Jackrabbit Smile & Edge of Dark Water by Joe Lansdale

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub March 27th 2018 by Mulholland Books, ISBN13: 9780316311588, Series: Hap and Leonard #12

The Hal & Leonard series is full up with crazy male bravado and vulnerability, pressing hard on our moral, sexual, and racial understanding until we squeeze out a guffaw and decide to fall for these guys sitting on our faces. These two take on challenges others would let fall into a fast-flowing river, and now that the series has become a regular gig on Sundance Channel as an Original Series, starring America’s own brilliant, tough-seeming, and comedic Michael Kenneth Williams and British star James Purefoy, hopefully Joe Lansdale will get more airtime .

Lansdale barrels ahead riding roughshod over anyone who hasn’t updated their hard drive with new information about the lives of gays, trans, and people of color. No more excuses will be made for those faltering on the road to total acceptance of these folks living in America. Lansdale doesn’t make any bones about it, just assumes the bad guys are the unreformed who ‘haven’t quite gotten there yet.’ There is damage being done daily to the psyches of ordinary folk with extraordinary skills who have to put up with crippling prejudice.

This fast-paced addition to the series addresses white supremacy head on: WHITE IS RIGHT is emblazoned on the T-shirt of a young man seeking the investigative services of Hap & Leonard, not knowing Leonard can be rattlesnake mean to those who disparage him for his color...or any old thing he might take it in his mind to do. This is the book #12 in the series so Lansdale doesn’t spend much time explaining the two main characters. The chapters are short and speedy, racing to a gruesome dénouement that features a hog farm, some mean twins, and a jackrabbit smile.

This is the kind of book one can read in a day, relaxedly, since it is mainly composed of dialogue and a few hard whacks of a rifle butt. But it will put you in a good mood since the bad guys get theirs and the good guys, well, they may not ever get paid, but think of what they’re doing for the planet! I ❤️ Joe Lansdale.

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Hardcover, 292 pgs, Pub Mar 27th 2012 by Mulholland Books, ISBN13: 9780316188432

Is there a more prolific writer of Westerns than Joe Lansdale? Endlessly inventive, Lansdale has both a series featuring Hap & Leonard, and a slew of standalones in which he shares the way even good people can get themselves in a bad way in a world with evil in it.

In this standalone novel, published in 2012 by Mulholland Books, 16-year-old Sue Ellen is narrating. She lives in a small southern town and has two friends her age: a white gay boy named Terry who is reluctant to let anyone know his inclinations, and Jinx, a black girl friend since childhood. Lansdale is so natural in his use of skin color that he can teach us things we never knew we needed to know.

Sue Ellen, Terry, and Jinx discover the town’s beauty, May Lynn, killed and submerged in the river, tied by the ankle with wire attached to a sewing machine. None of the grown men in the town seem to want to pursue the matter, but merely shove the body in a casket and cover up the evidence. We get a bad feeling, but mostly we sense any sixteen-year-olds ought to pack up & leave that place, so when the kids decide that’s what they’re going to do, we’re onboard.

They’re floating, by the way, on a wooden raft, and along the way they pick up more than one who decides to go with them. Seems like practically everyone who knows their plans—to go to Hollywood—wants to go with them, if not the whole way, at least far enough to get out of town. There’s a posse of folks, more than one, following behind, looking for them, so it gets hectic and dangerous and the hangers-on fall off, one by one.

Lansdale always seems to get the tone right, however, and when there is a chance for evil to thrive he makes us question whether or not that’s the way we want things to play out. After all this is kind of a crime novel, kind of a police procedural, kind of a mystery, but it’s got heart…more heart than we’ve come to expect of the genre. I like the way people think and make choices that seem fair and right and good.

Lansdale himself is really kind of a standalone guy. As far as I know there isn’t anyone else doing this kind of crossover writing with lessons on race, human nature, and on right and wrong. It is never sappy, often funny, and always deeply thoughtful. He is not religious: “I got misery enough in my life without adding religion to it,” says a character in one of his later novels. The language he uses is country, and can be extremely descriptive, if not entirely proper: “Expectations is a little like fat birds—it’s better to kill them in case they flew away” or “certain feelings rose to the surface like dead carp.”

The Hap & Leonard series has been made into a TV series starring Michael Kenneth Williams and James Purefoy. It is a rich stew of southern storytelling, darkened by reality but leavened with laughter. I don’t think I need to state how difficult it is to create new characters, new language, and new situations every year (sometimes more than once a year? is it possible?) and hit the bell each time. I’m a fan.



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The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

Paperback, 340 pgs, Pub Oct 14th 2014 by Mulholland Books (first published 2013),ISBN13: 9780316188449

Joe Lansdale is not an old man and yet he has published at least 45 novels and 30 short story collections, sometimes two or three books a year (!), as in 2012, according to Wikipedia. Some of these may be reprints of old favorites because it is difficult to imagine someone publishing quality fiction at that rate. But quality fiction is what I would call this 2013 novel. A young boy, his sister, and his grandad traveling north to Kansas from East Texas in the early part of the twentieth century find themselves at the mercy of a band of marauding cut-throats.

In what may be a signature trait of this author, a reader enjoys the company of what we call 'unusual characters' who represent the kind of resilience and humanity once assigned to heroes in Greek mythology. Race is an abiding subject of discussion in Lansdale’s novels and nearly every novel has at least one vital character who speaks out eloquently on race relations in America.

Eustace is a principled black man of nearly unequaled trustworthiness and equanimity—except when he drinks: then he cannot be trusted by man nor beast. This novel also ruminates on whoredom (Jimmie Sue) and the inequities of perception that result from other physical differences, like dwarfism (Shorty). There is a wild hog, too, who is accepted for what he is and how he is. Hog is a valued member of a select community.

“To some extent I find sin like coffee. When I was young and had my first taste of it I found it bitter and nasty, but later on I learned to like it by putting a little milk in it, and then I learned to like it black. Sin is like that. You sweeten it a little with lies and then you get so you can take it straight.”

Despite the graphic sense of brutality that reigned in the West during the period depicted in this novel, the most enduring sentiment in Lansdale’s novel is that of humor: the author counters each act of senseless brutality by heaping abuse on the perpetrator through description or through the mouths of other characters.

Some characters muse on the nature of man and the “why” of extreme violence. There is no answer to the “why,” Lansdale concludes. It makes no sense no how. Good may triumph over evil, but it ain’t always a sure thing. One has to puzzle out for oneself a sense of what is good and hold onto one’s own values to make the world into what we wish to see.

"Fatty was, in his own way, as dangerous as any Comanche. He was just mean as a snake for no other reason than it pleased him; all those men who had been with were like that, and I wondered then what made a man that way. I didn’t come up with any answers."

I listened to the Hachette Audio production of this novel, beautifully narrated by Will Collier, and highly recommend this method of consumption. Collier makes each individual unique, and Shorty’s accent and manner of speaking elevates his thinking to philosophy. One becomes so attached to the characters in this book we forgive them most of their more egregious transgressions and miss them when we do not see them for a couple of pages. I was terrified Eustace 'bought the farm' in the last shoot-out, and waited anxiously for word of him, that drunken cuss.

He did get the farm, after all, where he struck oil just as autos were becoming the norm.

There are few folks who can pull off a western these days, and the beauty of Lansdale’s writing is that he doesn’t idealize the turn-of-the-twentieth-century life in the west. It was a lawless, racist, sexist place where one was often at the mercy of men stronger and crueler. But when good people band together, they can often accomplish much, and create the kind of environment in which they want to live. It means a great deal to me that Lansdale reflects us back at ourselves, and shows us possible paths out of the thicket.

Lansdale’s books have spawned an industry: several movies and TV series, as well as graphic novels, have come out of his stories. A new publishing company, Pandi Press, is involved in republishing earlier Lansdale work now out of print. Among the books Lansdale is best known for are the Hap and Leonard series of nine books, featuring a white blue collar war protestor and a gay black Vietnam vet. The Sundance Channel premiered a series based on these books and find them if you can: the series, the actors (e.g., James Purefoy, Michael Kenneth Williams, Evan Gamble), and the writing are all terrific.

Lansdale's stand-alone novel called The Bottoms has received the most critical praise to date, and is currently in film production. Lansdale also writes horror and has a cult following in this genre. Enjoy this author in any of your favorite genres, but don’t miss him.




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The Competition by Marcia Clark

Author Marcia Clark, TV correspondent and former prosecutor, manages to distinguish her crime series by the strength of her writing and by her intelligent presentation of the material: she gives her readers an undeniably authentic inside look at the search for criminals, sharing along the way terminology and methods, points of law and methods of prosecution. She leavens the work by including the taunt-slinging humor that a hard-working, hard-living law enforcement team shares while investigating major crimes.

Clark’s Rachel Knight series features a prosecutor from the office of L.A. Special Trials. In her earlier (and shorter) novels, Knight was investigating interesting crimes that plague cities. This book takes on the important subject of the psychopathy behind mass shootings, whether at schools, stores, or the cinema. Clark relies heavily on the David Cullen’s nonfiction treatment of the Columbine shooting, Columbine, so that we can see clearly the resemblances in the copycat incident she relates, but she also looks closely at the other examples we’ve endured in the recent past and shares psychologists’ view of the phenomenon.

Clark’s story has many false leads and misdirection, but what I liked best was the palpable sense of not knowing enough: though the investigators worked hard at finding clues, there was so much they simply did not know. Clark manages to make us understand the real difficulties in pursuing an investigation in cases like these, and why it takes so long to make headway (hint: it is not simply because of the fabled traffic jams in L.A.). The smog fog of confusion felt very real to me. When, towards the end of the book, Knight and her partner on this case, Detective Bailey Keller, finally get a lead that connects tiny shreds of information learned from disparate sources early in the investigations, Bailey sits back in her chair and says "Well, what do you know. An actual bona fide lead. So that’s what it feels like." And we feel that sense of discovery, awe, and relief, too.

Clark exhibits her control in a story of this size and scope. She covers a lot of ground by looking at so many major examples of mass shootings and still keeping the story alive with interactions between her characters. If I had any criticism, it would be that there were too many words, but I am not going to quibble. This is an excellent example of its genre which also serves to highlight important questions about our society and justice system.

In my review of an earlier book in the series, Guilt by Degrees, I commented that Rachel Knight seemed to have expensive tastes when it comes to eating and drinking. She still does, but I can see more clearly in this novel that Knight has time to eat only rarely and when she finally does, often late at night, she deserves every bite of those exotic meals. Hers is the kind of job that doesn’t slow or stop for normal people’s needs.

The first book in the Rachel Knight series, Guilt by Association, was a wonderful debut. Take a look if you are beginning the series for the first time.


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Shake Off by Mischa Hiller

The main character of Mischa Hiller’s novel Shake Off is Michel, a survivor of the Sabra Massacre in Lebanon in 1982. A child at the time, he is taken under the wing of Abu Leila and gradually trained in languages and spy tradecraft with the idea that eventually he would be able to aid a resurgence of Palestinian power. He has a lonely, secret life apart from the intimacy of others.

What I found most interesting about this novel was the Palestinian viewpoint. Until about fifteen years ago when I began investigating the subject in earnest, I was, like many Americans, likely to equate Palestinian with terrorist. My knowledge is refined now, however. I have eyes and judgment enough to see the players, as well as failures of leadership.

Nancy O’s review of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird shows how even an apolitical observer of Middle East history places the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila as a defining moment for radicalization of Arabs, Muslims, Lebanese, and Palestinians.

The story Hiller tells in this novel captures the confusion and uncertainty and despair of a young orphan in a refugee camp, and later his willingness, indeed his craving, to believe in kindness and love. It is crafted so that we cannot see the outcome, though the seeds are there if one reexamines the start of the novel.

The love interest of the young man, Helen of London, fascinates me. It seems obvious to me that she is an operative of some sort, but for whom and why, we never learn. With the long-legged Helen (Michel is clearly a leg man), Michel loses his learned restraints and becomes an ordinary man, the kind that cannot help but think with his genitals. I can forgive him that, I suppose, though I don’t think his enemies will. It turns out he is altogether too gullible in general, having come from an area of the world where disagreements often end in bloodshed.

This novel is the second of Hiller’s, the first being Sabra Zoo. Another, called Disengaged, is in the works, due out January 2015 in the UK. The writing is clear, the viewpoint unique, and the subject positively deadly. Watch for it.


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Skinner by Charlie Huston

I thought I had read some other things by Charlie Huston, but now I don’t think I have. Huston’s American crime novels have a noir quality that is unlike anything I have seen before. To say his writing is clipped does not really encompass the extent of its abbreviation. It is thought fragments. One of his main characters, Jae, tries to make connections or linkages between ideas and information coming from widely disparate sources. Trying to understand his characters’ conversations is a little like that, too.

Skinner is current. It mentions the Tsarnaev brothers, for goodness’ sake. And it has lots of very alienated folks—unusual folks that are outside the mainstream. For that reason, it feels futuristic. These folks apply a great deal of cerebral muscle to take the technology we use every day to the next level.

However, meeting so many unusual people in one book made me feel a little alienated. I felt as though I were reading about comic book characters, which is another of Huston’s fields.

But let’s go to the heart of the mystery: I loved it. I loved the concept, the endgame, the central core of the story. It plays out beautifully, and mocks the gatekeepers of “security” in this age of terrorism. It has us rooting for the disenfranchised among us, and tells us to trust our overseers less and trust our own judgment more.

Part of the story features the slums of Mumbai, India and part is played out throughout Europe and in the cyberspace occupied by American security companies contracted to defend the United States. I can’t help thinking a very good companion book is a very serious and important book of sociology produced by Katherine Boo, called Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. In that book Boo shows us the [almost] limitless survival capacity of slum dwellers who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by innovating to live. Skinner carries the same theme.

In the end, I felt this was a very masculine voice talking to other masculine minds in a sort of video game mentality and graphic novel sort of jargon. His female character was aberrant, as were many of his male characters. They had a quality of unreality. For the reason that I could actually see in my mind’s eye the graphic depiction of his scenes, I found it interesting. It seemed less like literature than amusement, but that’s probably what he was aiming for.


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Guilt by Degrees by Marcia Clark

I see all the rave reviews for this title and I credit Clark for being able to create creditable characters in a thoroughly authentic law environment. That is the thing Clark does best: how does a special prosecutor's office sound, what do people actually do, and how do crimes actually get prosecuted successfully? What are the snags? I wouldn’t, however, call it “gritty.”

Clark is a rare creature, and so is her creation, Rachel Knight. Knight manages to get up (late) every day in her suite at fancy L.A. hotel where she lives with its closets of designer outfits that will hide a Glock. Knight retains close friends who can also help her with cases, keeps a sexy man-friend on a short leash, and maintains her figure by fantasizing about food more than she eats it. Much of the pleasure of the book is finding out what she will be eating or drinking, where, and with whom, and hearing her intimate chit-chat with friends. She’s clever, but not so much so that we feel jealous of her. Mostly we feel jealous of her friends, who get so much of her attention. We’d like to be them, knowing we could never be Knight herself. She’s an original.

But why then did I feel as though this was a slight downslide from her first in the series? Knight herself mentions that her heart bleeds for the poor victims of crimes that she prosecutes, but she doesn’t show it. In her job, I might be worse after a couple of years, but one wants to believe the best of those that prosecute serious crimes and those that make lots of (taxpayer) money. One doesn’t want to think they are, after all, lushes with the shells of success.

But this is a series, after all, and there is always variation in the mix. Let’s say this: Clark seems exceptional at a number of things, one of which is writing bestsellers. I wish her the best.

A word about January LaVoy's reading of the novel: LaVoy gets full points for sounding feminine and enthusiastic and interested all the time. She has a voice that keeps its cool no matter what the circumstance. She can be talking about designer clothes or a gruesome autopsy. It's all cool.

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