1956 saw the publication of Leonard’s third novel, Escape from Five Shadows. It’s another fairly pulpy Western with a fairly pulpy title, but even so, it’s again a little closer to what you’d expect an Elmore Leonard novel to be — in some ways, anyway. In others, maybe not so much.
It’s a little rough around the edges, but just the same, it’s a pretty fun story about an innocent man stuck with a seven-year prison sentence, desperate to escape from a prison camp run by a ruthless profiteer. Let’s get to it.
Plot summary: Five Shadows is a convict labor camp in Arizona. The government gives the man in charge, Frank Renda, money for the daily upkeep of each prisoner. Renda, being what you might consider the frugal type — he buys the cheap flour with worms in it and gets about one bar of soap for the entire prison — is profiting off each and every prisoner and making out like a bandit, although he has to fudge the books so the government doesn’t find out about it. His company has a road-building contract that’s being worked by the prisoners, and he aims to make sure the project takes a small eternity. Every extra day the convicts break rocks or clear brush is an extra day of profit for him.
Corey Bowen is a prisoner at Five Shadows. Bowen and another man, Earl Manring, were convicted of rustling cattle. Manring was in charge of the operation, and he had a bill of sale for the cattle and insists it was all legit, but the owner of said cattle insists he never sold them to Manring. They both got seven years in the territorial prison at Yuma. Already a year into his sentence, Bowen now finds himself working on Renda’s road-building enterprise.
Bowen is an innocent man. He doesn’t know if Manring stole the cattle or not, but Bowen was just a hired hand. He didn’t steal a damn thing, and there’s no way he’s spending seven years of his life in prison. He’s going to run. It doesn’t take very long for him to try it: he sees his opportunity and jumps off a transport wagon, running for it when Renda and his head guard, a particularly mean-spirited brute named Brazil, are distracted.
Bowen is smart and he’s got some moves. But Renda’s got a dozen Mimbreño Apache trackers on his payroll to keep people from doing exactly what Bowen is doing, so the odds are stacked against him. Bowen makes it to the nearby Hatch & Hodges Stage Line station, which keeps Five Shadows supplied and delivers mail to them. He needs a horse if he’s to have any chance of making it.
It’s here he meets Karla Demery, the daughter of the guy who runs the station. Karla’s noticed Bowen before, and now he’s suddenly here, grabbing her and telling her to help him. Karla, as it happens, entertains some ideas about Bowen, and knows what he’s in prison for. She’s got a feeling about him being innocent. She’s happy to cooperate. There’s a spark between them.
“You jumped off at the grade, didn’t you?”
“Before that.”
“And they couldn’t chase you because of the other prisoners.”
“That’s right.”
“But the trackers are probably already following.”
“That’s right,” Bowen said again. Still he did not move. His hands were on her shoulders and he continued to study her dark face, trying to understand the calm way she looked up at him.
“Then you’d better hurry,” Karla said. The saddle’s on the wall behind you.”
Bowen turned, almost reluctantly. He bridled the big mare, spread the blanket, and as he swung the saddle up, Karla started to walk away.
“Where are you going?”
Karla looked back. “To get you some clothes.” She waited as he stared at her and she felt that she could almost read his thoughts. “Don’t you trust me?”
“I don’t know why I should.”
“All right, ride around with those numbers on your pants.”
Bowen shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”
“What would you like to know?” Karla asked.
“Why’re you helping me?”
“I’m not. You’re taking a horse. What good would it do if I objected?”
“The clothes–”
“You would have thought of it sooner or later,” Karla said. “Hurry now.”
Unexpectedly, Bowen said, “Was Falvey bothering you?”
Karla smiled again. “Maybe you’re not in a hurry.”
Karla surprises, confuses, and intrigues Bowen, but with the trackers on his tail, he can’t stay and figure her out.
Bowen doesn’t make it, of course; he’s pretty good, but nowhere near “lose twelve Apache trackers” good. When they drag him back to the convict camp, with his hands tied behind his back, Renda delivers a brutal beating and throws him in the punishment cell — a tiny dark room — for three weeks. Sharing the cell is another convict, Ike Pryde, who tells Bowen that he thinks Manring warned Renda that Bowen was going to run.
The beating and the punishment cell is pretty much the kind of treatment you can expect at Five Shadows. The conditions are bad — with Renda skimming off the government subsistence money, there’s not much left for the prisoners’ comfort — and the discipline is harsh. Life is cheap, as we see when a prisoner gets a little too lippy for Brazil’s preference:
Chick swallowed again. He started to back away. “Beating me wouldn’t solve anything.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t at that,” Brazil said. He lowered the Winchester so that the stock was beneath his right arm. His right hand gripped through the lever. He moved toward Chick who half turned and began edging away.
“What are you going to do?”
“Run down and tell Renda to come here,” Brazil said.
“You mean it?”
“I wouldn’t say it ‘less I did.”
“You’re not going to do anything to me?”
“Go on.”
Chick edged away, still half turned looking at Brazil. He glanced up canyon to locate Renda, looked back at Brazil once more then turned, his quick short steps developing into a run. He had gone no more than thirty feet when Brazil fired. Chick stumbled as if trying to turn and Brazil fired again, the stock of the Winchester still under his arm and held just above his waist. He levered another shell into the chamber before his gaze returned from Chick Miller to the three men near him. His eyes moved slowly from Bowen to Pryde to the Mexican.
“He tried to run,” Brazil said. “You saw him. He tried to run away.”
But things are complicated at Five Shadows in ways that can’t be solved by shooting prisoners: after all, Renda’s been defrauding the government, and the camp’s superintendent, Willis Falvey, has been helping him do it, cooking the books and ensuring everything looks fine on paper. Willis is an unwilling accomplice in the scam, but he’s too afraid of Renda to protest — and anyway, he’s out of options, as his government career has stalled and he’s now stuck here in the ass end of nowhere, his only hobby staying drunk as much of the time as possible. He entertains some hope that perhaps, once he’s put in his time here, the powers that be will see fit to elevate him to a better position. It will never happen.
His wife, Lizann Falvey, is in the same boat: she thought Willis had great prospects and married him, only to discover that he’d gambled away a family fortune. Now she’s stuck at Five Shadows — stuck in a loveless marriage, scared and disgusted by Frank Renda, with nothing to do, surrounded by wilderness and convicts. She hates it all, but she can’t leave: this is all Willis has, and Renda needs him for the scam. Lizann is effectively Renda’s hostage, a bit of extra leverage over Willis.
In Bowen, Lizann sees an opportunity: she can tell this man is resourceful and eager to make a move. Maybe she could use him — she could give him a gun, help him escape. In exchange, she wants Bowen to kill her husband: with the camp’s superintendent dead, somebody from the government will have to come investigate things, Renda’s scam will be revealed, and she’ll be able to leave. Whether Bowen actually manages to escape isn’t really her concern.
At the same time, Karla’s convinced that there’s something that could be done to help Bowen, and she writes to a lawyer she knows, asking him to look into what went down. Turns out that there’s enough previously unknown evidence for Bowen to get a new trial: the cattle owner’s former accountant is willing to testify that he forged the bill of sale on Manring’s orders, and Bowen wasn’t a part of it at all. Bowen has a real shot at freedom — assuming he doesn’t ruin it all by escaping, of course. Unfortunately, Karla can’t get to Bowen to let him know things are progressing and a favorable outcome is in the cards.
With the road project reaching a point where dynamite is needed, Bowen’s expertise with the stuff comes in handy. He comes up with an escape plan for himself, Manring and Pryde — one that absolutely does not involve shooting Willis Falvey, because Bowen has no intention of becoming a murderer. The plan works, for the most part, although Pryde ends up stabbing Brazil, who in turn shoots Pryde, and the both of them are buried under tons of rock when a charge goes off.
But the explosion also does what it was supposed to: cuts their pursuers off long enough to give them a good head start. Bowen and Manring manage to make it to the stage line station, where they intend to get horses and escape. Here things take a turn: with Karla present, Bowen finally learns about his upcoming trial. They can even take down Renda by exposing all of his illegal activities. So now Bowen doesn’t want to run — with all the bad stuff Renda’s been up to, Bowen can get away with the escape attempt, as long as he doesn’t make things worse for himself. The problem is, Manring has no new trial to look forward to so he’s not cooperating, and in any case, now Bowen knows he’s the reason Bowen got seven years in the first place. Things come to a head; Manring sucker punches Bowen with a whiskey bottle and draws on him, but Bowen manages to wound him. Bowen also talks to Apache trackers out of bringing him in: Renda’s been mistreating them, and the chance to see Renda go down is enough to make them back off.
But Renda himself is also arriving at the stage line station, and he’s another problem. Bowen can’t surrender to him, because Renda would probably just shoot him on the spot as an escaped prisoner — after all, the last thing he wants is Bowen talking to a judge and revealing his scam. Bowen can’t really fight Renda, either; he’s an escaped prisoner, and if he kills Renda, that won’t go over well with the judge. The key to this problem is Willis Falvey, who’s been keeping the books and who can walk the government through all the corruption Renda has been up to — his testimony can take down Renda. But Willis is terrified of Renda and just wants to crawl into a bottle. Bowen and Renda end up in a standoff, but it ends when Bowen gets Renda talking about how he’s been abusing Lizann. Enraged by that, Willis — who knows his wife hates him, and maybe even wants him dead, still feels that he has a duty as her husband — finally finds his nerve, and threatens to kill Renda on the spot. Things escalate to a firefight, but despite some bloodshed, nobody dies. Renda’s finished, and Bowen will have his trial that, undoubtedly, will see him a free man again.
Thoughts: So, a couple of firsts here that feel very familiar from Leonard’s later work. There are women as POV characters, first of all. Women were barely present in Leonard’s two first novels, but now they’re an integral part of the proceedings, presented as interesting people in their own right. They aren’t quite main characters, but even so, it’s a notable improvement.
As for the second first… well, the previous two Leonard novels were fairly straightforward stories: you had good guys and you had bad guys, and while there was certainly a degree of moral ambiguity there, it was clear there were two sides that didn’t really mix. Here, though, Bowen is compromised right from the start: he doesn’t trust Manring, but he has to work with him, because they’re in prison together, and he knows Renda’s nothing but bad news, but he has to go along with what he says, and he knows Lizann’s scheme to have her husband killed is a terrible idea, but he plays along to get the gun he needs. At the same time, Karla’s offering a chance at freedom through the courts and telling him to just stay put and not do anything stupid, but Bowen stages the escape anyway, because he doesn’t know for sure that the new trial will happen, and almost undermines everything she’s worked for. This kind of narrative dynamic — people who don’t trust each other but who are still working side by side in one way or another, and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out — is one of Leonard’s greatest strengths.
Later, his dialogue would easily sell us on these uneasy allegiances or complicated motivations, but it’s not quite there yet. Neither are the characters themselves. Most of the cast feels frankly underdeveloped — more so than in The Law at Randado, in fact.
Bowen himself is not a particularly complex man. He’s resourceful and clever, but also a kind of a short-sighted dumbass. That contradiction isn’t really mined for character the way you would hope. All he really needs to do is stay put; Karla tells him in no uncertain terms to not do anything, but Bowen doesn’t listen — he chooses to take the opportunities he sees right in front of him over the ones that may or may not materialize at some later date. “When you’re behind the fence you don’t think the same as when you’re outside,” he says, trying to explain his behavior. Fair enough, but it’s hard to not feel like his greatest motivation to behave the way he does is because the plot demands it. Bowen isn’t one-dimensional, exactly; there’s some depth to him and he’s relatable enough, but he’s also somebody you’re unlikely to remember all that much about a few weeks after you’re done reading the book.
The same applies to the other characters. Renda’s a misogynist, racist and a bully, the sort of person that’s easy to hate, and he makes a fine villain, but not a particularly interesting one. Brazil, his hired gun, is a mean-spirited son of a bitch who’ll tell a man to run just so he can shoot him, and who openly wishes he could see somebody torn apart by exploding dynamite. More than anyone else, these two make it obvious that this is an early Leonard novel: a decade or two later, both of these characters would undoubtedly have a lot more depth and definition. Brazil, in particular, is exceptionally insubstantial. He’s barely there as a person: what I’ve written about him here is about as much as you ever learn about him. He’s underdeveloped and downright cartoony. Renda’s got more meat on his bones, but even though he’s got more detail to him, there’s not a lot of nuance.
Now that there are actual women in the book, it’s a bit of a shame that they aren’t used to full effect either. Karla’s easygoing and eager, optimistic and capable. Lizann is ruthless and manipulative, but not entirely unsympathetic; she’s desperately looking for a way out. Like most characters in Escape from Five Shadows, they’re… well, they’re okay. They’re fine. They have an internal existence and agency, and distinctive voices — but they don’t really surprise you much or give you any reason to think about them after you’re done reading the book. Still, seeing things from their perspective is a welcome change of pace.
They both have an interest in Bowen, although not for the same reasons; Karla likes him and thinks he’s innocent; Lizann thinks he could be useful. It never really gets to a point where there’s any real question of where Bowen’s interests really lie, but still, for a few moments, Bowen is smack dab in between the two of them — Karla with her attitude, competence, and obvious mutual attraction; Lizann offering a gun and an imminent opportunity for freedom — and you know it could go a way you don’t expect. It’s precisely the kind of dynamic Leonard will become a master of, but he doesn’t quite have a handle on it yet.
One of the best characters in the book is the man in charge of the Apache trackers, Salvaje — an outsider, belittled and insulted by Renda. For him and his men, tracking escapees is an opportunity to do what they’re good at… and this way they get to track white men. On the reservation, they’d have to go after their own people, hunting down tulapai stills and folks who jumped the reservation. They exist in an uneasy space that they’ve carved out for themselves. Salvaje is easily the most fully formed character in the story, and it’s a shame he doesn’t have a bigger role in it.
Escape from Five Shadows is an entertaining yarn, but it doesn’t quite manage to come together. The ending, in particular, feels somewhat abrupt, something that Bounty Hunters and — to a lesser extent, but even so — The Law at Randado also suffered from: the story ends in a way that is agreeable enough, but not particularly satisfying. The situation has been resolved, but it’s a little too neat, a little too convenient.
I feel like I’m harder on Escape from Five Shadows than the previous two books, even though I think it’s mostly better than they are — The Law at Randado has better characterization, but Escape from Five Shadows has much better flow and a much more interesting dynamic. I suppose a part of it is just that at this point, Leonard’s really starting to show what he will become, but he just isn’t there yet, and it’s frustrating. I know that’s a profoundly unfair standard. To be clear: it’s a perfectly fine Western.
One particularly enjoyable aspect of it is the budding romance between Bowen and Karla. It’s not perfect; the spark is there and it’s real, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Karla and Bowen only get a chance to talk a few times, and while it can be assumed they get together after the book’s over, it does come across as all setup and no payoff. Still, it’s got its moments, and the way Leonard sets up the vibe between the two of them has enough of that special something Leonard will learn to do so well: the easygoing attraction between two people, the chemistry that both of them feel and enjoy.
Bowen saw her look directly at him, then her skirt curved gracefully as she stepped from the saddle. Again, she was wearing a man’s shirt and her dark hair was shorter than he had pictured it — curving low on her forehead, but brushed back on the sides into a soft upcurl at the nape of her neck. And Bowen was thinking, watching her take her horse to the pool edge: I’ll bet she can ride like hell. I’ll bet she can cook and shoot and do everything like hell. But, he thought then, seeing her looking at him again and feeling the sudden quickening inside of him: Don’t try to figure her out.
I maintain that Leonard could very easily have been a pure romance writer if he’d chosen to go that way, without changing his method all that much. Certainly, at least for me, much of his most memorable work sticks with me not so much because of the twists or the action, but because of the relationships. Granted, we don’t get to that level here, but he’s exploring that space here, and it’s a lot of fun.
Closely related to that, actually, there’s something that feels distinctly Leonard — how he avoids certain narrative traps. For instance, in one scene Karla arrives at the convict camp to deliver mail, and she discovers Bowen and Lizann almost embracing; she’s got her hands on his shoulders, and he’s busily hiding the gun she’s just given him. There’s an opportunity a lot of writers would happily take here — the misunderstanding, the blooming jealousy, the refusal to acknowledge it or to talk about in plain terms. But that’s not a trick Leonard likes to pull, and even here, at what is still the beginning of his career, he makes other choices. Oh, Karla’s got some concerns and questions, but she’s not stupid or petty about it. And Bowen uses his words to explain the situation. It’s not the soap opera cliché of endless grudges and the stubborn silences that enable them, and I very much appreciate that.
Another thing that is worth some discussion is Renda’s business. He’s acquired the road building contract through questionable means, and he’s making money off the contract and the prisoners alike. Renda is not a government official; his road construction company has been given permission to use the prisoners as labor, and he’s in charge of the convict labor camp. He knows little about actual road construction and cares less. The road’s just a byproduct; his business is based on exploiting the convicts for profit. The worse the conditions for the prisoners are, the more money he makes. He gets 70 cents per man per day. Officially, that’s not just how much he’s being given to spend, it’s how much he has to spend on these men. Instead, he lines his own pockets with most of it.
“What I don’t understand,” Lizann said, “is why you bother. You have to use bribes. You have to watch every move anyone makes. You hire a man like Brazil, who would come higher than the ordinary guard. You’re constantly in danger of being found out. For what?”
“For fifteen dollars a day profit, free and clear,” Renda said.
“Which isn’t very much,” Lizann said.
“Besides what I make on the road contract.”
“But with your expenses, there couldn’t be much left of that.”
“Enough,” Renda said. “Which adds on to the fifteen a day–”
“How do you come to that amount?”
“The government subsistence!” He sounded surprised that she had to ask. “I don’t know why they think each man’s worth seventy cents a day — when you only need about twenty cents to take care of one. But as long as they want to pay it, I’ll make my fifteen a day. Figure that back over four months. Then go ahead a couple of months. See how it adds up? I figure I’ll make three thousand on that alone… something I didn’t even count on when I got the contract.”
“Do you think it’s worth the effort?”
“Lizzy, I’m not straining. I sit in the shade all day counting my money. When this job’s over, I spend the money. Then I get another contract.”
Fifteen bucks a day doesn’t sound like much by today’s standards, but for most people, daily wages were one or two dollars in those times. So Renda’s raking it in. As a business model, it’s obviously corrupt — morally, ethically and legally. When Leonard was writing the story, it was before the prisons-for-profit were truly a viable business model, endorsed and encouraged by the powers that be. Indeed, Renda’s acting on the sly: he’s not supposed to be profiting off the prisoners. But a few decades after the book came out, it was essentially the model a lot of American prisons were running on, and they didn’t have to cook the books the way Renda does. The results, as we know, are typically awful.
Leonard couldn’t have known that was coming, of course, but with today’s context, it all feels very much on point. But I suppose that’s not all that surprising — this is precisely the kind of theme Leonard tended to go for. Although more than one of his heroes was working for the establishment in one way or another, he tended to view structures of power and the people who benefited from them with suspicion, and his sympathies were always with the underdog.