It (Mysterious, 1984), Murder and All That Jazz (Signet, 2004), and Hollywood and Crime (Pegasus, 2007).

But the Brooklyn-born Randisi has also written hundreds of western novels. In fact, more than 300 of his westerns feature the same series character, “The Gunsmith,” which he writes as “J.R. Roberts.” And that's just one of a half-dozen western series characters he's created. There are also, among others, the “Tracker” series as “Tom Cutter,” the “Angel Eyes” series as “W.B. Longley” (a reference to a real-life western outlaw also referenced in Donald Hamilton's award-winning short story mentioned above), the “Bounty Hunter” series as “Joshua Randall,” and the “Ryder” series as “Cole Weston.” It was once said that a writer by any other name is likely to be Bob Randisi.

And, as is common with writers who plow the fields of both mystery and western, Randisi often combines the two. Perhaps his best single novel, and certainly his most ambitious, is The Ham Reporter (Doubleday, 1986), in which former frontier lawman Bat Masterson, now a sportswriter in New York , solves a big-city murder. Along the way, just as a matter of form, he gets himself hired as a Pinkerton operative, so Randisi can claim, with justice, that The Ham Reporter should be classed with his PI fiction. In any case, it blazed a trail that, while it's still not well-traveled, has since been trod by a few others. The light-hearted film Sunset (Tri-Star, 1988), has Wyatt Earp (James Garner, repeating a role he first played in Hour of the Gun , UA, 1967) and silent western star Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) collaborating on a murder investigation in Hollywood that culminates at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1928. And Earp headlines Black Hats (Harper, 2008) by Max Allan Collins writing as “Patrick Culhane,” in which the aging lawman travels to Prohibition-era Chicago to take on Al Capone.

One writer who started out writing hard-boiled crime but, after a long career, took up the western is Spenser creator Robert B. Parker. Like many hard-boiled crime writers who are drawn to the western, Burnett and Estleman, to name two examples, Parker was moved to write his own fictional version of the events that culminated in the gunfight at the OK Corral. It's easy to understand why this particular true-life story is attractive to purveyors of hard-boiled crime. Flawed but basically honest law officers, a large group of criminal banding together to form an organized crime cartel, corrupt politics, good-looking women. It's the stuff hard-boiled mysteries are made of!

Parker's contribution to the ranks of Earp novels, Gunman's Rhapsody (Putnam, 2001), suggests that the main spark that set off the confrontation between the Earps and the “Cowboys” was simply that Earp had the temerity to fall in love with Josie Marcus while she was still the lover of John Behan, the crooked sheriff in the pay of the outlaws. Since Gunman's Rhapsody , Parker's written Appaloosa (Putnam, 2005), about a pair of itinerant, town-taming lawmen that was recently filmed, and its sequel, Resolution (Putnam, 2008).

The traffic from crime to western has also been known to come from the other direction. Occasionally, a writer best known for his frontier fiction will insert a contemporary (or at least post-World War I) crime novel within his or her frontier fiction. Respected, award-winning western novelists like Elmer Kelton, Matt Braun, Richard S. Wheeler, and Fred Grove have all written at least one contemporary (or at least semi-contemporary) crime novel.

And I've only scratched the surface. Brian Garfield, Bill Pronzini, Edward D. Hoch, Alistair MacLean, Joe Lansdale, Bill Crider, and Ed Gorman, are just a few of the mystery writers who have written western fiction along with tough-guy crime fiction, sometimes combining the two in a single work. And Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Lewis Patten, and Steve Frazee have all dabbled in the hard-boiled mystery while specializing in westerns, sometimes combining the two in a single work.

So, as different as the claustrophobic, concrete canyons of the urban mean streets are from the wide open spaces of the Old West, it's clear that both settings are excellent canvases for hard-boiled fiction.