So this is it, the very first step on what is going to be a fairly long road: the inaugural On the Corner of Leonard and Stark post. We’re starting off with Elmore Leonard’s first novel, a Western called The Bounty Hunters. As a literary genre, the Western has shrunk to a fairly small niche these days. Not so back in the day: 19th century dime novels dealing with the taming of the west were hugely popular, and many of them purported to tell the true tales of actual people, like Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill. Later, with the arrival of pulp magazines, tales of outlaws and lawmen did very well, probably not least because Western movies were also proving to be popular with audiences, something that continued to be the case throughout the first half of the 20th century. The popularity of the Western lasted until the late 60s, when the audience had apparently had their fill, perhaps simply because of the overabundance of the genre on TV and on the silver screen.
But that’s jumping ahead. The Bounty Hunters came out in 1953, long before the audience was finally turning to other things. Leonard had already been writing Western stories for the pulps before this, so it wasn’t exactly his first stab at the subject, but this was his first novel. Leonard is, of course, best known for his crime novels, not his Westerns; he switched tracks when he could see the cowboy craze finally starting to die down, and he didn’t look back a whole lot. In my head, these early novels — although I like them — are almost a distraction from the real deal. The quintessential Leonard novel has its underpinnings in an urban, modern world. It doesn’t take place on dusty trails and open ranges. But it’s where he started, so that’s where we’re starting to too — and why not? In many ways, despite the change in the setting, the characters and dynamics didn’t change as much as you might think. Outlaws and lawmen.
There are a few Leonard books I haven’t actually read before, and as it happens, this was one of them.
Plot summary: As a guide, Dave Flynn gets paid four dollars a day — pretty good money by 1876 standards — to take the Army out into the field and find Apaches. He used to be a cavalry lieutenant himself, but things went sour; another officer, a fella named Captain Deneen, intentionally shot his own toes off during a battle to get out of fighting during the Civil War, and he’s been passing it off as a heroic war wound ever since. Flynn saw it, and Deneen knows Flynn saw it, and he’s been messing with Flynn ever since, sending him out on one stupid and dangerous mission after another. It caused Flynn to leave the cavalry and become a guide. But Deneen, now a colonel and the Department Adjutant for the U.S. Army’s Department of Arizona, is still the guy with the jobs, and after a failed attempt at prospecting, Flynn needs the money. Guiding’s what he’s good at, and anyway, he’s hoping to somehow get Deneen off his back.
So out he goes with a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant named Bowers, who’s tasked with bringing in a Mimbreño Apache renegade called Soldado Viejo, a famous guerrilla fighter who’s been at it longer than Flynn and Bowers have even been alive. Soldado’s somewhere in Mexico, so that’s where Flynn takes Bowers. It’s a bullshit mission that Deneen shouldn’t be sending them on; he has no authority to operate in Mexico, and it has the stink of another job Flynn isn’t supposed to come back from — maybe Bowers, neither. But orders are orders.
Mexico, it turns out, is not a great place to be if you’re a couple of lone Americans trying to track down and capture somebody extremely competent who really doesn’t want to be tracked down and captured. It gets worse when the Estebans, a Mexican family Flynn has long been friends with, get slaughtered and scalped on their way to their home village of Soyopa — something Flynn immediately recognizes as decidedly non-Apache work. The local rurales are paying bounties for Apache scalps, and a sleazy American bounty hunter named Lazair shows up with a fresh bundle in Soyopa. The man in charge of the rurales, Lieutenant Duro, knows where the scalps are really coming from, but he’s getting his percentage. Lazair rubs Duro’s hypocrisy in the lieutenant’s face, knowing that Duro likes the money more than he likes his scruples. Their relationship is fraught and ugly, but profitable for both.
“You’re stuck here and you don’t have a choice. And every year you see government pesos coming in for the scalp bounties. Easy money to take, it looks like, only you have to balance what goes out with scalp coming in. But when somebody comes along and offers you money in return for taking all scalps — no questions — then you’re just doing your job. All you gotta do is add and subtract… and you know how to do that.”
Duro said, “Add scalps that aren’t always Apache.”
“It’s up to you,” Lazair shrugged. “If you want to quit vouching for ’em it’s up to you. Only I don’t think you can. You get back ten pesos for every hundred going out. That’s a lot of mescal when all you gotta do is add up when the government man comes around. He isn’t going to feel ’em for texture. So don’t give me any goddamn talk about keeping your hands clean, because they’re just as dirty as mine. Maybe dirtier,” Lazair said evenly, “because I don’t particularly like Mexicans anyway.”
“Get out!” Duro screamed.
Lazair lifted his hat from the desk. “I wouldn’t want to be in your skin. You don’t know who to be mad at, do you?”
Flynn and Bowers get a lead on a small Apache group, and manage to track them down to an abandoned village, hoping to grab one of the Apaches and make them talk so they can find Soldado Viejo. Things backfire, as the two promptly get themselves captured, and eventually meet with Soldado, who comes to see what these two white men are all about. Flynn and Bowers try to talk him into surrendering, telling him that the big chief in Washington has made up his mind and this is just how things are now, and there’s no use fighting it. It’s off to the reservation with folks like Soldado. Soldado isn’t having it, and he pretty much laughs in their face; for every argument the two present, he’s got a counterpoint that pretty much takes the wind out of the white boys’ sails. It all boils down to “c’mon, we all know my people are getting royally fucked here, why would I make it easy for you?”, more or less.
Flynn and Bowers are understandably concerned, as they know torture may well be in the cards. But before anything of the sort happens, the Apache party transporting them runs into Lazair’s bounty hunters, and in the confusion, the duo manages to escape. After a rough night outside, they end up at the bounty hunters’ hideout, where one of the Apache warriors who captured them has been captured in turn — captured and tortured, because the bounty hunters want Soldado. They want the 800 peso prize on the famous renegade’s head. But the Apache gives them nothing. Flynn and Bowers aren’t exactly on friendly terms with the bounty hunters — both of them despise them, and Flynn strongly suspects that these men killed and scalped his friends — but this isn’t the time to pick a fight, not with the two of them heavily outnumbered. They return to Soyopa.
They now conclude that the Soldado Viejo isn’t really their immediate problem — on the one hand, they have Lazair’s ruthless bounty hunters, and on the other, there are Duro’s rurales, who pretend to be soldiers, but are little more than disorganized and incompetent ex-bandits. It’s a bit of a powder keg, and Flynn and Bowers are fixing to light a fire, maybe set these two powers against each other. That ends up being a job for Bowers, though, because Flynn takes off by himself so he can sneak back into the bounty hunters’ hideout. Earlier, he caught a glimpse of somebody he recognized: Nita Esteban, a young woman from the family he knew, and the sole survivor of the “Apache” massacre. She’s a witness to what really went down, but even if she wasn’t, Flynn would go after her: he’s sweet on her, and there’s no way he’s leaving her to Lazair. Flynn goes in and rescues Nita, and pops a couple of the bounty hunters who chase them as they escape. In the meantime, Bowers keeps sowing dissent in the ranks of the rurales, pointing out that Lieutenant Duro’s a drunk who’s making underhanded deals with the gringo bounty hunters, who can raise hell in Soyopa with impunity and make the rurales look weak and foolish.
Things come to a head when Lazair’s deal with Lieutenant Duro starts to come apart at the seams even as the rurales and the bounty hunters are clashing — but just before that can turn into an open conflict, Soldado Viejo’s Apache warriors attack the village. The bounty hunters recently ambushed, killed and scalped a bunch of Apache women, and enough is enough. A tense siege follows. Things get even more complicated as Colonel Deneen shows up near Soyopa, his superiors having found out what he’s been up to. He’s lost his position as the department adjutant, and how he’s been sent here to clean up his mess in the vain hope of salvaging his career. Deneen is in no way suited for this; whatever a cavalry officer is supposed to be, he ain’t it. As Soldado’s warriors attack, chaos reigns, and Deneen, thinking they’re about to die, shoots himself, not realizing that in fact Lieutenant Bowers has managed to organize the rurales into a reasonably efficient cavalry force, just like he’s been taught, and what looked like defeat turns into a victory. With Deneen and Lieutenant Duro both dead, and Lazair captured, tortured and killed by Apaches, who in turn have done badly enough in the battle to force them to surrender, things wind down. Flynn, having finally settled things with Deneen, albeit not how he expected, is done with this Apache business, and he’s ready to give prospecting another go.
Thoughts: It’s Leonard’s first novel, and it shows. It doesn’t quite have that famous flow; it reads easy enough, but the craftmanship just isn’t quite there yet. Sometimes, in fact, it’s a little tricky to follow what’s going on — not to a point where you get confused, but certainly there were a number of times where I had to backtrack a little bit just to double check what the progression from one character’s POV to another’s was, or what the chronology of events actually is. It’s subtle stuff that, more often than not, stands out not so much as bad writing, but an absence of the kind of narrative quality I associate with Leonard.
Still, it’s a pretty decent yarn, all things considered. It’s not a terribly complex story, but that’s not surprising; complex stories aren’t really what Leonard was known for. He was not a Byzantine plotter; most of his books weren’t very complicated, in the end. That was, in many ways, the Elmore Leonard magic: his ability to take seemingly simple situations and turn them into something fascinating. And that’s what he does here, too. He’ll do it better once he gets a little more experience under his belt, but already many of the trademarks are there: the way the characters’ thoughts and emotions are presented, how he shifts between narrator voice and character voice, slipping us inside somebody’s head, showing us what they’re about, the way he gets to the heart of a scene in just a few sentences, how characters interact — how characters and their motivations, their interactions with each other, are developed into unexpected directions…
Structurally, though, The Bounty Hunters is weak. There’s an aimless quality to the plotting — Flynn and Bowers are tasked with capturing Soldado Viejo, but he only really shows up once, and even his surrender happens off-screen. Deneen’s cowardice and paranoia cause the entire mission to happen in the first place, but Deneen himself isn’t there for most of the book, and he suddenly reappears at the end, only to eat his gun when things get rough. It’s still a fun read; even at this very early point in his career, Leonard knew how to build a good scene. It’s just that the way those scenes connect to each other feels haphazard.
The most pleasure in The Bounty Hunters is to be found in the characters. Flynn is, in many ways, a classic Leonard protagonist: competent and cool, but not infallible. He’s good at his job — he knows how to read the land, follow tracks, and take care of himself. What’s more, he knows the way the Apache operate. He doesn’t understand them, not really, but he knows enough about them to anticipate them and to talk to them. Deneen doesn’t get anywhere near as much spotlight as the plot requires, but when we do see him, he’s great — it’s easy to believe this man is insecure and foolish enough to make all of this happen, and to commit suicide mere moments before being rescued. Lazair’s perhaps the worst villain in the story — a man who murders innocent people for their scalps so he can defraud the Mexican government with them — but he’s not a simple character. Smart, ruthless, and calculating, but not without certain qualms. When he mocks and torments Lieutenant Duro, it’s hard to not side with him in that moment, as much of a scumbag as he is: whatever else Lazair may be, at least he’s honest about what he is. Nearly the only woman in the book (which definitely does not pass the Bechdel test), Nita Esteban is a damsel in distress — but she’s still got enough agency and personality to stand out, and given the opportunity, she can take care of herself. And Soldado Viejo, ostensibly the target of this entire expedition, only really appears for a single scene, but when he does, you absolutely believe he’s every bit the legend he’s purported to be — smarter than Flynn, with no illusions about what’s going on. “What is the difference in meaning between these words prison and reservation?” Flynn has no answer for him, and he’s decent enough to feel ashamed.
“It is only foolish when you fight against what is bound to happen,” Flynn said. “I see the days of the Mimbreño numbered… as well as the Chiricahua, Coyotero, Jicarilla and the Mescalero. The Tonto and the Mojave have already been given their own land.”
“And who is this that gives land which he does not own?” said the Apache.
Damn him, Flynn thought.
Reading about all of that with our modern context… well, obviously, when you have a couple of white guys hunting down an Apache for being an Apache, more than anything else, that’s, uh… that’s a whole thing. There’s some ugly business here — the scalp bounties are a disgusting practice, for one thing (and one that isn’t made up for the book, unfortunately enough). The bounty hunters and the rurales don’t really consider the Apaches human. They are an enemy, a primitive threat to be dealt with — a threat, and a source of profit. Early in the book the rurales execute a 12-year-old Apache boy by firing squad, with Lieutenant Duro instructing them to aim below the head, so as not to destroy the scalp, because that’s a hundred pesos right there.
Still, this is a book from 1953 and it’s not a particularly provocative or graphic tale. Even the language doesn’t get any rougher than “son of a bitch.” Racism is very much present, but it’s not a racist story — as much as you can say that about any Western from the 50s, anyway. It’s clear Leonard’s sympathies are with the Apache, as well as the Mexican civilians who are caught between the bounty hunters (who are straight up murdering them for their scalps) and the rurales (who oppress and take advantage of the people they’re ostensibly there to protect). The racism and greed of the people in charge, whether it’s the U.S. Army or Lieutenant Duro, is the real evil here — the bounty hunters are cruel and shitty people, obviously, but ultimately, they do what they do because the Mexican government is paying bounties for scalps. Soldado Viejo is a threat to Mexicans and Americans alike, but he, his people, and their way of life is being murdered by both governments.
And yet, as obvious as this theme is in the book, in the end, it means nothing. This, perhaps more than anything else, makes it clear that this is Elmore Leonard still finding his way, still struggling with the basics. As it is, after the big battle, Soldado Viejo and his warriors just… give in, apparently:
Madora came up behind them. He glanced at Flynn after looking down at Deneen, but he said nothing to him. Then to Bowers, “I see Soldado survived… him and about two dozen others. Counting his women up in the hills somewhere, you’ll have about seventy people all told. Red, how do you propose to get ’em to San Carlos?”
“I was thinking of talking Santana into helping as far as the border… have cavalry come down to meet us there.” Bowers smiled. “Hell, Joe, all the fight’s out of those Mimbres. The three of us could take them up, for that matter.”
And that’s it. The feared, fearless, dangerous and exceptionally competent guerrilla fighter, the man who’s been at this longer than either of our protagonists have even been alive, the legendary figure who, in fact, hasn’t even been captured, just… gives up, apparently, to a point where three guys could take him and seventy other Apaches to the reservation, no problem.
That’s where the book ends, too; there are literally only 21 more words left to go in it after the part I quoted above. It’s a strange note to end on. It feels like Leonard runs out of steam, and goes “OKAY THAT’S IT THE END BYE.” It’s jarring both in terms of flow and the themes of the book. It was of course inevitable that Soldado Viejo wasn’t winning this one — history being what it is, we all know how things went down for people like him. But to have him simply give up like that, routed but not actually defeated? Alive and still capable?
I mean… you could make that work. It could be a tragic ending. It could be a cynical ending. It could somehow acknowledge what’s going on. But that’s not what the tone is — The Bounty Hunters’ ending is presented as… perhaps not happy, exactly, but certainly not unhappy, either. The subtext is “welp, that worked out, goodbye.”
But a lot of this is my modern context talking. This is, after all, a book that came out in 1953, at a time when there was not a lot of interest in deconstructing Western tropes. By those standards, putting the Apaches in a sympathetic context as underdogs, as people who were being mistreated by two governments and faced with the choice of rebellion or submission and punished whichever they chose, and who still persevered under extremely difficult circumstances, was not the obvious choice. Leonard presents them as a people with legitimate grievances and intelligent arguments, people to be reckoned with, people who demand respect — never as some kind of savages, noble or otherwise. In 1953? That was downright subversive.
Arguably, Leonard starts here the way he means to go on: he’s always had an affinity for those who don’t fit in and those who buck the system, people on the outskirts of society, whether they’re thriving or circling the drain. He really doesn’t stick the landing, it’s true. But he’s breaking new ground, and that’s always going to be messy business.