L'Amour, Leonard, McMautry

I would have to say the three greateste Western writers have been Larry McMaurtry, Elmore Leonard, and Louis L'Amour. If you liked the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with Bale and Crowe, see the original with Van Heflin and Glenn Ford. It's black and white and doesn't have lead actors as hunky as Bale and Crowe, but it is a solid western adventure with a better story and an intelligent cast. Not that Bale and Crowe aren't good actors, on the contrary they are both very strong actors, equally. Anyway, while those three are great, they both have different styles. McMaurtry has a revisionist style. He paints and weaves a vulnerable, human, but eye-catching drama that gives tells you what the west really was. There are heroes or protagonists and there are antagonists, and he has respect and intrigue in the adventurous side, but he allows for more stark realism to take place. His protagonists are flawed and his antagonists can be admired for certain traits. While the killer in Streets of Laredo is a ruthless amoral creature, he is still admirable in his almost instinctive skills as a hunter and predator. No one should underestimate him. He is much like Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, a being molded, by himself, to be a killing machine. Watch Streets of Laredo or Lonesome Dove (Both are long, but excellent stories with a sharp casts)
Louis L'Amour is a tender, tangible, but ever entertaining painter of the sprawling Western action story. He did not just confine his writer to gunfighter tales. He wrote adventure stories of all flavors and types: detective stories, war intrigues, soldiers-of-fortune, swashbucklers, one medieval adventure and one science fiction adventure. Short stories and full-length novels, he has quite a volume of work, perhaps one of the most prolific writers of said genre. He is mindful history and accuracy and versimilitude, and involved with strong, believable character development, but the action and the epic adventure is, spiritually, always the star of his stories. You can't read or watch a story very long without caring about the characters, and L'Amour understands this as well as any storyteller. However, the action and intrigue and epic adventure is, spiritually, the main "character" in most of his stories. He is, more or less, a respectful tall-tale spinner. Respectful in that he respects the intelligence of his readers, the human qualities of his characters, and the believability in the story. Watch The Quick And The Dead with Sam Elliot, The Sacketts with Elliott and Tom Selleck, and Hondo with John Wayne.
Elmore Leonard, for lack of better analytic skills, is a rich, intriguing mixture of McMaurtry and L'Amour. He allows the stark realism to mingle with western action. Leonard, while striking as both a western and crime writer, is also quite honestly, a humorist. He is something of a satirist, in both westerns and crime. His stories may not all be grinning and comical, but there is ever a fine veneer of cynicism that has respect, intriguity, and attraction to conflict and intrigue. Hombre is as much a social drama as it is an western thriller, with some irony in both department. Same thing with 3:10 to Yuma and Cuba Libre and The Tonto Woman. Leonard sticks out more today for his crime fiction, since it has commanded the more contemporary half of his career. However, his western fiction should please any fan of the genre.


What doesn't kill you, can make you stronger or leave you crippled.
--Brenicus