Elmore Leonard’s first love was not the crime thriller but the western, writes Charles McGrath in the New York Times magazine's annual review of notable deaths.
In the ’50s and ’60s, when the going rate was about 2 cents a word, he tirelessly banged out western short stories for pulp magazines like Argosy, Dime Western and Western Story Roundup. He was a copywriter then for Campbell Ewald in Detroit — the big Chevy ad agency, with offices right in the G.M. building — and it was generally understood there that Dutch, as Leonard was called, came in early to work on his westerns, and no one was supposed to bother him.
Leonard’s goal, unlike that of so many self-consciously literary young men back then, was not The New Yorker but The Saturday Evening Post, which paid better and was read by more people. He cracked it only once, in April 1956, with a story called “Moment of Vengeance.” By then the market for westerns was already drying up, and yet Leonard stubbornly kept at it. There was a long, probably more lucrative, tradition of magazine crime writing, but the convention of the hard-boiled private detective had little appeal for Leonard, and he had no use for the writing of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the two big stars of the mystery pulps. He got into writing westerns, he once said, not because he was a buff or amateur historian, as so many western writers were, but because he liked western movies. He did a lot of his research just by studying the pages of Arizona Highways.
