The Tonto Woman — Elmore Leonard

Welcome to a world where the Hatch & Hodges stagecoach runs on time or someone will catch hell, and where a man knows the difference between handling a Winchester rifle and a Sharps and a Henry--or pays for it with his life.

Before he became one of the best crime writers in America, Elmore Leonard was one of the best Western writers in America. He churned out short stories for the pulp magazines with regularity; The Tonto Woman collects 19 of the best, including "Three-Ten to Yuma" and "The Captives," which in 1957 became the first two of his stories to be adapted for film (the latter as The Tall T). Reading them and the other stories, you can see why Hollywood has been continually drawn to Leonard: Every encounter between two or more people, no matter how casual, has substance--becomes a matter of great moral significance and can only be resolved through action. Even those stories that rely on O. Henry-style twists of fate to reach their endings are packed with intense character studies disguised as straightforward genre prose. When all is said and done, Elmore Leonard will be mentioned by literary critics in the same breath as Ernest Hemingway--quite likely even mentioned first--and The Tonto Woman will make one of the strongest arguments in his favor. --Ron Hogan