Not too many people know this, but Elmore Leonard began his career writing Westerns. While The Bounty Hunters and Last Stand at Saber River may not now linger in the mind, Hombre and Valdez Is Coming. along with the short story "3.10 to Yuma", are minor classics of the genre. And, of course, it helped that they were made into memorable films, especially "3.10 to Yuma", with Glenn Ford in one of his few baddie roles. Now, in his latest offering, Leonard has returned to the horse opera stage, Cuba Libre being set during the Spanish American War of 1898, with a square-jawed cowboy hero, flinty Ben Tyler, and a plot that contains no Indians, but an amount of hard riding, shooting, laconic one-liners, and eyes staring off into purple-blue vistas of mountain, hill and scrub. Ex-bank robber Ben, along with his partner Charlie Burke, is in the process of ostensibly transporting horses to Cuba to be bought by rich landowner Roland Boud reaux. In fact, the horses are only a cover for a much more lucrative consignment of guns, bound for the Cuban insurgents. Ben and Charlie have barely regained their land legs when things begin to go wrong. First off, Boudreaux tries to cheat them, then Ben becomes involved in a duel with an exquisitely loutish Spanish officer, whom he kills. He also catches the interest of Boudreaux's beautiful and feisty mistress, Amelia Brown, a New Orleans lady who is as intelligent as she is easy on the eye.
Enter a typical Leonard villain in the guise of Lionel Tavalera, a Guardia Civil officer who is bad to the core but also charming in an unctuous, Uriah Heep manner. He has Ben and Charlie thrown into the notorious Morro Castle gaol, where they languish in the company of a young Marine, Virgil Webster, one of the few survivors of the US battleship Maine, which has lately been blown up in Havana harbour.
Eventually rescued by the beauteous Amelia and Boudreaux's foreman, Victor Fuentes, Ben and Virgil - Charlie having been executed by devilish Tavalera in a vain attempt to get Ben to give up the location of the contraband guns - set off into the interior of the country, with a hired killer called Osma at their heels and a dust cloud containing Tavalera and his ruffians hovering on the horizon. Various near misses, rescues and shoot-outs then occur, until all is finally resolved and our hero and heroine ride away together into the sunset. All that is missing, really, is Ben singing a verse or two of Tumbling Tumbleweeds and a Gabby Hayes lookalike huffing and blowing through his whiskers. For a writer who has written such multi-layered novels as Glitz, City Primeval and Stick, this latest offering is surprisingly simplistic and formulaic. It is a throw-back to the traditional Western of strong, silent hero, black-stetsoned villain, resolutely steadfast heroine and young, wet-behind-theears partner. Okay, perhaps there are some shadings of topical violence: the two Guardia Civil thugs urinating while a couple of vengeful women creep up behind them, machete and butcher knife at the ready, being a case in point. An easy read, then, but nothing more. Perhaps this is Elmore Leonard free-wheeling, while gathering strength for a harder push in his next work. A revisionist, close-to-the-bone Western should not be beyond him, maybe something on the line of Oakley Hall's Warlock or Allen le May's The Searchers. In the meantime, I'll break into a gallop with Zane Grey.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic
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