Walk A Mile in My Chaps, Cowboy - #47, 48, and 49

STORY:  “The Colonel’s Lady” – “Blood Money” – and “The Nagual” - by Elmore Leonard

FROM:  THE COMPLETE WESTERN STORIES OF ELMORE LEONARD (William Morrow, 2004)

BASICALLY:  Action-packed Westerny goodness.

• “The Colonel’s Lady” (1952) – An infamous Apache bandit kills a party of travelers and takes the lone woman hostage, hustling her upstream.  They’re pursued by a US Army tracker who hopes against hope he’ll reach them before she’s the victim of further atrocity.  Twist ending.
• “Blood Money” (1953) – A gang of five bank robbers has apparently killed a man during its most recent heist. The marshal and his posse pursue the four hardened criminals and one boy, trapping them in an old dead-end mining canyon.  Then the wait begins.  Another twist ending.
• “The Nagual” (1956) – An old man, a vaquero his whole life but now disabled and unable to do much more than mend fences, is aware of the affair between his boss’s wife and the man who breaks his boss’s horses.  When the boss gets wind of the affair and takes a drastic action, the old man has a decision to make.  Cute ending, but not really a twist.

Amazingly, even after my gargantuan (sorry!) analysis of a formulaic noir story in #46, I still wasn’t tired of reflecting on how pulp writing does what it does.  And even though I think TYoOHS’s Library Month started, like, ninety-two years ago, I’ve still got plenty of great material to go through.  (Hooray for online renewal.)  This collection of Elmore Leonard Western stories was a perfect fit for my mood.  On one level, these are basic pieces of fiction that are easily categorized—good guys, bad guys, classic otherworld setting, lots of men doing archetypally manly things with guns and horses and whiskey.  Being a Western raises certain expectations in readers; it has to deliver if it’s going to succeed.

But what I discovered in reading these three Westerns is that Elmore Leonard knows how to use the formula as a jumping-off point, not an end.  Formulaic conventions are unarguably present—after all, that’s part of what it means to be a story in the Western genre—but what’s impressive is how well he masks them.  The guy is clearly brilliant.  In the introduction, Leonard’s quoted as saying that when he decided to become a writer, “I looked for a genre where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time…I chose Westerns because I liked Western movies.”  But then he went and wrote “twenty-seven of the thirty stories in this volume” in the five years between 1951 and 1956, which is a pretty fantastic learning curve.  Of course, he benefited from a thriving market for the Western story, a market that dried up by the end of the fifties.  But you’ve gotta admire his practicality and drive, combined with what’s clearly a significant natural talent.

In that formulaic murder story discussed in #46, as well as in Dashiell Hammett’s formulaic detective story discussed in #39, a single POV narrates the action in a straight linear arc.  That’s what makes those stories so simple and so analyzable.  They’re fun, but they are not complex.  These three Westerns, on the other hand, feel far more complicated.  Where Elmore Leonard breaks away from the pack, I think, is in his manipulation of point of view (POV).

All three of these stories are told in third person—never “I,” always “he”—but it’s mostly a close third person.  That means that instead of some distant god-like narrator, we’re as close to the character as if it were in first person.  We see the individual’s thoughts and feelings, and we’re in their head as they take in the world.  For example, in “The Colonel’s Lady,” we begin inside the POV of the Apache bandit Mata Lobo:

He inched his body upward until he was standing, placed a foot on a rung of the baggage rack, and pushed his body up until his head was above the coach. He was confident of his own animal stealth. A gun could be waiting, but he doubted it. Only a fool would have moved, knowing he was just outside. A fool, or a child, or a woman.

But Leonard doesn’t stay there.  After Mata Lobo captures the woman and sets off, we switch POV to the unit of soldiers that find the ruined stagecoach.  The narration begins distantly, but soon settles onto the POV of their young leader Phil Langmade.  Like his men, he’s exhausted and filthy from their most recent patrol, and finding this horrific scene is the last thing he could have wanted—especially because the coach contained the Colonel’s wife.  Experience tells him there’s almost no chance she’s still alive.

During this part of the story, Phil Langmade is unsure what to do, and he’s even scared to look inside the coach for fear he’ll find the corpse of the Colonel’s wife.  But civilian scout Simon Street has already noticed her footprint on the riverbank and reports that the bandit—he surmises that there was only one, and who it probably was—has taken her away on foot.  We stay in Langmade’s point of view and so get introduced to Simon Street through his eyes; mainly, he admires the scout’s abilities and trusts his judgment.  By the time Leonard changes the POV again, this time to Simon Street himself, we understand that this guy is the best of the best—and even he doubts this episode will turn out for the best.  The stakes feel very high indeed.

Leonard uses POV switches in all three of these stories.  In “Blood Money,” the change-ups are even more freewheeling, moving liberally between the escaping criminals and the lawmen pursuing them.  When you think about it, a standoff between a bunch of robbers and a marshal’s posse is about as formulaic as Western plots come.  But by building the story up through successive layers of POV, Leonard complicates the narrative.  A simpler story might keep us in the POV of the criminals, and then the lawmen become their antagonists, and either our bad guy protagonists succeed or they don’t.  Or it might make the lawmen the POV protagonists, the criminals the antagonists, and then the same question would hold.  But by jumping around between POVs frequently, the reader is never sure whose side they’re supposed to be on—which allows Leonard to make this a story about a young criminal’s chance at redemption, instead of what you think at first, that it’s just a story about whether or not some bank robbers get caught.

You’re probably wanting to know how Leonard switches POV so often without being annoying about it.  It’s a good question.  I feel sure it’s a good question because I can’t quite figure out the answer.  It has something to do with purpose, I know—every time the POV changes, it’s for a specific narrative purpose.  It might be to increase tension (as when we leave Mata Lobo with his helpless hostage), or it might be to set up another character (Phil Langmade’s evaluation of the scout Simon Street), or it might be to give the reader more information than a character has (as when we learn from a “Blood Money” lawman that the kid involved in the bank hold-up and attempted murder can probably avoid being hanged for his crime).  In any case, the changes in POV aren’t arbitrary and they don’t repeat information.

In “The Nagual,” Leonard chooses to use fewer changes in POV, providing an interesting contrast.  Most of the action occurs through the eyes of seventy-year-old Ofelio Oso, who keeps to himself and goes often into the hills to look at the stars and meditate on the approaching end of his life.  Unlike in “Blood Money,” “The Nagual” has a single unambiguous protagonist.  Even so, we don’t stay inside his mind the whole time.  For example, when Ofelio is waiting to pick up his boss from the stagecoach station, he hangs out with some other roughnecks who get a kick out of teasing him about going off into the hills.  They try to goad him into talking about “the devils” he says he sometimes sees, just so they can laugh at him.  But the POV shifts to the most sympathetic listener:

Billy-Jack Trew listened, and in a way he understood the old man. He knew that legends were part of a Mexican peon’s life. He knew that Ofelio had been a vaquero for something like fifty years, with lots of lonesometime for imagining things. Anything the old man said was good listening, and a lot of it made sense after you thought about it awhile—so Billy-Jack Trew didn’t laugh.

You might be surprised to know that, in the story, this isn’t really new information—earlier, in Ofelio’s POV, we learn about the long career as a vaquero and the propensity for thinking.  But having Billy-Jack think it, too, sort of validates it as an actual characteristic of Ofelio, not just the way the old man sees himself.  And it builds on that, too, by showing that Billy-Jack considers Ofelio to be a source of some wisdom.

“The Nagual” is the least formulaic of the Elmore Leonard Westerns I read—really, it’s pretty rad how much the stories, despite having been written within just a few years of one another, get progressively more sophisticated.  Although they all have formulaic elements, sometimes even employing Western tropes that border on the cliché, they overcome their humble foundations thanks to Leonard’s skill in making each story feel fresh.  When I talked about stories #44 and 45, I said that Margaret Drabble’s literary pair seemed strangely alike at heart, even though they had very different plots.  Remarkably, despite a shared nineteenth-century setting and masculine outlook, Elmore Leonard’s tales don’t project that feeling of sameness.  His handling of POV seems to be a big part of this, allowing him to inject change and tension into his stories at every turn.  So, go on, whether or not you think of yourself as the kind of person who reads Westerns, enjoy him for his writing chops and his ability to spin a great yarn.

Three Differents and One Menace - #46

STORY:  “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” by Justin Scott

FROM:  MANHATTAN NOIR, ed. Lawrence Block (Akashic Books, 2006)

BASICALLY:  Bob has finally found the New York apartment of his dreams, complete with unparalleled view of the Empire State Building.  He’s ready to buy, but the owner’s playing hardball with an exorbitant price.  Bob’s friend the real estate broker is helping as much as possible--but the friend’s newfound obsession with exacting revenge on his supposedly evil ex-wife is starting to get creepy.  A suspenseful tale with a deadly climax and a surprising final twist.

This is a story that fairly cries out to be broken down, like so many Lego castles, into its component parts.  I’m kind of obsessed with structure you guys!  Not because it’s my favorite thing about literature though—quite the opposite.  The reason I’m always wanting to know how stories are put together is that my instinctual understanding of the mechanism is precisely nada.

Now, lovely prose, that I get.  I’m making no claims to an immortal style of my own, you understand, but I do think I have a good strong gut feeling about what works and what has quality and how words sound nice together.  Sometimes I can even coax these qualities into my own sentences!  But large-scale narrative structure—like plotting, pacing, and overall balance—doesn’t come naturally to me in the slightest.

That’s why a story like “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” is such a boon to a writer like me.  It’s entertaining and interesting, and yet simple and formulaic enough that I can study it to understand why writer Justin Scott chose to include the elements that he did and how he knew where to put them.

I feel like I’ve got to insert a caveat, here—I definitely don’t see learning to write to a formula as one of my writerly goals.  (Noooooo!  I am lofty and high-falutin’!)  It’s not that I think formula fiction has no value, but it wouldn’t make sense for me to start penning popular thrillers; that’s not what I read and it’s not where my passion lies.  However, I do want to learn how literary formulas function.  Why are they so pleasing to readers?  What effect do certain narrative choices have?  It’s that whole “you have to learn the rules before you can break them” thing—not that you have to do anything at all, or do it in the way that I do it.  I’m just groping along in the dark, here.

I’ve run across a couple of links lately that have given me a lot to mull over in terms of formula and structure.  First, it was this breakdown by Michael Moorcock, a respected science fiction writer who’s written many a non-formulaic novel in addition to his bald-faced moneymakers.  In it, he explains his approach to churning out a 60,000-word potboiler in a mere three days.  That discovery led me to this method by Lester Dent, successful pulp writer of yore, for writing a 6,000-word short story.  Let’s take a look at some of the ways “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” (or “TMBAINY,” as I shall henceforth call it) accords with their principles.  By the way, some serious spoilers ahead.

So, if you look at Lester Dent’s method, you’ll see he starts right in with some good specifics about what your unique formula-driven story will need:  

1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE
2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING
3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE
4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO

One of these DIFFERENT things would be nice, two better, three swell. It may help if they are fully in mind before tackling the rest.

I wasn’t sure what Dent meant by “different” in this context, but it seems to make sense once I apply the concepts to “TMBAINY.”  The murderer, unhinged real estate broker Tommy King, uses in this instance a scalpel.  As murder weapons go, it’s not especially shocking and in no way over the top, but neither is it the kind of thing you hear about every day.  It’s, y’know, different.  And author Justin Scott amps up the interest level by having Tommy talk about his fascination beforehand:

“I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel. What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught— What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”

At the time, this is fairly casual.  Of course, once you know that Tommy does try to cut his ex-wife’s heart out, it’s a bit more grim.

I wouldn’t say that Tommy is seeking anything especially different in this story, but he’s not clearly a villain until most of the way through.  As Bob the protagonist’s friend and real estate broker, Tommy’s goal (revenge against his ex-wife) is meaningful because it remains hidden until the climax.

Next, Dent calls for “a different locale.”  (And check out his tricks to convince editors you’re familiar with any random faraway place.)  (I could spend forever musing about the ways such shenanigans have become both easier and harder in the Internet Age.  But I’ll spare you.)  This story takes place in New York.  New York!  Pretty-well-known slash not-so-different.  There must be a million and one other stories that take place in that city.  Yet I think Scott’s New York serves the same function that an exotic and thrilling locale would for Dent.  The main thing is that it’s absolutely integral to the story.  New York itself is intertwined with the protagonist’s goal—everyone everywhere wants to live in a nice place, but in a gargantuan city where real estate is scarce, apartment buying achieves epic importance.  The other main thing is the specificity, how place permeates this story in its smallest details.  The intractable owner, for example, insists that his apartment’s a great investment because

“Nothing will bring it down. It didn’t go when the Towers went down. I was watching on CNN thinking, Oh, God, the Empire State Building’s next, I’ll never get my price without the view. Then I realized the terrorists don’t know from shit about the Empire State Building. You gotta be a New Yorker to love the Empire State Building—sure enough, they went for the Pentagon.”

Now, this is an excellent passage for several reasons, but most fundamentally it melds the story’s What to its Where.  Plot and setting are about as elementary as narrative components come—but when they’re well-united, as they are here, they add a powerful dimension to the storytelling.  (And I don’t see how the truth of this is limited to pulp or formulaic writing.)

Last of all, Dent says a menace has to hang like a cloud over the hero.  This mystified me at first, but then I looked at “TMBAINY” and realized that a certain feeling—yea, one might even say a menace—does hang over the whole story.  Bob, as protagonist, is intently focused on his own goal: he wants that apartment something fierce.  The importance of his desire is increased by the New York setting, an external impetus, and also by his growing sense that in his life, he’s always accepted second-best—the lesser apartment, the lesser wife, the lesser life.  And then even the guy selling the apartment suggests that maybe he’d be better off buying an apartment in Brooklyn.  Infuriating!  So Bob’s got forces within and forces without pushing him to do whatever it takes to get this apartment.  He’s even willing to spend time with Tommy King, sleazeball extraordinaire.

Bob and Tommy are presented as friends, but it seems fairly clear that it’s a friendship based on, to put it nicely, practicality.  Bob is unnerved by Tommy’s ex-wife fixation and this feeling only grows throughout the story as Tommy’s fixation seems to balloon out into a real desire to do harm.  Bob also finds himself seriously doubting Tommy’s loyalty—is he showing the apartment to someone else who’ll buy it out from under him?  The story’s focus is the acquisition of the apartment, but the thing with Tommy is like a gadfly that won’t let up.  As a reader, I felt a mounting anxiety about it—I didn’t know how Tommy’s violent impulses would end up affecting Bob’s goal, but I could sense that something was going to have to give.  Of course, this only works if the two separate strands end up crashing into one another.  If that had never happened, if it had turned out that Tommy King’s ex didn’t actually figure in the story at all, it would have been baffling.  In a short story, what’s there needs to get used.

That’s something Michael Moorcock says in his advice on writing sword-and-sorcery action to formula.  I haven’t talked much about Moorcock’s approach, mainly because it’s designed to apply to a short novel rather than a short story (and even Dent’s method is meant for a much longer story than “TMBAINY”).  But one bit from Moorcock stands out because it happens to be the main way in which “TMBAINY” fails.

Moorcock says,

You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other.

It’s the thing about cohering that matters.  In “TMBAINY,” the conflict comes to a head with Bob humiliating himself by borrowing money from his working-class parents, who have painstakingly saved it to retire on, but then it doesn’t even matter because the owner’s already sold to a woman who wants a “pied-a-terre for her boyfriend.”  The woman just happens to be Tommy King’s ex-wife.  She has no idea that Tommy’s even involved, she just loved the place at first sight—but he is literally lying in wait for her.  As she tours her new piece of real estate, he attacks and kills her.  Bob has guessed Tommy’s plan, but he hesitates just a moment too long—fully aware that her murder would mean that “the price of that apartment was going to plummet.”

She dies.  And Bob does get the apartment, which brings us to the problem with the story’s cohesion.  Bob finds that he can’t enjoy his wonderful new apartment because everywhere he looks, he sees this woman’s ghost.  Literally.

Samantha was waiting in the window, her heart-shaped face super-imposed on the Empire State Building. Her ghost? Or just my guilty imagination reflected in the glass? Didn’t matter which, I saw her clear as I saw the sunlit spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me…“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”

My big problem with this part of the ending is that it just doesn’t fit.  There’s been no indication that we’re in anything but the mundane world—now, suddenly, I’m supposed to accept a supernatural judgment?  Irascible apartment owners cohere with sleazy real estate brokers, and big-city apartment hunters cohere with ex-wives, and excellent views of the Empire State Building cohere with human motivation—but none of that coheres with the sudden appearance of a mournful, guilt-inducing ghost.

When I re-read “TMBAINY,” I realized that the author had actually mentioned ghosts numerous times before the ending.  The guy selling the apartment, for example, mentions that the only thing that brings down prices on apartments like his are hauntings.  And the word gets used metaphorically more than once.  So Scott clearly made an effort for the ghost thing to cohere.  But it fell flat; the departure was too great.  I think he would have had to include some early hint that supernatural events actually could occur in the universe of the story—lacking that, protagonist punished by his own guilt in the form of a ghost just feels like a cop-out.

Luckily, that’s not quite where the story ends.  The true ending has a much better twist, and I think I’ll leave it unspoiled for you.

Even for this major flaw, though, “TMBAINY” is a really fun little story.  To me, that’s the big power of formulaic approaches—even when other elements aren’t as strong as they could be, the formula points to the pieces that make a reader want to keep reading.  Most people, I believe, would vastly prefer an exciting and interesting tale with some slightly wooden characters and a few weird plot turns to a beautifully-composed, carefully-rendered story in which nothing seems to happen.  And to me, it’s not an either-or proposition—the very best fiction serves up pleasure right alongside art.