Onyx reviews: Charlie Martz and Other Stories by Elmore Leonard

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 06/12/2015

In 2001, Elmore Leonard published (in the New York Times, no less) an essay that subsequently became known as his 10 Rules on Writing. Among his words of wisdom, he said that writers should never open a story with the weather, never use anything other than "said" in dialog attributions and never use an adverb to modify "said," to avoid detailed descriptions of characters, places and things and, in general, leave out the parts readers tend to skip. The "hooptedoodle," in other words.

By the time he authored this essay, Leonard had been writing and publishing for half a century, so he was speaking from a position of experience. Did he always follow these rules? Eventually, but in his early days he broke most of them with panache. And yet, readers of Charlie Martz and Other Stories, the posthumous collection that brings together fifteen stories from the 1950s and 1960s, will recognize the talent in these early tales. Though there may be a fair amount of hooptedoodle in some of the longer entries, many of them display his skill at creating vivid dialog.

The stories, only four of which have been published before, are generally set in familiar locations (Detroit and the Wild West, predominantly), and are about the same kinds of things as his later works. Men and women who are underestimated by their opponents, for example, or unlikely heroes and heroines. Some of the stories are set in foreign locales (Kuala Lumpur or at a vacation resort in Spain), and one takes place during the final battles of the Civil War.

Among the men who stare down criminals and thugs is a priest who discovers a trove of cash that may or may not be the score from a recent robbery. Charlie Martz, who appears in two stories that are at odds with each other from a continuity perspective, is a reluctant lawman in the old West. People think he's lazy because he doesn't arrest many people, but anyone who challenges him does so to his detriment. Another pair of stories represent different attempts to tackle the same idea with the same protagonists. A young couple trying to earn their living on a farm are confronted by a pair of bad men with evil intent. The young bride wonders whether her husband has what it takes to survive such a difficult life, but the confrontations and their resolutions show her just what he's made of.

“The Only Good Syrian Footsoldier Is a Dead One" is a wryly amusing tale told from the perspective of an aspiring actor who has appeared as an extra in numerous epic films, often dying more than once as different background characters in a given film. He knows the business as well as the marquee stars and directors, he believes, but he's never gotten his big break, though not for lack of trying. He's determined to do whatever it takes to get noticed, with tragic results.

A couple of the stories are more rumination than plot. "A Happy, Lighthearted People" is about a man named Rico who works in a vacation resort. He has to deal with American, British and German tourists who are far wealthier than him and put up with their assumptions about him and his fellow Spaniards. They patronize him as he toils in obscurity, driven by his own ambitions in a tale worthy of Hemingway, who was one of Leonard's major influences. Another story features a wealthy and spoiled young man who goads a migrant farm worker into participating in a bull fight by threatening to fire the worker's brother from a much-needed job. As with many of Leonard's stories, the underdog prevails, though often in surprising ways.

The book is introduced by Leonard's son, Peter, who reminisces about the context during which some of these stories were written.