JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL AND SO IT ENDS! OR IS IT A NEW START?

If you've not yet seen the Justified sequel, City Primeval then you may not want to read on because there's A BIG FAT SPOILER - coming up. Go watch the series and then come back. You have been warned.

I was, and remain a huge fan of the original run of Justified which starred Timothy Olyphant and Walter Coggins, and I've very much enjoyed the limited mini- series City Primeval. The new series (said to be a one-off) is set some years after the events of Justified and sees an older Raylan Givens chasing down another gun crazed madman, but this time in Detroit.

It has a different feel to the original series, the grimy city setting sees to that, and it took some time for me to settle into the show, without yearning for the Kentucky setting of the original show and the beloved characters who populated that universe - mind you many of the great ones died in the original run - Dewey Crow remains a much missed character but of course Boyd Crowther put a bullet in his head in the final episode of the original series.But would we see Boyd again, or Eva? That question seemed to hang over City Primeval - remaining even after the series got into its stride and became something excellent in itself. The absence of Boyd, Raylan's nemesis, was glaringly felt and time and time again we were told that the character would not return - he was still incarcerated and he'd be a very old

man before and if he ever saw freedom again.

This time out the thorn in Raylan's side is Clement Mansell, played by Boyd Holbrook so we do sort of get a Boyd. And in fairness the actor chews up the screen in each and every scene he appears in. He's just as deadly as Boyd Crowther was - if anything he maybe a little more so because he comes off as far more sadistic - where Crowther always had a justification for his actions, as bad as they were, this guy simply seems to enjoy killing and it means nothing to him; just like swatting a fly. One second he guns down several guys and the next he's taking a drink or chowing down on an undercooked steak without a care in the world.

”There are only two kinds of guys out on the street chasing bad guys your age — the ones who got passed over for the ‘big chair,’ and the ones who just love it so much they’re going to have to be dragged off.”

City Primeval was a darn good series, a worthy tie in to the original series which is one of very few series that maintained a solid standard from beginning to end and when the sun set in City Primeval and we were left with a freshly retired Raylan Givens off on his boat with his daughter, played by his real life daughter, we got that fan pleasing epilogue. Right at the dying moments of the show we are back in Kentucky and there he is - Boyd Crowther. In a skillfully put together ending we see Boyd break out of prison and ride off into the sunset. The scene shifts once more and we see Rylan's phone ringing - that's about as open an ending as you can get.

Will Justified return or is this really the end? Either way it works - if it is the last time we see Raylan and Boyd then it works. Raylan's off enjoying his retirement, while Boyd continues to live his life in mexico. It all feels kind of satisfying, but both Olyphant and Coggins have said they would be up to revisiting the characters again so I wouldn't be surprised if there is indeed more to come, and that would truly be something to look forward to. Though it really is perfect as it stands and another comeback has the risk that it could sully what has been a truly excellent run, so I guess the creators have a difficult decision to make. I, for one though, would love to see more, see Boyd and Raylan once more going head to head.

Justified and City Primeval are based on Elmore Leonard's stories about the character Raylan Givens

A TV hit in their Gunsights

Western fans will rejoice at the news that AMC, home of Hell on Wheels  are to bring Elmore Leonard's 1979 novel, Gunsights to the small screen.

The plan is for a pilot movie to be made which will go to a series to replace AMC's Hell on Wheels which is soon to start its fifth and final season.


Published in 1979, Gunsights follows Army officer Brendan Early and scout Dana Moon, who used to work together for the 10th Cavalry. Now the former friend and allies find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict between a mining company and a group of settlers. Brendan works for said mining company, which wants to rid an Arizona mountainside of settlers, including Mexicans, Apaches, and former 10th Cavalry soldiers. Dana is one of those settlers, an Indian agent defending the land against these mining company thugs.

AMC, home of the successful Walking Dead, are tuning out some quality TV series and this bodes well for Gunsights. After all AMC's Hell on Wheels is a pretty fine western series so I eagerly await the arrival of Gunsights.

Leonard is dead

Elmore Leonard, who died his week, published his first novel, The Bounty Hunters, way back in 1953 and went onto become one of America's best known and most respected authors. Many of his books have been turned into successful movies - among the best known being Hombre, Valdez is Coming, Get Shorty and Jackie Brown. The current hit TV series, Justified  is based on characters created by Leonard.

In his much circulated rules of writing he said that narrative should be stripped back to the bone, kept simple. In fact if I wrote this piece by following Leonard's guidelines then it would simply read, 'Elmore Leonard is Dead,' or even more concisely, 'Leonard is dead.'

Apparently Leonard was well advanced in his 46th novel when he died, so maybe we'll get to see this book in the fullness of time, but it seems fitting that his last published work was Raylan which owed so much to the westerns with which he cut his teeth.

He will be greatly missed - below are Leonard's much read 10 rules for writing

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck'sSweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you'reMargaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

MAGAZINE WATCH

Recently Elmore Leonard published his book, 10 Rules of Writing and this month's Writing Magazine features an interview with the great man carried out by John Wright. It's a great interview that any Elmore fan will want to read.

Writing Magazine is on sale now priced £3.70

The Bounty Hunters by Elmore Leonard

The Bounty Hunters
Elmore Leonard
Harper Torch edition
cover price $5.99 (import)
originally published 1953

Elmore Leonard is best known as a crime writer and not just any crime writer but a master in the field. And that's all very well but the author's considerable success in the genre has overshadowed his equally good work with westerns. Everyone know he wrote the original short story from which came the movie, 3.10 to Yuma, a few even know he was responsible for Hombre and Valdez is Coming, but for the most part his western work is far less visible . Pity really because some people, myself included, prefer the author when working in the western field.

The Bounty Hunters was the author's first novel and concerns the hunt for renegade Apache, Soldado Viejo. Dave Flynn, a verteran tracker and fresh faced calvary officer named Bowers are in pursuit of the indian but it soon become evident that Soldado is the least of their worries. Early in the book they come across some burnt out wagons. The wagons have been attacked, everyone killed, some of them scalped but Flynn recognises this as a poor attempt to make the attack look like the work of the Apaches.

It's a great book with some devious plotting and a real feel for the harsh Arizona landscape - the author also knows the ways of those proud people we call the Apache but often called The Tigers of the Desert, and his pen draws them with great respect and some sadness for the passing of their ways. Flynn and Bowers are a great double act with each complimenting the other and throughout the narrative there is a feeling of hopelessness as things move towards the inevitable conclusion.

Crime fans really need to discover the western work of Elmore Leonard for it was within the genre that he honed and perfected the style that would serve him so well in his later work. But reading this, his début novel, one thing is clear - this writer hit the ground running and hasn't stopped.

USA TODAY claimed that Leonard has penned some of the best western fiction ever - I must say I concur.

RELATED: The fourth episode of The Tainted Podcast goes live tonight featured, among other things, is a look at The Complete Elmore Leonard western short stories.

Hombre - Elmore Leonard

This review is part of The Book Review Club's April meeting - for info go HERE.

Hombre
Elmore Leonard
Originally published 1961
Orion Books £6.99

I've long been a fan of Elmore Leonard and have read many of his books but what is strange is that, for a western buff, this is only the second western I've read from the man. I don't know why that is - perhaps because his crime work is more readily available but when, earlier this year, my daughter returned from New York with a paperback of Last Stand at Sabre River I knew I had to read more of the author's early westerns.

I recently read an opinion that stated of Hombre - Elmore Leonard has never written a finer book. Which is a lofty claim indeed but it might not be too far of the mark.

The story is told in the first person by an onlooker to most of the action which works well and helps to present John Russel/Hombre, a part Mex who has been raised by the Apaches, in a true mythical fashion. He always stands there on the sideline, glimpsed rather than seen clearly, and on times seems like a supernatural being.

The book starts off with a disparate group of travellers on a stagecoach and when it is discovered who John Russel is no one wants to ride with him and he is forced to sit up with the driver. However when they are attacked by outlaws they find they have to walk to safety - and walk with John Russel if they have any hope of escaping the outlaws who are on their tail, holding the wife of passenger, Dr. Favor ransom for stolen army money that the doctor is carrying.

Hombre the name means simply, "Man"


"As he sat there that's when I got my first look at John Russel. Picture the belt down across his chest with the sun glinting on the bullets that filled most of the loops. Picture a stained, dirty looking straight brimmed hat worn almost Indian - fashion, that is uncreased and not cocked to either side, except the brim was curled some and there was a little dent down the crown.

Picture his face half shadowed by the hat. First you just saw how dark it was. Dark as his arms with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. Dark - I swear-as the faces of two White Mountain Boys. Then you saw how long his hair was, almost covering his ears, and how clean shaved looking his face was. Right then you suspected he was more to those Apaches than a friend or boss. I mean he could be a blood relation, no matter what his name was, and nobody in the world would bet he wasn't."

Leonard is famed for his sparse, tightly wound prose and it carries over here. His style seems deceptively simply and yet the trained eye will notice the virtuoso performance of his narrative in building a story and fleshing out the characters with not a single ounce of fat. It's not an easy trick to pull off but then the style has always been intrinsic to all of the author's work.

The Western Writers of America listed this book in the top 25 westerns of all time and I wouldn't argue with that. I've read scores of westerns in my time and this moody tome is a thrill ride from page one to last. And there is a punch at the end that comes so unexpectedly that it leaves the reader breathless - in the final analysis it seems Russel is more true hero than anti-hero.

western news

The Western Writers of America are to award Elmore Leonard (full story follows)

Western Writers to honor Elmore Leonard

ALBUQUERQUE, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- The Western Writers of America has announced its plans to honor author Elmore Leonard for his lifetime contribution to the genre.

Leonard, 83, wrote the novel "Hombre," as well as the short stories "Three-Ten to Yuma," "The Captives," "The Boy Who Smiled" and "The Tonto Woman."

He is to receive the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contribution to Western literature on June 20 at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, during the annual convention of Western Writers of America. The WWA is a nonprofit organization founded in 1953 to promote and recognize literature of the American West.

Leonard, who lives in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., said he was surprised but thrilled to hear he'd be receiving the Owen Wister Award.

"I love the Western genre and writing them was a great way to learn to write," Leonard said in a statement.

"Elmore Leonard has had a tremendous impact on the Western and crime genres," WWA President Johnny D. Boggs said. "He has always been a gifted storyteller and never afraid to take chances. That's why his Westerns remain in print decades after they were first published and why anthologies of his short Western fiction fill bookshelves. Recognition from Western Writers of America is long overdue."

Leonard is also the author of the crime novels

"Bandits," "Get Shorty" and "Tishomingo Blues."