Elmore Leonard's Western Roundup #3: Valdez is Coming & Hombre
"The basic structure of an Elmore Leonard plot," Larry Beinhart explains   inHow to Write a Mystery, "is that a big tough guy pushes a little  tough guy. The little guy doesn't take it. He shoves back. The little guy  is the kinda guy, the harder you shove him, the more trouble he's gonna be.  In the end, the big guy really wishes he'd picked someone else to shove.  When Leonard started he wrote westerns, and in those early books you can  see the bones without an X-ray. I recommendValdez Is Comingto  anyone who wants to understand the structure of an Elmore Leonard  novel."When part-time constable Bob Valdez tries to put together a compensation  package for a woman whose husband was killed in a case of mistaken  identity, the matter quickly escalates into a brutal struggle to regain  honor and dignity. There's not a wasted moment; every scene, every line of  dialogue moves the story forward to the inevitable showdown where, as  Valdez says, "you get one time, mister, to prove who you are." The second  novel in this volume,Hombre--perhaps Leonard's best-known Western  novel--is just as relentlessly plot-driven, with characters that reveal  their psychological complexity strictly through what they do and say as  they struggle to make their way to safety across a hot desert in the  aftermath of a stagecoach holdup. The only difference between these two  novels and classic Leonard crime novels likeGet ShortyorOut of  Sightis the time and place. Other than that, you've got two classic  tales of hard-boiled professionals who know that every step they take is a  matter of laying their reputations and their lives on the line.--Ron  Hogan