Western Men with Guns, grudges, honor, & women...

“And she thought if you don't have the desire to fight or wait for something there's no reason for being on earth.”
― Elmore Leonard, Last Stand at Saber River

A solid Western published in the late 1950s with a lot of the same feel of Louis Lamour's pulps Westerns of the same period. My favorite description of Elmore Leonard's Westerns comes from Britian's New Musical Express, they called him "the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers" .

The book is set in the last year of the Civil War. The protagonist, Cable, comes home from to his land in Arizona to find that his land/homestead has been overun by two brothers (and their posse of 12 thug apostles) supplying the Union with horses. They have no intention of leaving. Cable, an officer under Bedford Forest, is between a hard rock and an adobe place. Lucky for Cable, he's got a heart of gold and a gun of steel, and an unyielding woman, yadda yadda.

No the prose isn't actually that bad. HOWEVER, I'm not very comfortable with the protagonist having come from Gen Bedford Forrest's Cavalry. This gives me pause. I recognize Forrest's genius, but also his many, many, many moral failings. So, utilizing a Confederate soldier from that Calvary comes with a helluva lot of baggage. I see with Leonard was doing. He was showing morality stripped down. It wasn't about North or South. It was about man, taken away from War, deciding on whether it was right or wrong to kill another man. What limits do men place on themselves? What happens when men place few limits? But I also don't think Leonard was writing a super-deep exploration of morality and killing. Mostly, this was just a Wild West setting, with an interesting story, and a couple characters placed in each others way, and Leonard writing about the struggle and its inevitable conclusion. It was good, but not great. Elmore Leonoard would develop A LOT over the years. This one wasn't bad, just wasn't great.

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Another Elmore Leonarard Keeper

Mainly, I'd like to comment on the perfect combination of an Elmore Leonard yarn and Richard Poe's narration. Elmore always delivers, so my favorites are most often determined by how well I like the read, and Richard Poe brought this story to life. He's the kind of storyteller/narrator that you can enjoy listening to even if your attention drifts and you lose track of the storyline.

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Vintage Leonard

Any additional comments?

Another stellar performance by a true master. With not a word extra and no extraneous element to slow the plot down, the story drives forward with all the force and inevitability of a falling redwood, the prose so stripped-down and pure as to make even Hemingway look florid. Despite the tale's apparent simplicity Leonard even manages to add an element of moral ambiguity to the genre's usually stark division between good and evil, making the already gripping story even more compelling. The remarkable thing is that Leonard's sure hand should be no less apparent in this, and other of his early Westerns, as it is in his later work. A real gem.

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how can you not like it?

it's Elmore Leonard, for petes sake! The same.guy who gave us Fire Down Below which in turn gave us JUSTIFIED.

Elmore does corny

I picked this up again after losing it for a year wondering why I had abandoned it. After an hour or so I learned why. Very corny 50s B grade western story line that was as predictable as a B grade 50s western could be. As it built to the climax my interest faded into the sunset.