How Fury at 4-Turnings Became The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing
Guided by collector Joel Lyczak, I uncovered a lost Elmore Leonard western short story at the New York Public Library.
The following introduction to The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing appeared in the first Harper paperback of The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard in 2007.
While assembling The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard in 2004, I was haunted by the possibility that it was still incomplete. I had seen a clue among Elmore’s papers: a ledger entry for a story called “Fury at 4-Turnings,” dated 1957, but no one, not even Elmore Leonard, knew one way or the other.
As Collection Editor for The Complete Western Stories, published in hardcover December of 2004, I finally had to admit we had no clue about any missing story and we went to press.
Later, Joel Lyczak, who had assembled an earlier collection of Elmore’s western stories, told me that Popular Publications, publisher of many of Elmore’s pulp westerns, had sent their archives to the New York Public Library. Perhaps there was some clue in there.
In the Manuscript and Archives Division, Office of Special Collections at the NYPL, I looked at the Popular Publications card catalog still sealed in plastic when I opened it. The very first card under Elmore’s name listed “Fury at 4-Turnings,” published in Adventure Magazine under another title, “The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing.” No publication date was given.
Joel looked through the Adventure Magazine index for 1957 and 1958 and found no mention of “The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing.” I Googled the title and came up with the name of an artist named Chris Dingwell who had called a painting “The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing.” He got it from a story title on a magazine cover in a book called It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps, by Adam Parfrey.
Ironically, I had met Parfrey when the book came out and even asked him for help tracking down the story. With the wrong story name and magazine, he came up with nothing. But Dingwell directed me to page 63 of Parfrey’s book, and there was the cover of True Adventures magazine for June, no year shown, with the cover story, “The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing.”
We still didn’t have the magazine and confirmation that Elmore Leonard wrote it. Fortunately, Parfrey had sold his men’s magazines to Atlantic Books in Burbank, California. I went there and found True Adventures, June, 1958, with the story in it.
A further twist to the story was that on the table of contents page for the magazine, the author of the story is listed as “Leonard Elmore”; possibly the reason collectors never found it, because of the wrong title and on top of that, the wrong name.
In the panoply of Elmore Leonard westerns, “The Treasure of Mungo’s Landing” fits in nicely. Written in the late fifties as his style matured, it unfolds as a little Old West morality play with an Elmore Leonard twist: Sometimes you have to jump-start events to force justice on a world that takes too much time determining what’s right and wrong. Elmore is still doing that to this day.
Now The Complete Westerns are truly complete.
Gregg Sutter
Los Angeles, 2006
