Superb rawhide shoot-’em-ups from Leonard’s early years that not only stand tall beside his bestselling crime fiction (Out of Sight, 1996, etc.) but might even revive the moribund western literary genre. Leonard’s first nine published novels were westerns, one of which became the creaky Paul Newman’s 1967 film Hombre. While supporting himself as an advertising copywriter, Leonard developed his steely-eyed, resourceful but romantically compassionate American heroes, his feisty females, the villainous authority figures, menacing oddballs, and fast-talking nincompoops that he later transferred so successfully to the contemporary urban environments of Detroit, Miami, New Orleans, and Hollywood. Though Leonard’s rugged western scouts talk the talk and appreciate the difference between a Sharps and Winchester rifle, there is a timeless excitement in these spare, tauntingly wrought scenes of macho confrontation against a harsh, lawless landscape that brings out the best and worst in everyone. Like the stories of Raymond Chandler, these 19 episodic tales, played out among the dusty, Apache-haunted canyons between the aptly named towns of Inspiration and Contention, are highly polished set pieces, replete with the winking humor and masculine terror that lack only the escalating sense of violence and prolonged tension of the longer books. A stage robbery goes awry when a renegade Mescalero decides to test his manhood (“Trouble at Rindo’s Station”); unbearable guilt makes Bob Valdez go from good guy to bad when he’s forced to kill an innocent man (“Only Good Ones”); Amelia Darck, wife of a US Cavalry colonel, stares down an Apache bandit (“The Colonel’s Lady”); and, in a long story that prefigures the heart-stopping climaxes of Leonard’s crime novels, Pat Brennan, a luckless, unarmed cowboy, valiantly rescues a woman abandoned by her craven husband from a trio of homicidal kidnappers. A list of publishing credits, or an introduction indicating what magazines or editors nurtured the master’s career, might have helped future biographers. Still, these lean and stirring action stories are among the best of Leonard’s long career.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32386-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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