Description:
"The basic structure of an Elmore Leonard plot," Larry Beinhart explains in How 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 recommend Valdez Is Coming to 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 like Get Shorty or Out of Sight is 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
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