Elmer Kelton, April 29, 1926 - Aug. 22, 2009

Elmer Kelton, a working journalist who wrote Western novels on the side and is considered a master of that much-maligned genre, died Saturday in his home town of San Angelo, Texas. He was 83.

By coincidence also on Saturday, I finished reading "Shotgun," a new reissue of a 1969 novel I'd picked up at Schnucks earlier in the week. It just shows Kelton didn't fade away, and he didn't go out in a blaze of glory, he went out as he had lived ... plugging away at a craft he mastered early and kept up year after year in a thoroughly workmanlike way. Other novelists burn out, or start to parody themselves in their later work. Kelton didn't. In all, he wrote 62 books ... most of them category westerns. Not great literature, although a couple of his mid-list novels, like "The Time it Never Rained" and "The Man Who Broke Midnight" are justly considered to be minor classics. Mostly Kelton's books were just well-crafted stories that upheld the values Kelton thought important. He also edited magazines, a more than full-time job in itself, until he retired in 1990.

If you're interested in writing for common, everyday readers - maybe especially readers who live in the country or live in town but still ask if you think it'll rain and talk like they spend time on the phone with relatives who live in the country - you should consider picking up a couple of Kelton's books and studying the way he writes.

The editorial board of the Austin (Texas) Statesman-American summed up the man - and his career -like this in a piece to be published in Tuesday's paper:

The elderly gentleman wearing the western cut suit and listening attentively to former President Bill Clinton at the 2005 Texas Book Festival would have been easy to overlook.

He projected a quiet, dignified demeanor, wearing the look of a West Texan with unstudied grace. He could have easily been an accountant or school administrator from Abilene or Fort Stockton. Approached and addressed as "Mr. Kelton," he looked up, shook hands and expressed appreciation for the compliments from well-wishers who recognized him as a renowned Texas author whose very name seemed to fit his life's work.

Elmer Kelton, who died in San Angelo on Saturday, was a lot like the people he wrote about over a newspaper, magazine and literary career that spanned six decades. He listened more than he talked, and when he did speak, his words reflected the roots of his rearing and his love for the land and the creatures it supported.

Those creatures would be men, women and cattle ... probably in about that order.

After serving in World War II, Kelton studied journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. According to his obit in the Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News, Kelton was farm and ranch writer-editor for the San Angelo Standard-Times, editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine and, for 22 years, associate editor of Livestock Weekly. He retired in 1990, but he continued to write westerns. His first came out in 1956, and the last two will come out posthumously. He was working on another until this spring, when his health failed.

Macy Halford, a book reviewer who doesn't ordinarily write about westerns, grew up in Texas. This is what she said on the New Yorker website: "Kelton opened my eyes to the romance of the landscape and of a certain character—hard-nosed, homespun, forlorn, but with a vast capacity for revelation—that marked his nineteenth-century cowboys and that somehow still clung to many of the late-twentieth-century Texans I knew." She quoted a passage that, for her, was typical vintage Elmer Kelton. It's in a novel called "Sons of Texas," and it's a dialog between two cowboys:

“You ever given much thought to dyin’, Eli?”

Eli shook his head. “Never was interested in it, much. Always rather think about livin’. There’s more future in that.”

“I come near dyin’ in Texas once already.”

Eli nodded toward Lucero. “So’ve him and me. We all have. And we’re all still here. So why not take what you’ve got and enjoy it while you can?”

“Ain’t much to enjoy.’”

“Sure there is. Sunshine instead of rain. Birds singin’ in the trees. A man takes his blessin’s where he finds them.”

Halford admits "less generous critics might call all this hokey (and they have), but it’s just the sort of hokum I like."

But there's more than likeable hokum here. Read that passage out loud to yourself. Listen for the cadence, the rise and fall of the spoken language. Where have you heard people talk like that? West Texas? Central Illinois? (I grew up in East Tennessee, and that's where I first heard it. I still hear it in downstate Illinois.) If you want your writing to take on the cadence and texture of vernacular American speech, you can do a lot worse than read Elmer Kelton. I'd recommend a lot of Elmer Kelton. I'll bet he's all over the used bookstores.

Here's one last passage. It got picked up in staff writer Jared Fields' obit for the Abeline Reporter-News:

Kelton’s work with the San Angelo Standard-Times often took him to area towns. In his memoir “Sandhills Boy,” Kelton writes about covering a firemen’s convention in Winters and trying to take a picture, but the flash wouldn’t fire. “Finally one of the firemen stepped out of the line and said, ‘Son, I’ll bet if you put this plug into that socket, it’ll work.’ I did, and it did, and I felt about two feet tall.”

Vernacular American speech. Roll that last sentence around on your tongue, "I did, and it did, and ..." You'll hear what I mean. All written by a workmanlike guy who had a realistic sense of what's important and what isn't, and a strong sense of craftsmanship to match.