Short Story Sunday: "You Never See Apaches..." by Elmore Leonard

Clip from an Elmore Leonard Youtube Video

Elmore Leonard is best known for his crime novels, several of which were made into successful Hollywood productions over the years, but it was the author's Western short stories for 1950s pulp magazines that actually jump-started Leonard's literary career. Hollywood adaptations of Leonard's western novels include: Hombre (starring Paul Newman in the lead role), 3:10 to Yuma, and Valdez Is Coming. Fans of Elmore Leonard's shorter work were also been blessed with the publication of a compilation of all of the author's "Western Stories" by publisher William Morrow in 2004. That one-volume collection, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, is home to all thirty of the author's western stories. 

I don't read as many short stories these days as I used to. That's partially my fault, and it's partially my library's fault because my local branch has eliminated its Short Story section in favor of shelving short story collections in the General Fiction section. So you have to know what you're looking for, or you have to depend on blind luck for finding new collections of interest, and that's the same hit-or-miss kind of browsing you are faced with on websites such as Amazon nowadays. Honestly, I never thought any library would adopt such a bad system - but my complaining about it have done exactly zero good. 

Luckily, my own shelves are filled with several hundred unread short stories in compilations I've dipped in and out of for years. I just need to keep reminding myself that they are there. 

So this afternoon I pulled my Elmore Leonard book off the shelf and read his fifteen-page story titled "You Never See Apaches..." -  a story first published in Dime Western Magazine in 1952 as "Eight Days from Wilcox." And I was totally immersed in the story's tense atmosphere by the time I turned the first page.

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Angsman is a scout and tracker who has seen it all in his day. He's killed and almost been killed by warriors of various Western tribes since he was a young man - and he's no longer a young man. When three men come to him with a treasure map in hand and offer to make him rich if he leads them to  "one little X on a piece of paper," he knows it would be a mistake to tie-in with them. But the trouble, is that Angsman is bored, very bored, sitting around in Wilcox, and he's way past ready for a little adventure. 

Leonard creates three very different characters in the story for Angsman to deal with: the generally level-headed older man who was given the map by a prospector on his death bed, the young Mexican gunner who is smart enough to listen to the voice of experience, and another young gunslinger who thinks he's so smart (and fast) that he will live forever. Somewhat predictably it's the young gunslinger whose recklessness puts the other three men into a no-win situation in which someone is going to have to pay the ultimate price for daring to be where the Apache war leader catches them.

The plot itself is not a very surprising one in pulp magazines of the day. What is surprising is the talent Leonard exhibits for creating such believable characters in so few pages, plus the realistic dialogue between those characters, and the tenseness that the story's readers feel despite knowing what is likely to happen at the end of the day. I am a big fan of western novels and movies (having grown up on fifties and sixties television, how could I not be) and "You Never See Apaches..." pushed all the right buttons for me. I feel just like I once did after walking out of my hometown movie theater after a Saturday spent watching movies and serials all day long for 35 cents. 

I really miss Elmore Leonard.