Moon Lake: Joe Lansdale

“But you don’t beat the moneyman.”

Joe Lansdale’s Moon Lake is a tale of corruption, murder and the long-held secrets of a small East Texas town. The novel opens in 1968, with a father driving his 13-year-old year old son, Daniel to Moon Lake. Daniel’s mother, always a free spirit, ran off some months before, abandoning her husband and son. Now facing financial ruin, the father drives the son to the lake and then drives the car into the water. By some miracle, Daniel survives but his father does not. His father’s body is never found.

Temporarily, Daniel is taken in by the Candles family, also his rescuers, but Daniel, a white boy, can’t remain with this black family (East Texas, 1968)–even if he’d like to, and eventually, Daniel’s aunt June (Daniel’s mother’s twin sister) is located and hauled back to Texas. June isn’t a nurturing woman. In fact she makes it clear that raising a kid is the last thing she wants to do, but she does it. Years later, Aunt June is dead and Daniel, now an author, inherits her home. Around that time, a drought hits, Moon Lake shrinks to nothing, and in the dry lakebed, Daniel’s father’s car is retrieved. What remains of the body is in the vehicle, but the car is parked in a garage, and stranger still, a skeleton is found wrapped in rags in the trunk. Everyone assumes that it’s Daniel’s mother, but Daniel remembers that his mother had a silver star placed in one of her front teeth, and there’s no such tooth on the corpse in the trunk. Local law enforcement assume that Daniel’s father murdered his wife, stuffed her body in the trunk and then proceeded to drive the car in the lake as a murder-suicide. But Daniel isn’t buying that theory.

My mother was beautiful and mysterious-that silver star in her front tooth, her charming hippie outfits-but if you knew her for long, you realized how peculiar she was as well. It’s like she had clawed open a hole in the universe, gone into it, and clawed it back together again.

Back in Long Lincoln to identify the body found in the trunk, Daniel takes a room with a local widow, not the most hospitable woman, but the arrangement works. With Ronnie Candles, now a police officer, Daniel discovers that the lake holds many secrets and rich and powerful people are determined to keep those stories buried. Daniel finds a few unexpected allies and begins digging into the town’s hidden past.

I am a Joe Lansdale fan. Last year I read and loved More Better Deals, but Moon Lake is not his best. The freshness and vitality of More Better Deals is absent here, and while I liked some of the characters, overall the theme of small town corruption said nothing new. The most interesting character, Daniel’s aunt, plays only a minor role and disappears from the book all too soon. Interestingly, it’s the female characters here that grabbed my attention: Officer Ronnie Candles, mouthy Aunt June, the antisocial landlady, Mrs. Chandler, Shirley, the brainy intern, and Christine, the owner of the local paper. The male characters couldn’t hold the spaces they inhabited quite as well.

Review copy

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More Better Deals: Joe R. Lansdale

“Some people pave a short way to hell.”

In Joe Lansdale’s hard-boiled noir novel, More Better Deals, it’s Texas in the 60s and Ed, a used car salesman makes a marginal living pushing junkers on a used car lot. There are a few tricks of the trade: moving the odometer back, blacking tires, plugging holes in the transmission. But a deal’s a deal, and Ed doesn’t have trouble sleeping nights even though he knows most of the customers have been ripped off. Boss Smiling Dave, “about two hundred and fifty pounds of lard on a five-foot frame mounted on tiny feet, had a cheap pistol”  in his desk just in case any of the customers think they have a complaint. Smiling Dave’s advice:

Don’t grow a conscience., Ed. It’s bad for your bank account. You know what they say. Buyer beware, and better you fucked than me.

Customers are suckers, and every sale presents an opportunity to screw someone over and grab a commission. It’s a marginal life, and Ed’s in a rut. His mother, a bitter alcoholic wreck, thinks that Ed can do better since he can ‘pass’ for white, so there’s nagging pressure to improve his life and the life of his sister. And one day the opportunity for Ed to get ahead comes knocking in the shape of a cheap blonde who’s behind on her car payments.

Ed tries to repo a red Cadillac and runs right into Nancy Craig, a “blond in a cheap out-of-the-bottle way.” Barely dressed, cocktail in hand, she invites Ed inside her home and claims that her abusive husband, a travelling encyclopedia salesman is on the road, presumably with the Cadillac. Nancy, hardly an oppressed housewife, oozes sex and availability; “she could make Billy Graham pull down his pants and jack off in five o’clock traffic.” Nancy and her husband own a run-down drive-in and a pet cemetery, and to Ed, it’s a sweet deal; get the blonde, the drive-in and the cemetery. Frank, Nancy’s gorilla of a husband is in the way of that plan of course, but a few sweaty hot sexual encounters later and Ed signs on for murder.

Nancy is a bad woman, but that doesn’t stop Ed. Since he’s ok with ripping off customers, he’s apparently also unperturbed by Nancy’s explanation of how to run a pet cemetery.

Be honest with you, Ed, what we found out is digging a hole is work. So we mound the dirt up a little, scrape some here or there and make it look like a grave, then we take the beloved off in the woods and throw it in a ditch somewhere.

That would be a hint to make a run for it, but Ed is too wrapped up in the hot sex to hear alarm bells. 

It may sound as though More Better Deals is a typical noir novel–perhaps it even sounds like something you’ve read before: the bad blonde, an inconvenient husband, and a murder plot. In the hands of Joe Lansdale, however, this book is something special. A simple debt collection launches our narrator into hell–he may think he’s landing a sweet deal, but in this tale of greed, lust and murder, just who is screwing who is up for grabs. Lansdale laces this tale with some wonderful touches, violent cops, crude sex and a narrator who’s bad but not as bad as he needs to be. For Lansdale fans, I think this is one of his best, and for anyone who’d like to read a hardboiled noir novel, go no further.

They throw the switch and the devil is showing you your hotel room.

Review copy

Hoodoo Harry: Joe R. Lansdale

Joe Lansdale’s novella Hoodoo Harry is one in the entry of Bibliomysteries (“a series of short tales about deadly books by top mystery authors”). Hoodoo Harry features Lansdale’s much-loved fictional duo Hap and Leonard, and since it’s a short trip with these two, I’d recommend it for fans rather than newbies.

For those unfamiliar with Hap and Leonard, they live in East Texas, outside of mainstream culture by scraping a living at menial jobs as field hands or day laborers. Later in the series, they work at a detective agency run by Hap’s girlfriend, Brett. Hap and Leonard’s close friendship substitutes for other familial relationships, and while these two men are the best of friends, especially during humorous bantering sessions, they seem like an old married couple. Hap Collins is white, Leonard Pine is gay, black, a Vietnam vet. Digging back in Hap and Leonard history, Hap, who was a member of the counter-culture, refused to go to Vietnam, and served time. The two men operate as a team, with Hap as our narrator, so the novels clearly lean towards the Hap side of things. Hap is often troubled about acts of violence that take place while Leonard isn’t troubled by moral questions.

In Hoodoo Harry, Hap and Leonard are on a fishing trip when a bookmobile barrels towards them:

As we came over the hill. the trees crowding in on us from both sides, we saw there was a blue bus coming down the road, straddling the middle line. Leonard made with an evasive maneuver, but by this point the trees on the right side were gone, and there was a shallow creek visible, one that fed into the private lake where we had been fishing. There was no other place to go. 

Hap and Leonard survive the accident, but the driver of the bookmobile van doesn’t. Turns out the driver, am orphaned boy named James, had been “couch surfing,” and picking up odd jobs in Nesbit–a town with an ugly history. Hap and Leonard are troubled by James’s death, and although his death was caused by a horrendous accident, they feel responsible. The fact that James was covered with cigarette burns and had clearly been tortured before his death indicates that he was running, terrified from some awful fate. And then there’s a question about the bookmobile. It disappeared 15 years ago along with its driver, Harriet Hoodalay, otherwise known as Hoodoo Harry. This was a cold case until the perfectly preserved missing bookmobile plows into Hap and Leonard.

Where has the bookmobile been for the last 15 years? Where is Hoodoo Harry and why was a runaway child at the wheel of a vehicle he couldn’t handle?

Anyone familiar with Hap and Leonard, who typically take on the cases of the disenfranchised, can guess that these unlikely best friends will investigate the case and find the answers. Race issues, as always, float to the top of the tale. Hap and Leonard operate in East Texas and Nesbit is one of those out-of-the-way unpleasant little towns where everyone appears to know everything about all the mostly unsavory residents.

The tale also includes Lansdale’s signature style and that is occasionally crude. It goes with the territory:

When I came to, I was lying on the ground on my side by the edge of the creek. I was dizzy and felt like I’d been swallowed by a snake and shit down a hole. My throat was raw, and I knew I had most likely puked a batch of creek water. 

For Lansdale fans, this tale is a short, fun trip, but it’s probably not the best place to start if you’re new to the Hap/Leonard team

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Honky Tonk Samurai: Joe R. Lansdale

“the front windshield collapsed like a Baptist deacon’s morals at a strip club.”

Honky Tonk Samurai is the eleventh book in author Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series. For those who are unfamiliar with this excellent series, Hap and Leonard are an East Texas pair, who live surrounded by rednecks and racism, are unlikely friends and consider themselves brothers. While the two aren’t exactly itinerants, they are content to live outside of mainstream culture by scraping a living at menial jobs as field hands or day laborers. Their close friendship substitutes for other familial relationships, and while these two men are the best of friends, blood brothers if you will, at other times, especially during humorous bantering sessions, they seem like an old married couple.

Hap Collins is white, Leonard Pine is gay, black, a Vietnam vet. Digging back in Hap and Leonard history, Hap, who was a member of the counter-culture, refused to go to Vietnam, and served time for his opinions. The two men operate as a team, with Hap as our narrator, so the novels clearly lean towards the Hap side of things. Hap is often troubled about acts of violence that take place while Leonard isn’t troubled by moral questions. In all the Hap and Leonard books, somehow or another they are dragged into crime–not that they go looking for trouble; somehow trouble always looks for them. Sometimes it’s a returning ex that heralds trouble (Savage Season), and sometimes it begins with a friend asking for help.

I don’t think we ask for trouble, me and Leonard. It just finds us. It often starts casually, and then something comes loose and starts to rattle, like an unscrewed bolt on a carnival ride. No big thing at first, just a loose, rattling bolt, then the bolt slips completely free and flies out of place, the carnival ride groans and screeches, and it jags and tumbles into a messy mass of jagged parts and twisted metal and wads of bleeding human flesh.

Honky Tonk Samurai finds Hap and Leonard aging and working part-time for a detective agency. Not far into the tale, Hap’s long-term girlfriend, Brett, decides to give up nursing and takes over the company, and the first case appears in the shape of a crotchety, foul-mouthed, sinewy old woman who looks like a “retired hooker.”

“You’re Hap Collins, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I said. “Do we know each other?”

“No, but when I was forty I’d like to have. You and me could have burned a hole in a mattress then. Course, you may not have been born. But you might want to lose a few pounds, honey. You’re beginning to chub up.”

“He’s taken,” Brett said, “Pounds and all.”

The old lady studied Brett. “Aren’t you the Southern belle? I bet you could earn a pretty penny on a Louisiana shrimp boat and never have to cast a net.”

“Listen, you old bag,” Brett said.
“Either say what you want or I’m going to stick that cane up your ass and throw you down the stairs so hard the dye will come out of your hair.”

Turns out the old lady, Lilly Buckner, is the first client of the Brett Sawyer Detective Agency, and she wants Hap to find her missing granddaughter Sandy. Sandy, who graduated with a journalism degree and “found that the newspapers and magazines that did hard news had gone the way of the dodo bird and drive-in theaters” ended up working at a “high-end” used car dealership, but one day she just disappeared. Five years have passed and the case is cold. Hap and Leonard go undercover as potential car buyers at the high-end dealership and discover that the business is selling more than just cars….

On the hunt for Sandy, Hap and Leonard stir up trouble in the form of a biker gang and a mysterious hitman known as the Canceler who has a habit of collecting trophy testicles. Cheap hustlers, petty cons, thugs and psychos populate Hap and Leonard’s colorful world, so expect some old familiar faces (including Jim Bob and his car, the Red Bitch), and some new weirdos. I haven’t read the entire Hap and Leonard series; I read a few of the early books and a couple of the later books, so I’d recommend that if you come to Honky Tonk Samurai you should also have at least Vanilla Ride under your belt.

As always with series characters, the adventure/case runs parallel to developments in the personal lives of the main players. In this instance, Leonard, who never baulks at using violence, is deeply torn over the behaviour of his lover, John who’s struggling with guilt for being homosexual. Hap and Brett face a surprise development when Hap’s past arrives on his doorstep.

It was a pleasure to read Hap and Leonard’s latest adventure. Author Joe R. Lansdale is clearly fond of these characters, and it shows. This is another excellent entry in an excellent series. It’s no surprise that someone finally saw the sense of picking up this unlikely crime fighting duo for a TV series, and I’m certain that this will brings Lansdale a new audience of fans.

Review copy

 

Cold in July by Joe R. Lansdale

“I needed, as they say in California, some space. Or as we say in Texas, I wanted to be left the hell alone.”

Cold in July is a novel from American crime author Joe R. Lansdale’s backlist. Its release is in conjunction with the film version which features Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. After reading the novel, I don’t need to read the cast list to see who plays which role; it’s easy to guess.

The book’s premise is simple: Richard Dane lives with his wife and small son on the outskirts of the small East Texas town of Laborde. One night Richard’s wife, Ann wakes up after hearing the sounds of someone breaking into their home. Dane grabs his .38 and in an act of self-defense, kills the armed burglar. This should be the end of the matter, and local police Lt. Price reassures a troubled Dane that he had no choice but to shoot. The man is identified as Freddy Russel, a small time crook with a history of incarceration. Dane’s house is cleaned, and the remnants of the crime are washed away, but Dane is troubled, in spite of the fact he knows he had no choice but to kill the burglar.

Trouble begins when Freddy’s violent father, Ben, just released from Hunstville comes looking for revenge….

Lansdale’s crime novels frequently place the individual on a lonely path, seeking justice, vigilante style, without the aid of legal channels. The individual, outside of the boundaries of the law for various reasons then rounds up loyal friends, people he can trust, and then with a team in place, the action begins. It’s a throw-back to the Western idea of the posse, and Lansdale novels seem to tap into monumental archetypes. That scenario emerges here as Dane learns that he cannot trust the police, and seeking the truth, he forms an uneasy alliance with Ben Russel, an ex-con whose explosive temper is fueled by guilt.  They join with unorthodox PI Jim Bob Luke and a speedy investigation takes them right to the Dixie Mafia.

On the down side, there’s the sentimentality of saving the home and hearth which some readers may not mind, but the main issue is that there are just too many implausibilities which occur simply to move the plot along (the phone book? really?…) . I can’t give the examples I’d like to give as that would reveal too much of the plot, but I can add that one of the first implausible points that annoyed me was Dane as the owner of a marginal frame shop with two full-time employees in a town of 40,000. This just hit me the wrong way. He lives too well, doesn’t worry much about money (orders new locks, windows, a paint job & a couch without blinking), and then leaves the work to two employees as he takes off to pursue his investigation with a PI he hires for $300 a day.

But that brings me to the best part of the book–the character of the PI, Jim Bob Luke, a man who drives a blood-red Cadillac named the Red Bitch:

About two-thirty an ancient blood-red Cadillac about the size of a submarine pulled up directly in front of the door to Russel’s room. There were baby shoes hanging off the mirror along with a big-yellow, foam-rubber dice, and on the windshield was a homemade sticker that had six stick-figure humans and three dogs drawn on it and there was an X through each of them. The car had curb feelers and they were still wobbling violently when the driver got out and slammed the door and stretched.  

The entrance of the seeming laid-back Jim-Bob to the book added a lot of zest. He’s a well-developed character, always fully into his role, and that includes some racist comments.  He looks like a “washed-up country and Western singer,” complete with a “worn straw hat with a couple of anemic feathers on it.”  Here’s some dialogue to give a sense of the book’s style:

Jim Bob ordered steak and baked potato and all the trimmings, and when he took his first bite of steak he waved the waitress over and told her, “Honey, take this cow on back and finish killing it. Set the little buddy on fire for about three more minutes and then bring it back to me.”

While Jim Bob waited on the steak, he and Russel talked about old times, and laughed. Ann and I felt a little limp, as if we had gone to the wrong party.

When Jim Bob’s steak came back he thanked the waitress and ordered a Lone Star Light. “Got to watch my girlish figure,” and he went at his food with gusto, saying “Brain food.”

“Then you better eat plenty of it,” Ann said.

I looked at her. Russel looked at her. Jim Bob looked at her and laughed. “Ain’t that the damned truth,” he said. “Pass that salad dressing. The one that looks like someone threw up in the bottle.”

I’m a long-time fan of Lansdale, but this is not his best book. IMO the Leonard & Hap series is the best of Lansdale. That and Bubba Ho Tep, of course.

Review copy/own a copy.

The Best American Mystery Stories of 2011

“They’ve got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up.”

A short story collection presents me with a dilemma. Which ones should I mention in the review? I inevitably land on those I liked the best or those that stuck out from the pack for one reason or another. This makes short story collections more difficult to review I think, but at the same time, they can also be infinitely rewarding as for this reader they act as a showcase for new authors. I discovered Jonathan Coe thanks to a short story collection, and so I approach a new collection as a way to collect fresh names.

The Best American Mystery Stories is a series that’s run now for 14 years. The 2011 edition brings Harlan Coben as the guest editor with Otto Penzler (and I’m a fan of Penzler’s for all he’s done for the crime/mystery genre) as series editor. Penzler gives what he states is “fair warning” that a mystery is not necessarily a detective story. Penzler argues:

I regard the detective story as one subgenre of a much bigger genre, which I define as any short work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot.

Patricia Highsmith, of course, we think of as a mystery writer, so then the 2011 Best Mystery Collection, is not, and it’s a good thing, all detectives–although some detectives appear as well as a wide range of other characters in these pages. In Audacious by Brock Adams there’s a pickpocket, in Beth Ann Fennelly & Tom Franklin’s What His Hands had Been Waiting For there’s a couple of ranger types in a world I had, at first, some difficulty dating, and there’s a female serial killer in Lawrence Block’s Clean Slate. There are some big names here including a story from Joe Lansdale and a collaboration by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane, a great Mike Hammer short story called A Long Time Dead.

Chewing over the stories, I’ve landed on some favourites which also happen to be by writers I’ve never read before, and Dennis McFadden’s Diamond Alley makes the short list. It’s a story told by a man who reminisces about his past,  and those memories include a young woman named Carol Siebenrock, a beautiful nubile girl who became the sex fantasy of every boy who attended the same high school. The author recalls how groups of boys organised Peeping Tom sessions at her remote country home. While this is all very familiar territory, in McFadden’s hands the story becomes sublime:

The year we were seniors in high school, a girl in our class was murdered, and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series. Which was the more momentous event? No contest, of course; how could a game,  a boys’ game at that, compete with the death of a classmate, a girl who was our friend? Yet somehow, despite our lip service to the contrary, these two happenings seemed to attain a shameful equality in our minds. And if anything, now that so many years have passed, Mazeroski rounding the bases in jubilation after his homer had vanquished the big,bad Yankees is more vivid in our memories than the image of  Carol Siebenrock, young, beautiful, and naked as seen from the darkness beyond her window.

The narrator describes that senior year in Harts Grove, Pennsylvania–a year of promise & hope , rampant sexual fantasies, and yet also a certain innocence that is smashed by Carol’s disappearance. The story charts the chilling appropriateness of her last comment to her male admirers, loss, collective guilt, and the passage of time. School all too frequently becomes the place where we first experience death of peers, and McFadden’s story captures all the nuances of the narrator’s experience as Carol passes from the real, the desired and the unattainable to the iconic.

Andrew Riconda’s Heart like a Balloon is one of the meanest contract killer short stories I’ve ever read, so it makes the short list for its one track nastiness which still managed to shock and surprise me. The story is told by Brian Rehill, a contractor/fixer of “dirty business” who is meeting with Denny back in New York after an absence of three years:

We’d been friends of sorts until I did a favor for him to keep him out of jail. Subsequently he got leery of our association. Denny could deal with the blood on his hands as long as he didn’t have a daily reminder of it. Shit, it wasn’t all that much blood. And it wasn’t even like someone had been killed. That being said, I certainly didn’t mourn the loss of our friendship. I’d mainlined enough Dr. Phil while unemployed to recognize the toxic people in my life, and when this bastard broke wind, the room smelled of almonds and burned Legos.

After doing a “favour” for Denny, Brian suspects he was subtly blacklisted:

And even though I suspected Denny had quietly put a few bad words in for me here and there, after I did him his little favour, putting the kibosh on jobs I should’ve gotten, including a couple of big sheetrocking contracts that would’ve put me into a whole other tax bracket, I didn’t care now. This pariah’s subsequent relocation westward turned out to be the best move I’d ever made. And L.A., much to the bemusement of my condescending New Yorker mentality, turned out to be paradise–professionally, romantically, and even, god help me, spiritually (I hadn’t done anything I was ashamed of in nearly two years). I was even thinking about buying my first house, although I still needed to somehow come up with a big chunk for a downpayment. Somehow….

Well the “somehow” is handed to Brian when Denny asks him for yet another favour–it’s a long story that begins, classically (and I see Dennis Farina in this role) saying, “there’s this guy…”. This ‘guy’ as it turns out, is Joe, the soon-to-be ex-husband of Denny’s mistress, Sucrete. The schmuck doesn’t get the message that the marriage is over, and loser that he is, he’s bugging Sucrete. Restraining orders haven’t worked, so Denny asks Brian to put a “permanent restraint” on Joe: “whatever you deem … most permanent.”

Anyway, that clip gives a sense of style and voice (both excellent) and the set-up….

Another favourite is a story written by Ed Gorman, Flying Solo, a story about two widowed cancer sufferers in their 60s who meet during chemo sessions. One man is retired cop Ralph and the other is Tom, a retired English teacher. Ralph has terminal prostate cancer and Tom has colon cancer. They begin scheduling chemo on the same days and watch films to pass the time:

The DVD players were small and you could set them up on a wheeled table right in front of your recliner while you were getting the juice . One day I brought season two of the Rockford Files , with James Garner. When I got about two minutes into the episode I heard Ralph sort of snicker.

“What’s so funny?”

“You. I should’ve figured your for a Garner type of guy.”

“What’s wrong with Garner?”

“He’s a wuss. Sort of femmy.”

“James Garner is sort of femmy?”

“Yeah. He’s always whining and bitching. You know, like a woman. I’m more of a Clint Eastwood fan myself.”

Ralph and Tom, in a what-do-we-have-to-lose way, decide to take the law into their own hands and improve the world a little bit with what time they have left. Author Ed Gorman wrote the story as “the result of sitting in chemo rooms for the past nine years dealing with [my] multiple myeloma.” Gorman captures the idea that for those dealing with chronic or terminal illness, sometimes a little empathy, a little recognition of the trials of others, goes a long way.

My copy courtesy of the publisher via netgalley and read on the kindle.

L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (Rockstar Games)

One of the features I really like about the Kindle (apart from the free classics) is the way stories, novellas, and novels not published anywhere else find their way onto this device. Example: I came across L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories for the princely sum of 99 cents. How could I not buy this?

Ok, so what do you get for your 99 cents?

That Girl by Megan Abbott

See the Woman by Lawrence Block

Naked Angel by Joe R. Lansdale

Black Dahlia and White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates

School for Murder by Francine Prose

What’s in a Name by Jonathan Santlofer

Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski

Postwar Room by Andrew Vachss

Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, wrote the introduction which explains that Rockstar Games “set out to create a classic noir experience,” and that LA Noire puts the player “into the shoes of Cole Phelps” former Marine now a member of LAPD. In addition to creating the game, Rockstar Games also “invite[d] some of the most acclaimed living practitioners of the noir storytelling art … to each write a new short story inspired by the world of LA Noire.” Some of the stories, apparently, are inspired by cases in the game.

I’m a Megan Abbott fan, so I was happy to see her included, and her story, The Girl is a female-centric tale that focuses on the tawdry side of Hollywood. I’ve read all of Abbott’s novels, btw, and The Song is You is my favourite. The Song is You was inspired by the real-life, unsolved disappearance of actress Jean Spangler. It’s a bitterly haunting novel, and I found myself thinking about it as I read The Girl. The Girl is set in a “famous” LA house, and I know which house inspired Abbott here. It’s a “Mayan fortress made of ferroconcrete blocks stacked like teeth.”

The protagonist of the story is an actress called June. She doesn’t have much of a career, but she’s married to a gangster named Guy, and this career move has removed some of the desperation from June’s life. June’s agent tells her that she’ll meet Huston at the party:

“Key Largo. The part’s perfect for you.”

“Claire Trevor’s got it sewn up between her thighs,” June said softly, looking up at the house from the open door of the agent’s middling car. “Ten years, every bed I land in is still warm from her.”

“She’s not married to Guy,” the agent pointed out.

“You see how far that’s got me,” June said.

Ok, this is a Hollywood party of the movers and shakers, the power people of Tinseltown. June has already admitted that she’s slept around to get parts. What else is she willing to do?

The first few years in Hollywood, times were hard and June shared apartments, rooms, even, with a hundred girls, their shared pillowcases flossy with their peroxided hair.

Working counter girl, working  as an extra, working as a department-store model, a girl to look pretty at parties, she got by, barely. She even filled her teeth with white candle wax when they turned brown and died.

She said she would do things, and she wouldn’t suffer for them. She’s seen where suffering could get you, and it wasn’t her bag.

So she hustled and hustled and finally found the ways to get all those small roles at Republic, B-unit jobs at Fox. She never could be sure, though, is she was making headway or running on her last bit of garter-flashing luck.

I am a fan of Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series, so it wasn’t too surprising that another favourite story came from this author. Lansdale’s story, Naked Angel, is about patrolman Adam Coats who finds a dead body frozen inside a huge block of ice.

Downtown at the morgue the night attendant, Bowen, greeted him with a little wave from behind his desk. Bowen was wearing a white smock covered in red splotches that looked like blood but weren’t. There was a messy meatball sandwich on a brown paper wrapper in front of him, half-eaten. He had a pulp-Western magazine in his hands. He laid it on the desk and showed Coats some teeth.

I wasn’t sure which was worse–thinking that the morgue attendant’s smock was covered in blood or realising that he was eating a messy meatball sandwich a few feet away from the stiffs.

Another favourite I’m going to mention is Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski. This is the story of Bill Shelton, an underpaid Los Angeles surveyor who thinks he gets lucky when he picks up a waitress named Bonnie. Wait. I’ll revise that. She picks him up. Bad sign. A few dates and a little tongue hockey later, Bill’s ready to do whatever it takes to get Bonnie out of trouble.

These are classic noir tales: the easy pick-up femme fatale, affairs torched by lust, greed and ambition, and our characters lured by opportunity only to be tricked by fate. Some of these short stories have the feel that they could be fleshed out into novellas, but hey for 99 cents, I’m not bitching.  And if you want the low-down on the other stories, knock yourself out and spring for a copy.

Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale

Last year I made a disturbing discovering about author Joe Lansdale…he’s written a lot of wonderful books and I’d never heard of him.

First I read one of Lansdale’s stand-alone thrillers, Leather Maiden. I liked it. But then I discovered that he’d written an entire series featuring two characters: Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Anyway, I read and reviewed the second novel in the series Mucho Mojo for www.mostlyfiction.com Then I read and reviewed Vanilla Ride and even managed to cop an interview with Lansdale at the same time.

So why was discovering Lansdale disturbing? I read a lot of books and yet I hadn’t heard about this author. It’s at times like this I wonder what I am doing wrong. Is my book antenna out-of-order? How many other great books are slipping by unnoticed? But then I discovered something else…Lansdale wrote the short story that became the weird and wonderful film Bubba Ho Tep, and I love that film. Things were beginning to fall into place…and I knew it was my mission to read all the Hap and Leonard novels in the series. This brings me to the first book in the series, Savage Season.

If there are any other people out there who haven’t yet heard a thing about Hap & Leonard, here’s the run-d0wn: Hap Collins & Leonard Pine are friends who live in East Texas. These are men who are products of their environment, yet not in the way we would normally assume. Surrounded by rednecks and racism, Hap and Leonard rise above the negative aspects of their environment and appear to mentally thrive because of it. While the two aren’t exactly itinerants, they don’t pursue ‘the American Dream’ of a house in suburbia. Their close friendship substitutes for other familial relationships, and they are content to scrape a living at menial jobs as field hands or day labourers.

Hap Collins, the narrator, is white and straight. He was part of the 60s counter-culture and served time in prison for refusing to go to Vietnam. Leonard, on the other hand, is a black, gay, Vietnam veteran. And while that brief cliched description may lead to the conclusion that they have little in common, the two men the best of friends. Sometimes they seem to be blood-brothers; at other times they even seem like an old married couple, and then there are times that they are a couple of unemployed comedians.

Hap & Leonard are a throw-back to the cowboy days. They operate outside of the law–which is just as well since most of the lawmen in their neck of the woods are as rotten as rancid bacon. And they also become embroiled in situations involving friends (Vanilla Ride) and ex-lovers (Savage Season).

Any novel series needs to create characters that we want to return to…again and again, and this is most certainly the case with Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard. These two men are great fun to hang out with for 200-300 pages. This is the third book I’ve read and I really can’t wait to read more. But I’m not going to be a piggy and read them all at once. I’m going to dole them out to myself over time–perhaps as an antidote to reading something I didn’t enjoy.

In Savage Season, Hap & Leonard are enjoying a pleasant afternoon shooting clay pigeons when Hap’s ex-wife Trudy shows up. Leonard, who can’t stand Trudy, makes a quick exit, and that leaves Hap alone with his barracuda ex. After giving Hap a song & dance about how much she misses him, they have sex and then Trudy reveals the real reason for her visit. She needs Hap’s help….

Trudy tells Hap a convoluted tale about yet another ex-husband, a bank job gone wrong, & stolen money which may be hidden in the depths of the nearby Marvel Creek. Trudy wants Hap’s help to get the money out of the river, and she promises him a share of the money. Leonard goes along with the plan, not trusting Trudy but he’s there mainly to watch Hap’s back.

Aging hippie Trudy is part of an ad-hoc group of misfits who intend to use their share of the loot for some sort of subversive activity. The group is composed of ex-husband Howard, Chub, the privileged outcast son of a wealthy elite family, and the mysterious Paco–a man whose face appears to have melted off. The plan is that Hap and Leonard will do the dirty work and dive down into the icy depths of the Marvel Creek, retrieve the money and then split it with the others. But of course the plan goes horribly wrong….

This is a lean, fast-paced tale that establishes the roots of the unique relationship between Hap & Leonard. In Savage Season, it feels as though Lansdale is just becoming acquainted with these new characters, and the humour, wild and profane in Mucho Mojo and Vanilla Ride is present here, but muted and definitely toned down in comparison. This is an appropriate beginning for the East Texas pair as Lansdale excavates Hap’s past through his troubled relationship with Trudy. Trudy and Hap once wanted to make a ‘difference’ in the world, and in Hap’s case that idea fizzled after a taste of prison, and he realized that he “didn’t want to help the underprivileged anymore” as he “was one of them.” Trudy, on the other hand, has remained on the fringes of society, flailing around looking for causes to define who she is. The loot represents another chance at life, an opportunity to make up for lost moments:

“He lifted out a long aluminum canister cracked in the middle. We all looked at it. I felt as if I had suddenly been filled with molten lava, that a little ice had gone out of my soul. Lost years were on the verge of being regained. Possibilities went through me, grew heads like a Hydra. The fact that this money might be partially mine for the taking, that it was stolen and illegal, filled me simultaneously with ecstasy and guilt, like I’d have felt if my mother had ever caught me jacking off to a girlfriend’s picture.”

Of the three Lansdale Hap & Leonard novels I’ve read so far, this one is my least favourite, and while it’s weak in comparison, it’s still a damn good read. First series novels are often the weakest as the characters are established. Later novels are stronger as much loved characters mature, their lives develop and we become even fonder of them. Personally I missed all the swearing and the humour that peppered the pages of Vanilla Ride and Mucho Mojo, but then again, Lansdale is just flexing here.