How the Western developed into a crime novel ‹ CrimeReads

In the 1980s, a man who was being charged with murder by my father, the district attorney, escaped from the county jail and threatened to kill my entire family by stranding himself on the roof of the county courthouse. My father decided to go to the roof himself, where he eventually convinced the man to return to custody, but not before he did so, he contacted his investigator, an armed ex-cop, who would watch over him while he was on the roof.

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“If he moves,” my father said, looking his investigator in the eyes, “shoot him.”

This moment was the inspiration for the first chapter of my latest novel, The Queen City Detective AgencyFor years I heard my father tell the story of the roof, and for years I heard him recite his heroic moment –If he moves, shoot him– and thought it was completely original that my father had come up with this idea spontaneously.

Then I saw The wild troop. I should have known. After all, my father loves westerns.

At the beginning of the film, the titular gang robs a cash office, and their leader says to his colleagues, alluding to the robbed cashiers: “If they move, shoot them.”

The Queen City Detective Agency grew out of this transition from the Western to the crime novel. It is a crime novel that, like all crime novels, I believe grew out of the Western genre. The modern development of crime fiction can be traced most directly through the career of Elmore Leonard, who began writing Westerns and achieved his greatest success as a crime writer.

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The man often referred to as the Dickens of Detroit began his literary career on the streets of the American West.”“The desire to write or read Westerns comes from a feeling rather than a visual appeal,” Leonard noted of the genre's influence on his novels and stories. “Living in Detroit, as I do, doesn't seem to be conducive. There are certainly no buttes or barrancas outside the window. But if you squint hard enough… you can see horsemen coming with Winchesters and Colt revolvers and watch them play their epic roles in a time that will never end.”

Westerns are the original literary genre of the American myth, celebrating and condemning the best and the worst of this country, its rugged individualism coupled with genocidal colonialism, heroic masculinity coupled with cowardly misogyny, and Leonard chose the genre for a suitably American reason: capitalism. “He chose Westerns primarily because of the market,” claimed Peter Guttridge in The Guardian“He was only interested in money and sold everything he wrote.”

Leonard is an uncompromising writer. Although he uses many of the Western's most well-known and popular stylistic devices – busy saloons, quick shootouts – he defies many things that would be considered problematic today. He was ahead of his time, even when he was writing about the past. In Leonard's novel Valdez is comingthe title character, a Mexican forced to switch between “Bob” and “Roberto,” demands reparations for the widow of a black man he instigated to murder. Leonard's other westerns, including the short story “Three-Ten to Yuma,” which was made into a film twice, and Manby the Western Writers of America as one of the 25 best western novels, establishing him as one of the best representatives of the genre – and also one of the most thoughtful. The women in Leonard's westerns lead rich inner lives, and people from marginalized groups are always first and foremost People.

What has changed for Leonard? The market. As the 60s turned into the 70s, martial arts were integrated into the Western genre (Kung-Fu), family drama (Our little farm), satirical comedy (The wild wild saddle) and this soon inseparable combination of sex and violence (The wild troop). Leonard loved the movies. In these times of change, when Clint Eastwood went from the man with no name to DirtyHarryas the popularity of Smoking Colts defied the typical cause-effect principle of physics by BullittElmore Leonard decided to take the advice of Woodward and Bernstein. He followed the money.

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The core dynamic of the Wild West popularized in literature, with its lawless frontiers and associated frontier justice, its sheriffs and outlaws, desperate maidens and cattle and railroad barons, began, I believe, with the Civil War, which trained people to kill and desensitized them to violence. Later, I would argue, the modern form of crime fiction began with the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, which trained people to kill, desensitized them to violence, and disillusioned them beyond measure.

“At Western, I felt like I wasn’t using everything I knew,” Elmore Leonard once told New York Times“I was in second gear and didn’t take advantage of what was happening around me.”

A lot was happening in the 1970s. Besides the end of the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil embargo ended America's “Long Summer” of economic prosperity, President Nixon resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, Skylab collapsed, disco was on the rise, and in central Michigan, a petty criminal named Jack Ryan got involved with the wrong woman.

The big leapPublished in 1969, on the threshold of the turbulent decade to come, Ryan introduced the petty criminal and Leonard the great crime writer. He had found his literary niche, his stool in the dive bar, flanked by Eddie Coyle's friends. Under the influence of George V. Higgins, Leonard wrote some of his best novels in the 1970s (52 Pick up, prey) and some of his most mediocre (Unknown Man #89, The desk), their sepia tones bathed in neon, their vistas narrowed to alleys. The moral drama of the traditional Western developed for Leonard into the immoral drama of crime. Cocktail bars were the new saloons. Ski masks replaced bandanas. Once a lasso, now handcuffs.

For many crime writers, the problematic stereotype of the cowboy and Indian became the problematic stereotype of the cops and robbers, and the simple denigration of Native Americans turned into the simple idolization of the cops. Leonard managed to avoid this dilemma. Author Frank Gruber devised seven main plots for Westerns, two of which make up the bulk of Leonard's crime novels: the outlaw story and the marshal story. His bibliography can be divided along the same binary division. Unlike non-revisionist Westerns, however, Leonard painted his knights-errant of the asphalt jungle in shades of gray. His cops were corruptible and his crooks had a code.

This moral ambiguity intensified in later decades, when the Vietnam War was firmly embedded in the American psyche. In these later decades, too, the influence of the Western was firmly established in Leonard's crime novels, many of which confirmed an old adage: You can take the novelist out of Monument Valley, but you can't take Monument Valley out of the novelist.

Nowhere is this line clearer than in the subtitle of Leonard’s novel City Prehistoric.

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Recently adapted for television, Urstadt: High Noon in Detroit is the brackish waters of Leonard's and America's shift from Western to crime fiction. It mixes genres, the salt water of one lapping into the fresh water of the other, and that's all the more striking given the biggest change FX made to the book when bringing it to the screen. They retrofitted it for Leonard's most famous cowboy of modern times.

Raylan Givens appeared in three novels (Immediately, Riding the rap, And Raylan), a short story (“Fire in the Hole”) and the acclaimed television series Justifiedwhich ran for six seasons. Leonard went completely anachronistic with the character. Givens, wearing a Stetson hat, is a man out of time, a man who draws fast and speaks slowly, whose moral code is as rigid as the corpses he often deals with. The guy is more a throwback than a throwback to the past, and in that respect Givens represents the current symbiotic relationship between the genres he straddles. Crime novels brought realism to the Western, and Westerns brought idealism to the crime novel. Givens operates in both worlds. But what does this mean for the current state of the real world? What does it say about America that its signature genre has shifted to the crime novel?

For the New York TimesMartin Amis wrote: “Mr Leonard is as American as jazz, and jazz is, in its origins, a naive form.” But crime novels are not naive; they are brighter westerns. If Westerns are the most emblematic genre of the American myth – they are to literature and film what jazz is to music – then crime novels are an indictment of the American experiment.

Elmore Leonard's career reflected decades of testing this experiment. After the 1970s, he ended the century by exploring what Anthony Lane had done in The New Yorker described as “the full range of human ineptitude.” Leonard's work never strayed from the tavern sins of classic Westerns, gluttony and drinking and gambling and lechery, and it also never strayed from the cardinal virtues of classic Westerns: a sense of place and a sense of people. That sense of place was deeply rooted in America. Throughout his career, Leonard only lost his footing when he strayed from the dusty, tumbleweed-strewn boulevards of the American psyche: The Hunted plays in Israel, Pagan Babies in RwandaDjibouti in Djibouti.

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Since Leonard's death in 2013, Westerns have been enjoying a small renaissance, with Leonard's signature truck-and-buck style. The moral ambiguity, cultural representation and dynamic female characters that Leonard brought to the crime novel are being brought back to the Western, minus the unquestioned racism and sexism. Anna North's Outlaweda selection from Reese's Book Club and New York Times Bestseller, portrays the real Hole in the Wall Gang as female and/or nonbinary. C Pam Zhang's How much of these hills is goldlonglisted for the Booker Prize, is about two Chinese-American orphans during the gold rush.

Are readers of these books aware of Elmore Leonard's direct and indirect influence on the genre? Are the authors aware of a lineage that includes themselves and the Dickens of Detroit? These questions occurred to me recently as I discussed the courthouse roof story with my father. When he moves, He had said that day: shoot him.

“Did you realize that you were quoting The wild troop?” I asked my father.

He scoffed. “Snowden, I've only seen this movie about two hundred times.”

“Yes,” I said, “but did you know you were quoting it?”

My father became serious. He lowered his voice. “Of course not. I just wanted to stop my ass from getting killed!”

This punch line was reminiscent of the classic Elmore Leonard. He was the man who took aim at the value of freedom, the writer who always brought the funny to the good, the bad and the ugly. He was an explorer with real guts who crossed the Red River of literary genres for a fistful of dollars.

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