From a forbidden glance on a Miami night to a killer's slow burn on a Detroit street, no one mixes passion, scheming, and violence better than Elmore Leonard. But before he did it in Miami Beach or Motor City, Elmore Leonard did it on the American frontier. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories is a raw, hard-bitten collection that gathers together the best of Leonard's Western fiction. In stories that burn with passion, treachery, and heroism, the American frontier comes vividly, magnificently to life. In "The Tonto Woman," a young wife, her face tattooed by Indian kidnappers, becomes society's outcast--until an outlaw vows to set her free. . . . In "Only Good Ones," we meet a fine man turned killer in one impossible moment. . . ."Saint with a Six-Gun" pits a doomed prisoner against his young guard--in a drama of deception and compassion that leads to a shocking act of courage. . . . In "The Colonel's Lady," a brutal ambush puts a woman into the hands of a vicious renegade--while a tracker attempts a rescue that cannot come in time . . . and in "Blood Money," five bank robbers are being picked off one by one, but one man believes he can make it out alive. The wild and glorious spirit of the West comes alive in the hands of America's greatest storyteller. Etching a harsh, haunting landscape with razor-sharp prose, Elmore Leonard shows in nineteen brilliant stories why he has become the American poet laureate of the desperate and the bold. Welcome to a world where the Hatch & Hodges stagecoach runs on time or someone will catch hell, and where a man knows the difference between handling a Winchester rifle and a Sharps and a Henry--or pays for it with his life. Before he became one of the best crime writers in America, Elmore Leonard was one of the best Western writers in America. He churned out short stories for the pulp magazines with regularity; The Tonto Woman collects 19 of the best, including "Three-Ten to Yuma" and "The Captives," which in 1957 became the first two of his stories to be adapted for film (the latter as The Tall T ). Reading them and the other stories, you can see why Hollywood has been continually drawn to Leonard: Every encounter between two or more people, no matter how casual, has substance--becomes a matter of great moral significance and can only be resolved through action. Even those stories that rely on O. Henry-style twists of fate to reach their endings are packed with intense character studies disguised as straightforward genre prose. When all is said and done, Elmore Leonard will be mentioned by literary critics in the same breath as Ernest Hemingway--quite likely even mentioned first --and The Tonto Woman will make one of the strongest arguments in his favor. --Ron Hogan Before he became famous as the author of such funky crime noir mysteries as Get Shorty (Delacorte, 1990) and Maximum Bob (Delacorte, 1991), Leonard was a prolific pulpwriter, known mostly for his gritty Western stories. Tonto Woman is the first of four volumes to appear this fall showcasing his Western short fiction. As a rule, the women fare better in these tales than the men?hapless, self-centered, and ill tempered?who feed on them. You won't find in these earlier stories the manic mix of humor and violence we have come to expect from Leonard's later off-the-wall urban thrillers, but even as a journeyman, Leonard could tell a story. Readers will enjoy this collection of diverting tales of the old West, where men were men and women learned how to live with them. Recommended for all public libraries. -?David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Long before Elmore Leonard was the crime writer of choice for the cinema set, he was writing equally compelling western fiction. Leonard's westerns appealed to moviemakers, too: Hombre , Last Stand at Saber River , and Three-Ten to Yuma are all based on Leonard's work. These 19 selections represent some of his best western stories, including the superb title piece in which a roving horse thief restores a woman's sense of self. Like Leonard's crime fiction, his westerns are always character driven. Other similarities are apparent across genres: his contemporary women are always a half-step ahead of their men; it's no different in the heat of the desert sun. "The Colonel's Lady" accomplishes a task that had thwarted 1,000 cavalry and 100 Apache scouts, and she's more than a little miffed when the rescue party is late. Other standouts in a strong roster include "The Nagual" and "Blood Money." Expect demand from both Leonard's crime-fiction fans as well as western aficionados, who are always starved for nonformulaic fare. Wes Lukowsky paper 0-385-32387-5 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 w