The Big Book of Hap and Leonard Read online

  When Jesse spoke to me, if no one was looking, I would nod.

  We all carry memories of shame, embarrassment over our own conduct. Lansdale isn’t directing you to examine them; he’s too good a writer for that. The reflection is a product of the story, and all the great things—laughter, fear, profundity—that come from his work will always come from the story. While many writers repeat the show don’t tell cliché, Joe Lansdale lives it. If you don’t believe me, wait until you get to the last line of “The Boy Who Became Invisible.” See how long that one lingers.

  Again, this is merely a taste of a remarkable body of work. That’s staggering to consider, and inspiring.

  I just have a knack to aim at something and hit it, Hap reflects on his shooting ability in “Hyenas,” and that’s the way reading Lansdale feels—effortless talent, a knack so natural that he just leans back in his chair, puts his feet up, and spins a yarn. Meet him in person, and you’ll leave thinking the same thing, that this stuff comes easily, that he shares great storytelling as naturally as most of us exhale.

  And I’m here to tell you it’s bullshit.

  Does Joe Lansdale, like Hap Collins, have one hell of a lot of natural talent, a “knack” for hitting stories out of the park and dropping one-liners that are the envy of professional comedians? Sure. Does it come easily? No. It comes from a lifetime of dedicated work, a man committed to craft, a man so aware of how story works and why that he can fool us into thinking it’s effortless. William Blundell once said, “Easy writing makes hard reading. Hard writing makes easy reading.”

  I think of that line when I read Hap and Leonard, and when I read Joe Lansdale in general. I think about how smooth these stories go down, each line so razor-edged, each action scene so perfectly choreographed, and I think—this guy has worked awfully hard so the reader doesn’t have to.

  You have in your hands a collection by a master. Enjoy it, treasure it, and as you breeze through with a smile on your face and some head-nodding over bits of polished wisdom, be damn grateful that Joe Lansdale has put in the work to deliver it so well. I assure you, the writing is not easy.

  But the reading? It’s an absolute joy. You’d best get started. Hap and Leonard are already in motion, I assure you, and you’re going to want to catch up.

  Michael Koryta is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven suspense and horror novels.

  Joe R. Lansdale, Hap and Leonard, and Me

  by Bill Crider

  I like to tell people that I’m so old I can remember when Joe Lansdale said he didn’t think he’d ever write a series. He may deny he said that, and I can’t prove that he did because I wasn’t wearing a wire at the time. But that’s the way I remember it, and I should put a disclaimer in right here. Everything that I remember is suspect and might not even be true. I’ll paraphrase Mark Twain here (I’ll get back to Twain later) and say that my memory is so good that I can remember things that didn’t even happen. Those things are true to me, however, and I think it’s worth setting some of them down so that future literary critics can mine my comments for information. They’re a little bit of the history of Texas writing from the perspective of someone who was around to witness it, whether his memory is reliable or not.

  Let me start from the beginning.

  I first met Joe R. Lansdale on April Fools Day back in 1979. He may not recall that, either, but I’m certain on this point. It was probably an appropriate day for us to meet, too, though I thought nothing about it at the time. We were both at the AggieCon X, a science-fiction convention at Texas A&M University. The guests of honor that year were Theodore Sturgeon and Boris Vallejo. Wilson Tucker was the toastmaster, and he told us that the War of 1812 was fought in 1814. You could look it up.

  Neither Joe nor I was a well-known writer at the time. I’d published pretty much nothing except a lot of reviews of crime fiction and a few essays about it in various fanzines. Joe might well have been selling fiction and nonfiction by that time, but it wasn’t anything anybody would have heard of. As incredible as it may seem, some of it might not even have been reprinted. However, in spite of his relative obscurity at the time, I’d seen Joe’s name attached to a few reviews and letters in some of the same fanzines I was publishing in, primarily one called The Mystery FANcier, and because he was from Texas, his name stuck with me.

  I didn’t cross Joe’s path during the convention itself, or if I did, I don’t remember it. On the final day of the con, my late wife, Judy, and I were in the Memorial Student Center where the convention was held in those days. We were getting ready to leave and had headed back to our room to get our luggage. As we walked down a hallway near one of the entrances to the dealers’ room (I could take you to the exact spot even today), we stopped near a young man and woman. I was trying to decide whether to make one final run through the dealers’ room, and I didn’t really notice the man because the woman was (and still is) much better looking. Judy told me to forget the dealers’ room, and we were about to move on when I happened to glance at the man’s name tag and saw that he was claiming to be Joe Lansdale.

  I’m not usually a guy who’ll open a conversation with a stranger. I’m socially awkward and the very picture of an introvert (quite the opposite of Joe, as I learned), but Judy and I had been wandering around the convention all weekend without speaking to anyone, and I thought we might as well get acquainted with one person. So I introduced myself. Joe seemed a little suspicious at first when I told him that I knew him from another fandom. Maybe he thought it was some kind of April Fools joke. However, after I told him that I’d read his letters and reviews in The Mystery FANcier, he relaxed and pretended that he recognized my name, too. He introduced his wife, Karen, and we talked for a few minutes. Not long, but long enough to exchange addresses. Almost as soon as we got home, we began a correspondence.

  This correspondence was conducted in the quaint manner of the time, by means of typewritten letters on paper that was folded, placed in envelopes, and put in the U.S. mail, after which time the letter would reach the recipient within a few days. It seems like a tedious process compared to email, but it worked just fine for me and Joe. We became friends by way of our letters, and every year we’d get together at AggieCon and talk about the same things we wrote about in the letters: writing, reading, movies, TV, and just about anything that interested us. There was hardly anything that didn’t interest us, to be honest, and the discussions were wide-ranging, indeed. We covered just about everything, from why Mars needs chickens to why Winston Churchill said (or didn’t say) that the British naval tradition was nothing but “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” Shoes and ships and sealing wax probably got into the conversation, too.

  Many more people than Joe and I got involved in these discussions. A number of couches lined the hallway where we met, and often two or three other couches would be dragged to where we were. People sat on the floor, as well. The core group for many years consisted of me and Judy, Joe, Scott Cupp, Willie Siros, and Neal Barrett, Jr. I can’t remember all of the others who dropped by, but I know that Tom Knowles, Lewis Shiner, Henry Melton, Kurt Baty, Bill Page, and Jayme Lynn Blaschke showed up at one time or another. Sometimes the convention guests would stop and talk, too. I know that Greg Bear and David Drake did when they were the guests of honor.

  Whatever else we talked about, the main topic was always writing. Not that everybody there wanted to write and publish, but most of us did, and a lot of us succeeded. Neal, of course, had succeeded already, and Joe and I were working on it. In 1981, both he and I published novels. His was Act of Love, a novel about a serial killer on the loose in Houston. It was published by Zebra Books, with one of its many fondly remembered knives-in-fresh-fruit covers. Joe’s had an impaled strawberry, I believe. Mine was The Coyote Connection, one of hundreds of Nick Carter novels in that long-running series. It was written in collaboration with a friend, and here’s a big difference between me and Joe. I would have been quite content to spend the rest of my life writing Nick
Carter novels, and I might well have done just that had the editor who liked the proposals my co-author and I sent her not moved on. Joe, on the other hand, had no intention of spending the rest of his life writing novels about serial killers.

  That was because Joe had more than talent. He had ambition, and he had a powerful confidence in his writing. I had neither one, and after the new Nick Carter editor nixed the proposals my co-author and I had sent to the previous editor, I took a look at the other novel I’d been working on and stuck it in a desk drawer and forgot it.

  Joe kept writing, but he didn’t stick to crime. From the very start, he was mashing up genres and selling a good many stories while also writing all kinds of things that nobody would buy. He didn’t let the things that didn’t sell bother him. He was too busy with books like The Nightrunners, The Drive-In, and The Magic Wagon to worry. In 1989, he published Cold in July, which I think of as something of a breakthrough novel. It was a crime novel, but it wasn’t like Act of Love. It was about ordinary people in East Texas who found themselves in an extraordinary situation, with some savage violence but with some humor and a core of humanity and decency that would distinguish Joe’s books from then on.

  A few years before Cold in July, I’d pulled my abortive novel out of my desk drawer because Joe had suggested we collaborate on a book. I sent him the fifty pages I’d written, but he soon sent them back. His career had started to take off. All those things that nobody would buy were selling now, and he didn’t have time for a lengthy collaboration. And he said that the manuscript was fine just like it was and didn’t need anything from him to help it along. I eventually finished the book on my own and sold it.

  When I got the acceptance letter for my novel, the editor concluded by saying, “You are working on a sequel, aren’t you?” The honest answer to that question would have been, “Nope. I never dreamed I’d sell that book, much less another one.” This wasn’t the answer I gave, however. I said, “Of course I’m working on a sequel.” Soon after I sent that letter, I was at the typewriter (this was a long time ago, remember), and the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series is still going as I write this, with nearly twenty-five books and a lot of short stories in it now.

  Which brings me at last to Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, the dynamic duo of East Texas who first appeared in Savage Season in 1990. It was a paperback original, and nobody who’s seen the cover with its dramatic painting of a woman’s hand with a nail driven right through the middle is likely to forget it. I remember considerable discussion of that cover at the AggieCon after the book appeared. Would people buy a book with a cover like that, or would they be put off by it? We never came up with a definitive answer, though we all agreed that it was an accurate depiction of the contents.

  The other topic of discussion related to the book was about series characters. By that time, I’d published five books in the Sheriff Rhodes series, so I considered myself an expert on the topic. Joe said he didn’t like the idea of writing a series. It was too confining. He had too many ideas, too many different books he wanted to write, too many genres he wanted to explore and mash together and generally manhandle. I expect that explains at least in part why it was four years before a second Hap and Leonard novel appeared. By that time a lot of people must have thought the first one was a stand-alone instead of just a great first act.

  But I know how it is with writers and characters. When you write a book, the characters don’t just go away. They hang around in your head, and sometimes they talk to you. Sometimes they tell you such good stuff that you can’t resist sitting down and writing a few sentences about them, and before long you find out you’re forty or fifty pages along in what’s about to become a much longer manuscript. So you keep writing things down until the characters shut up for a while.

  Hap and Leonard must have been pretty insistent talkers, because after Mucho Mojo appeared in 1994, the books about them came out with some regularity: The Two-Bear Mambo (1995), Bad Chili (1997), Rumble Tumble (1998), and Captains Outrageous (2001). Then the guys went quiet for eight years. It’s not that Joe wasn’t writing. He was writing a lot, winning about every award there was, including the Edgar presented by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel. His bibliography is mighty impressive.

  The boys were back at last in 2009 in Vanilla Ride, followed by Devil Red in 2011, and a couple of novellas, Hyenas in 2011 and Dead Aim in 2013. A new novel, Honky Tonk Samurai, is out in 2016. Not to mention the short stories, several of which are included in this volume. For someone who didn’t think he wanted to write a series, Joe’s done very well by his characters, and they’ve done well by him.

  And what characters they are. Hap Collins is a working-class kind of guy who, by what must be the merest coincidence, shares a little bit of Lansdale’s own background. Joe didn’t go to prison for refusing to go to Vietnam as Hap did, but he did oppose the war on moral grounds, and he did refuse to be drafted. Once he makes up his mind, he’s like another famous Texan, David Crockett, whose motto was “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” Joe never backed down, and he didn’t go off to war. You could probably look up the court case if you were so inclined. Hap didn’t back down, either, and served his time in prison. He’s still a peaceable sort most of the time, and he doesn’t much like guns. Leonard once told him that he had “more bleeding heart than the Democratic Congress.” But hurt one of his friends or threaten them, and it’s another story. Readers can be forgiven if they get the feeling that had Hap gone to Vietnam, he’d have kicked out the Viet Cong in a few weeks, especially if he’d had Leonard to help him.

  Leonard Pine, unlike Hap, isn’t a peaceable sort at all. He’s black, gay, and often angry, eager to kick anybody’s ass at the least excuse. He did go to Vietnam, and when you think about it, that would make both him and Hap about ready to go on Medicare and draw Social Security, assuming they ever paid into those programs, which isn’t entirely likely considering their occupations, or lack of them. It’s a good thing that fictional characters don’t age like us mere mortals, or Hap and Leonard would be having a tough time keeping up their active lifestyles.

  Although they sometimes find themselves working as unlicensed investigators for P.I.s named Marvin Hanson or Jim Bob Luke, Hap and Leonard have most often taken on jobs for friends or helped each other work out personal problems that have turned seriously bad and require some heavy lifting to set right. However, both of them have had real jobs on occasion. Hap has worked in the Tyler rose fields, like his creator; at an aluminum chair factory; and on an offshore oil platform. He also works as a bouncer at various bars now and then, although it’s a bit embarrassing to him to be doing work that requires him to beat up grown men. He and Leonard have worked security at a poultry plant, too, although Leonard would prefer to be a bouncer. He’s not embarrassed by the work and doesn’t mind beating up on anybody at all. As a bouncer, he can work out his anger issues in a more or less acceptable and legal fashion. Leonard also likes to burn down crack houses, but that’s not really an occupation. It’s more of a hobby.

  What Hap and Leonard have instead of steady jobs is a talent for getting into trouble. They can’t even take an ocean cruise without getting kicked off the ship and marooned in Mexico. We readers wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. If they just sat around and led boring lives, they wouldn’t be any fun to read about.

  Or maybe they would. One thing that distinguishes the books and makes them so readable is Lansdale’s use of language. Or maybe I should say that it’s Hap’s use of language. Hap is the first-person narrator of his own adventures, after all, and he has a way with a simile. When it’s humid, for example, Hap might say that it’s “humid as a monkey’s armpit.” A man’s not just fast on the draw. He produces a pistol “quick as a bunny fucks.”

  I have a theory that you can draw a straight line from Mark Twain’s use of the American vernacular to Joe Lansdale’s use of it. Here’s what Twain says in his explanatory note to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “In t
his book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

  “I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”

  Lansdale’s use of dialect is equally masterful, although instead of Pike County his territory is East Texas. If I were really going to get far out in my literary theorizing, I’d seize on Twain’s “hap-hazard” comment and write a paper for the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting about how Hap Collins’ first name was derived from Twain’s note. But I’m not teaching anymore, and I don’t have time for high-falutin literary essays. Besides, I might be wrong.

  I do know for sure that there’s nothing haphazard about what Lansdale does with words. He’s not just making up the language that appears in Hap’s narratives. He has, or had at one time, people who’d scout around for good phrases to use in his novels. At one of those late-night sessions at a long-ago AggieCon, Joe said that a friend had recently come to him and said, “I got you one.” When Joe asked what it was, the friend said, “It’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.” Sure enough, that expression turned up on one of the books not long afterward. It’s too bad nobody recorded those gab sessions. History in the making.

  And like Twain, Lansdale’s not afraid to use what’s now called “the n-word.” In fact, there might be more instances of it in one of Lansdale’s books than in Twain’s. Lansdale’s despicably racist characters, of which there are many, find nothing offensive about the word, and it just comes naturally to them, as it does to one in The Two-Bear Mambo, who has fond memories of minstrel shows and who thinks Leonard is funny: “I didn’t realize how much I’d missed being around funny niggers. And what I got here is not just some white man in blackface playing nigger, I got the real thing. I got me a genuine, born-of-black-hole nigger.” If you think a situation containing comments like this doesn’t end happily, you’d be right on the money.