Great short stories

Elmore Leonard's latest book is a collection of nine stories, which have, apparently, been written at various times over the past 20 years. Certainly one of them, The Tonto Woman, which appeared in an earlier collection, dates back to the time when the author was still riding the range on the trail of Zane Grey, writing novels about the Wild West, in the hope they might be, like Hombre (starring Paul Newman), turned into westerns. Other stories are much more recent.

The eponymous hero of Chickasaw Charlie Hoke - an anecdote of male bonding over baseball, incomprehensible to most English readers - turns up again as the celebrity host of the Tishomingo Lodge and Casino in Elmore Leonard's most recent novel, Tishomingo Blues. And the Karen of Karen Makes Out is US marshal Karen Sisco, heroine of the novel Out of Sight, played by Jennifer Lopez in the film version, with George Clooney as her bankrobber boyfriend.

In fact, the plots of the short story and the novel are so similar that any textual scholar would immediately conclude that the latter is a later reworking of the former. This might have been a mistake, for the story, lacking the romanticism and sentimentality of the novel, is a tougher and better piece.

Hurrah for Capt Early is another spin-off from a previous book, in this case Cuba Libre, a foray into historical fiction set in the Spanish-American War of 1898. In fact, it's impossible to avoid the impression that what we're being offered here is a collection of chips, swept up from the floor of Elmore Leonard's workshop.

Not that this is a complaint: one would far rather have one of Leonard's chips than a fully finished chiffonier from most other writers. And all the characteristics of the novels are here: the impeccable ear for dialogue; the verbless sentences; the inimitable use of the present participle - Leonard's trademark, as it were - to introduce thought, speech or action.

But the more leisurely development of the novel suits his style better than the compressed tension of a short story: good as these examples of the genre are, one would have preferred a booklength work.