"Forty lashes Less One," by Elmore Leonard

    I had never read anything by Elmore Leonard, a prolific American author, but the name seemed to me to be famous, and when I saw a novel of his available as an E-book in the library, I downloaded it out of interest: and then I gobbled it up...
    It is set in an Arizona prison, perhaps in the 'twenties or earlier,  and it focuses on the naive, temporary superintendent, who is a minister of religion: on two convicts--one a negro (the only one in the prison) and one a native American, who start by fighting each other in a punishment cell: and on a convict who seems to run the prison, with many of the guards in his pocket.
    The superintendent is convinced that the negro is a Zulu and the Indian an Apache, and their ancestry should mean that they can run long distances--so he has them trained to run behind a car each day, which leads them to develop a friendship and considerable running power. There is a major break-out as the prisoners are being moved to a new prison, and the convict boss and his outside friends go off into the desert to get to Mexico. The 'Zulu' and the 'Apache' follow them on foot and kill them all but the convict boss, whom they deliver back to the authorities, and then they set off to make their own escape.
    The whole story is very funny, and the portrait of how the prison is actually run, and especially the racial attitudes, was probably all too true of the period in which the story is set. I recommend it as a rather strange but fascinating read.