Valdez Is Coming by Elmore Leonard

The delightful thing for me about my habit of soliciting book recommendations from other readers is that often I am led to read very well-written books which I ordinarily would never have found. This is one of those fortuitous finds.

Elmore Leonard is certainly a familiar name to me from shopping in book stores. He seems to have written hundreds of books (maybe only 50 or so), most of them crime novels. I had never read a book of his, however, because I am probably a book-snob, even though I try not to be. I think I just suppose that any author who is widely and wildly popular must be bogus. When I have ventured into "popular" fiction, my opinion has often been confirmed. But sometimes I am surprised. Stephen King is sometimes very good at what he does, as is John Grisham. Elmer Kelton was excellent. Of course, pulp fiction writers Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Philip K. Dick have long been recognized for their genius.

This Leonard book is a Western, published in 1970, before the many crime novels. It is a very well-executed story of a complex man who decides he has to stand up for what is right.

Bob Valdez works for a stagecoach line and is a part-time town constable. He is affable and seemingly mild-mannered and everyone likes him. But then he is put into an untenable position by a crowd of vigilantes and has to kill an innocent man to save his own life. He believes the only right thing to do then is to give the dead man's pregnant widow a large sum of money for the wrong done to her, so he asks the powerful man who started the whole business, with a wrongful identification, to contribute. He is refused and is punished for his presumption. Then a part of his person which he has suppressed comes forward, and he becomes again Roberto Valdez, the Army tracker, and he begins impelling justice, with a gun.

All this sounds very formulaic, but it is much more than that. The opening chapter is extraordinarily well done, with the characteristics of the entire cast of central characters revealed, not through "telling" but by their actions and reactions. The writing is terse and straight to the point, reminding me of Hemingway. The descriptions of terrain (very important in a Western of this kind) are not lyrical, but descriptive to the point of visualization. The ending is not the stock ending one might expect, but very true to the characterizations previously portrayed.

I understand that a movie was made from this book, and I would like to watch it to see how they handled it. But it starred Burt Lancaster? As an apparently non-threatening Mexican-American? I don't hold out great hopes.

Recommended for those who like Westerns and those who like effective writing.