Customer Reviews

Hombre

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Elmore Leonard is not nearly as well known for his Westerns as his hardboiled crime dramas, but in fact he is one of the finest writers in the genre of the past fifty years. This is partly because he is simply one of the finest American writers period. He is famous for writing some of the hardest hitting, purest prose during his lifetime. There is nothing flashy about his writing. My guess is that a glossary of all his words would tally less than 400 words in all. There probably aren't more than 20 words of more than two syllables in the entire book. Some paragraphs have few two syllable words. This apparent simplicity can mask what is in fact a stunning virtuosity. Leonard is known as a writers' writer and this will escape no reader who pays close attention to the deceptive sophistication of his style.

The story he tells here is a simple one. Leonard is hardly the first to depict a Western hero. Nor is he the first to depict a hero who possessed outsider status. John Russell, the "hombre" of the title (and "hombre" here really has a similar sense as "Mensch" in Yiddish), is a white man who was raised in his formative years as an Apache. He is the result of white, Apache, and Mexican cultures, yet doesn't completely fit in any of them, though he seems most comfortable as an Apache. Though treated with disdain by his fellow stage coach passengers (actually, they travel in a mud wagon), he becomes their only hope after bandits hold them up. Russell is striking for being treated as both heroic and extremely capable, but not impossibly skilled as many Western heroes are depicted. Though a good shot, he misses more than he hits his target. Though most of his decisions are good ones, he isn't infallible.

The novel is remarkable for how sympathetic Native Americans are depicted. Written in 1961, Leonard anticipates the far more positive treatment of Indian characters in the seventies and beyond. The central crime in the novel is one perpetuated against Indians, just as the protagonist is a product of Apache culture.

I highly recommend this novel. It is yet another example of Elmore Leonard's consummate ability as a writer, as well as being a first rate Western. It truly is Leonard at his very best.

John Russell was not welcome to ride in the coach with the other passengers but they all want him after they are robbed and left to walk. Th story tells of their trying to get away and the outlws trying to catch them. Enough action to keep you interested. If everyone had been like Hombre the book would have ended differently. Russell was a great character. I liked his Indian ways and his quite silent wat if getting things done. The book is a fairly quick read and will hold you attention. As Henry Mendez says in the book, "Take a good look at Russell. You will never see another one like him as long as you live."

If you haven't seen the 1966 movie take on Elmore 'Dutch' Leonard's book, HOMBRE then track it down and watch it. It is a western classic or perhaps a unique western, starring the late Paul Newman in a very good version of the book.

Saying that, read the book first because Leonard offers up a great story that is anything but a typical cowboy western. The premise is that raised among the Apaches John Russell has to readjust to 'civilized' life and finds out early on just uncivilized it can be.

Next to Valdez Is Coming and 3:10 to Yuma Leonard's Hombre makes us all look at the Old West with new eyes and perhaps a new appreciation of a talented writer early in his long career.

Although he went on to write modern best selling novels I'd sure like to see him go back and do another western. They may not have broad appeal since the public seems to look down on the genre (literally too, for that matter since one store where I buy my books has them situated at ankle level!) and probably don't sell as well as main stream works but many are better written and have stronger, more convincing storylines than most thrillers.

If you haven't read Leonard's westerns then try this book out for size and settle into a new realm of appreciation for a better brand of storytelling.

'Hombre' is another entry in the western genre from Elmore Leonard. This novel tells the story of a man named John Russell that was raised as an Apache. He owns some property that he needs to sell and is about to take a stage coach ride with one Mr. Mendez to get where he is going. Quickly, several other passengers join the coach. When they discover Russell's background, they refuse to allow him to ride in the coach with him. It doesn't take too long for the coach to get into trouble when it becomes obvious that Mr. Russell is not the only one who isn't as he appears.

This is a good Western. The scenes are laid out well be Leonard and unfold nicley. For the most part, the characters are what you expect in a Western given their backgrounds. The various prejudices of the white man against the Apache's are obvious. In other words, the characters match the time period.

This novel has a moral that we've all heard before. Leonard simply repackages it. In addition to not judging a book by its cover, you need to walk a mile in its shoes. That is the lesson to be learned from this novel, which will become apparent by the time you get to the end.

As is usual, Leonard has created some wonderful characters. In addition to Russell, there is "the McLaren" girl who has her own ties to the Apaches. She had been kidnapped by them, and while she resents them, she has learned a few things from them. There is Dr. and Mrs. Favor. Dr. Favor isn't quite the good doctor, and his wife doesn't quite obey the rules of polite society. Mr. Mendez is the Mexican coach driver, and kind of a mentor to Russell. There are a few colorful bad guys that round out a diverse cast.

This isn't Leonard's best novel, but it is a very good one. Anyone that enjoys Leonard's work should like this. I'd also recommend it to fans of Westerns.

Grade: 4 stars.

No writer chronicles the battles of misfits, underdogs, and renegades like Leonard. In Hombre, Leonard captures a land where the rich, the poor, and the wandering come together as equals __ and where honor is earned by courage and by blood.

Prolific pulp and screen writer Elmore Leonard made his bones as a writer of clever crime and Western tales in the heyday of men's magazines, graduating from short stories in such venues to the silver screen as a script writer. Along the way he turned out numerous well-received longer works, too.

Hombre, which became the Western movie classic of the same name with Paul Newman, is one of Leonard's most well known tales in this group and one that has entered the mythos of modern Westernophiles, among whom I count myself. Although I tend to favor the Western in film more than in fiction, the novels and stories of this genre have long provided the seed and soil of the filmed tales. From Jack Schaefer's Shane to Lonesome Dove: A Novel and Broken Trail, it's to the books that Hollywood has so often looked for inspiration. Hombre is no exception.

Leonard's Western heroes are typically hard loners, isolated from the larger Anglo society around them either because of their Indian or Mexican heritage or other factors that have combined to set them apart. They just don't quite fit in. John Russell, the Hombre of this tale, is one of these. Three parts Anglo and one part Mexican he was kidnapped at the age of five or six and raised by the Apaches until the age of twelve when he is returned to white society, adopted by a lonely man named Russell and given his Anglo name, a name that, like the clothes he is forced to wear or the society he is forced to endure, never quite seems to suit him.

At seventeen he flees to the Apache reservation and works for a number of years as an Apache policeman where he wins the name "Tres Hombres" after a remarkable fight with bandits. All this is told quickly in the backstory because Leonard, a master of narrative movement, doesn't dither long over the past, giving us just enough to get our first fix on the character of the man and what he is likely to turn out to be as the story unfolds.

The best of Leonard's Westerns are character studies of a particular type, men like John Russell, a man who has returned to Anglo society only reluctantly after learning of the death of his benefactor and of the inheritance of land the man has left to him. It is this return that sets the stage for the action which will soon unfold, quickly, brutally and with deadly results.

Russell is a man the others in the small group on the "mud wagon", hired to take them all to a distant town, cannot fathom. A filthy Indian to several of them when they discover his background (he refuses to disavow having Indian blood), a dangerous enigma to the hardened Frank Braden who is fresh out of Yuma Prison on a mission of his own.

It's a tight tale taking place over a few weeks with most of the action occurring in the last few days as those traveling with Russell soon learn that he alone holds the key to their survival. His unique Apache mind and the life he has led sets him apart from his companions in the only way required by the hard land and circumstances in which they find themselves. When the small group is finally beleaguered by outlaws on the grounds of an abandoned mine it falls at last to Russell to decide whether he is more white than Indian. In the end the choice he makes is a white man's but the way he does it is all Apache.

This is a very fine Western though, perhaps, the film spoiled it for me. As when I read Dashiel Hammett's Maltese Falcon after seeing the film (The Maltese Falcon [Blu-ray]) and could not get the actors out of my head, I had the same experience here. Try as I might, I couldn't shake the picture of Paul Newman (Hombre) as I followed John Russell leading the stricken passengers in a desperate effort to save themselves after the abortive hold-up -- or of Fredric March as the crooked, pusillanimous Indian agent, despite the fact that he looked nothing like the description of Dr. Favor in the book. Or Richard Boone's sneering and overbearing Braden.

The novel and the movie are very close and, if Westerns are your thing -- or good, really tight writing is -- then Hombre should be, too.

Stuart W. Mirsky

author of The King of Vinland's Saga

HOMBRE is an excellent read until the very end. The end is a WTF!!! moment. I conclude that Leonard wanted an ending with an O'Henry twist, and picked the worst possible twist to use for the job. Its definitely incongruent with the John Russell character. What was Leonard thinking? He wasnt.

The rest of the book is excellent.

John Russell is in many ways an archetyypal hero of the Western movie and novel-tactiturn and laconic in demeanour,whipcord tough and a man of action -yet he is a man apart from most of those around him by virtue of having been raised by Apaches .He was captured by them as a boy and subsequently adopted by a white man, a supply wagon owner ,thus having experience of both the ways of the whites and the Apaches.

He is not the narrator of this tale however -a lot that falls on Carl allen ,a passenger on a stagecoach bound for Delgado where russell is going to see if he can fully embrace white customs and live as a white man .Allen is in awe of Russell but by no means uncritical of him or his manner .The journey is complicated by the presence on board the stage of an embezzling banker ,something which is known to a band of outlaws who lay siege to the coach and its passengers ,and are prepared to kill if need be to get their hands on the loot.

The result is grim chess match as standoffs and shootouts ensue but the emphasis is as much on the psychological and interpersonal tensions as it is on physical violence .The prose is lean ,mean and economical ,the action scenes punchy and direct and the characterisation way above normal for the genre .

Russell is a true ,if deeply flawed hero ,as he possess tha courage to do what he felt had to be done -others fall short of the mark.

Gripping and edgily compulsive reading -please dont miss it if you have any love for great storytelling

I'm new to the Western genre. After a few L'Amours, a friend put me on to Leonard's Westerns. So I'm reading them; they are a world apart (and very much a better one) than the good but stolid L'Amour.

I read Hombre just after Valdez is Coming, and now I'm going through the Leonard western list; he's my definite favorite for the time being.

Hombre is a distinctly moral tale. The moral punch comes suddenly and unexpectedly at the end. The hero (not anti-hero, in my opinion; here I differ from an earlier reviewer)is so laconic that you don't get much foreshadowing of his actions until they happen. This is a style I very much like, instead of the author's own ruminations through the thoughts and bloviations of his protagonist-- a major L'Amour characteristic. (I suppose I shouldn't dwell on L'Amour, but he's my only other Western author so far; and he's a solid 3-star writer, a very respectable thing to be.)

Leonard is very spare in his writing and very suited to the Western, in my mind. I'll be getting the well-regard Paul Newman movie, which I've never seen.

After having read almost all of Leonard's crime novels, I finally got to this, his best known western. Written in 1961, it was made into the 1967 Paul Newman movie. I was surprised at the differences here compared to recent Leonard novels. The anti-hero, John Russell, is a young white man raised by Apaches in 19th century Arizona. He inherits some property which requires taking a trip away from the reservation. On this trip a stage coach robbery goes wrong and Russell fights the robbers to the death. Like all other Leonard protagonists, Russell is a man of action and of few words. Unlike other Leonard heroes, he inexplicably sacrifices himself at the end of the book to save a women that neither he nor the others really care about. Chili Palmer, Frank Ryan, or Ernest Stickley would have never done a thing like that. Leonard employs an unusual device of having one of the minor characters narrate the story. Later books have either an omniscient narrator of the protaganist's inner dialogue serving as narrator. Very good but not as much fun as more recent hits.