Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale is one of my favorite writers working today. Two of my very earliest posts on this blog were about his books. On Sunday afternoon, I attended a book signing for Lansdale's newest book, Leather Maiden. And I'm happy to say, he could not have been a nicer, cooler person.

He took some questions from the audience, which was about 25-30 people. He let us know that the next Hap and Leonard book, Vanilla Ride, will be out next year, with two others ready to go in fairly rapid succession after that, which is fantastic news for Lansdale fans. He told us about the various film adaptations of his work which never quite made it to the screen, such as a Hap and Leonard film which would have starred Josh Lucas and Don Cheadle which fell apart at the last moment. He told us Bill Paxton was looking to direct the film version of one of his books (I forget which, but it was either The Bottoms or Cold in July, I think). And he told some crazy, hilarious stories, illustrating that some of the weirder things he writes about have a basis in real life.

He then read from the first three chapters in the new book, which I can't wait to get started on -- equally funny and intriguing, as usual. And finally he invited people to get their books signed.

I brought two of his novels from home for him to sign, plus the new book which I bought that day, as well as about twenty of his comics (primarily his work with Timothy Truman -- all the Jonah Hex stuff, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto mini-series). I didn't expect he'd have time to get to all the comics; in fact, I was just hoping he'd have time to sign three or four key issues. But he grabbed the whole bundle and signed everything. He loved signing stuff, he said -- that's what he was there for! (And yes, I waited until everyone else had gone first, so I didn't tie up the line. I'm considerate!)

During the Q&A, I had mentioned how hard it was to find some of his earlier books. For example, I've been searching for ages, but his first Hap and Leonard book, Savage Season, is just impossible to find, new, used, or even at a library. He said that Vintage would be reissuing the first six books starting next year -- again, great news for Lansdale fans. But then he also said if I wanted to stick around after the signing, when his wife came to pick him up, he had a whole trunk full of his old books for sale. (And no, he doesn't just drive around with a trunk full of books all the time -- at least, I don't think he does; he was stocked up because he had been at ArmadilloCon earlier that day.)

Sadly, it turned out I didn't have any cash on me at the moment. And here's how cool this guy is: he said, "Tell you what, I'll give you my address, and you can just mail the payment to me later." Who does that? Who would trust a random fan like that? That blew my mind. How incredibly generous. Too bad he's never getting his money!! (Actually, I ran across the street to an ATM. As much as I appreciated his offer, I felt it would be impolite to make him wait on a check from me like that. I'm considerate, damn it!)

So, with the help of his very sweet wife, and his lovely daughter (country singer Kasey Lansdale), we dug through the boxes in his car and found hardback copies of the first three Hap and Leonard novels, two of which, Savage Season and Mucho Mojo, I've never been able to read before. I also picked up a copy of the aforementioned Cold in July, another of his best I could never track down. And I got to pick up all four for well under the cover price. I call that a bargain. I also call it a belated birthday present to myself. I'm worth it.

Great writer, great guy, great day. If you haven't read anything by Lansdale yet (or, at the very least, watched Bubba Ho-Tep, which is based on one of his stories), you're missing out.

BOOKS: I got nothing.

I think I'm going to have to rejigger my posting schedule, because I just don't read fast enough anymore to have a new book to write about every week.

This week, I could write about Captains Outrageous, which I'm almost finished with, but since I already wrote about it, that would be a tad redundant. And repetitive. And it would say the same thing over again. And it would be redundant, too.

Or I could write about the Steve Martin book I picked up at the library this week, The Pleasure of My Company, but I haven't read it yet, despite the fact it's only, like, 12 pages long. Seriously, it's short. But I can barely read six comic books in one day anymore, let alone a whole novel (like I used to).

So I can talk a little about Martin's last novel, Shopgirl, which I have read, and then I'll talk about the changes I'm thinking of making to this site.

Mostly what I remember about Shopgirl was how funny it wasn't. There were more than a few humorous lines and scenes, but the overall feeling I got from it was one of melancholy. Love didn't seem to work for any of its characters, and frankly, I felt a little concerned for Steve Martin. After all, Anne Heche dumped him for Ellen Degeneres. That's enough to destroy any man's hopes for true love.

(Tangent: I wonder if he and Ellen have ever talked about Anne. I mean, he drove her to the other team, and she drove her right back. There can't be an awful lot of people in the world who have shared an experience like that. Maybe they have meetings with Lou Diamond Phillips, whom Julie Cypher left to be with Melissa Etheridge.)

Also, I was shocked at the sexual explicitness of Shopgirl. I've grown to think of Steve Martin as an almost asexual character, like Gilligan. As disturbing as it would be to picture Gilligan having a three-way with Ginger and Mary Ann, so was it disturbing to read sex scenes written by Steve Martin. As disturbing as it was to watch him participate in a sex scene with Helena Bonham-Carter in Novocaine.

Even more disturbing: my mother wanted to borrow the book when I was done. She was thinking, "Oh, Steve Martin, he's a silly fella." Meanwhile, he had written an unexpectedly dark and sexually frank book. I don't know about your relationship with your mother, but I was not going to be responsible for giving her that book. She kept asking if I had finished it, and I kept saying, "Nope, not yet!" even though I had finished it in a day and a half. I stalled long enough that I had to return the book to the library. "Sorry, I guess you'll have to check it out yourself!" I don't know if she ever did. I kind of hope not.

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So, what to do with my blog if Wednesdays are no longer book days? It's a little early in my blog's existence to have an identity crisis, yet here we are. I think I may either open the "books" entry to comic book trade paperbacks as well, of which I have far too many for my own good. Or turn it into a grab bag kind of day -- books one week, music or art or whatever the next. Already I post a variety of different items on different days, but I wanted this blog to have an agenda of at least one lengthy post on one particular predetermined aspect of pop culture every weekday. I think I'm going to have to concede defeat on the book posts for the immediate future.

I'll sleep on it tonight. More contemplation tomorrow.

BOOKS: One for the Money; Captains Outrageous

I'm in the middle of two books right now, so here's two half reviews.

The first is Janet Evanovich's One for the Money, the first Stephanie Plum mystery. I like how Plum starts out from square one; she becomes a bounty hunter basically because she can't find any other job, and she has to learn as she goes, which means she makes a lot of mistakes. And it doesn't help her ego any that she gets rescued from her most severe peril by the guy she's supposed to be arresting.

Plum is flat broke (her car has been repossessed, and for breakfast she has the only thing in her fridge, one bottle of beer), but she's tough, foul-mouthed, sharp (it doesn't hurt that she seems to know everyone in New Jersey -- and their mothers), and entertaining. I have no idea how her character progresses in later novels -- whether she remains a bounty hunter, or becomes a more traditional detective -- but I have a feeling I'll find out. It's a good read, good enough to want more.

The other book is Joe R. Lansdale's Captains Outrageous, which I just bought yesterday. I'm reading it now instead of the Plum book (but that's only fair, because I started reading the Plum book to get a break from Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver -- and, if I may go off on a tangent, here, where the hell is the paperback version of Quicksilver? The second book of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy is out in hardback now, but according to Amazon, the paperback of the first book isn't coming out till October. What gives? I got Quicksilver from the library, but there's no way I'm gonna finish it before it's due back. I'd like to buy it, but not at hardback prices. Irritating).

Captains Outrageous is the sixth book in the Hap and Leonard series. I recently finished Bad Chili, the fourth in the series. Why'd I start with #4 and #6? Because #4 was the only one at the library, and #6 was the only one at Barnes & Noble. The supply ain't meeting my demand. And I do demand the other books, because Captains Outrageous is as great as Bad Chili.

The first chapter opens with Hap and Leonard as security guards at a chicken plant, and Lansdale's laidback humor is in full evidence:

     "Any chickens try to break out?" I asked.
     "Nope. None tried to break in either. How about on your side? Any trouble?"...
     "No chicken problems. I saw a suspicious wood rat out by the trees, but he didn't want any part of me."
     "Well, I can see that."

When they get going on what anatomical properties Hap (straight) and Leonard (gay) like in their partners, I laughed so much the people in Barnes & Noble (where I read the first few pages) thought I was crazy.

The second chapter shifts gears, and it left me slack-jawed and breathless at its sudden shocking brutality. Hap finds a man savagely beating a woman in the woods and tries to subdue him, but the man is out of his mind on drugs and near-unstoppable. And the third chapter, with Hap meeting the father of the woman in the woods, had me almost in tears.

From hysterics to horror to heartbreak in 25 pages. That's damn good writing. And that's before the real story even begins.

Lansdale has a gift for storytelling, and I couldn't recommend him more highly. This series especially, if you can handle a little rough dialogue and a little rough violence: you've got to give it a try.

BOOKS: Joe R. Lansdale

I had never read any Joe R. Lansdale before two weeks ago, and brother, have I been missing out.

Actually, that's a lie. I've read his comic book collaborations with artist Timothy Truman, of whom I was a fan from such books as Grimjack and Scout. Their works together have included a Lone Ranger and Tonto mini-series, and three Jonah Hex mini-series (one of which got them sued by Johnny and Edgar Winters).

I greatly enjoyed the Old West as portrayed in these comics. This wasn't the cleaned-up Old West of John Wayne films, nor even the somewhat darker version in more recent, "revisionist" Westerns such as Unforgiven or Tombstone. This was closer to Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Westerns, where dirty people had ugly teeth and uglier morals. Of course I loved the art, but the writing was also fantastic, and while I may have been aware that Joe Lansdale was a well-established novelist, I didn't bother seeking out any of his other books.

That was a mistake, which I have at long last remedied, by reading Lansdale's Bad Chili and The Magic Wagon back-to-back.

Bad Chili is the fourth in a series (up to six, so far) of crime novels featuring Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. (Why did I start with the fourth? Only one my liberry had.) Hap is a down-on-his-luck, '60s agitator turned offshore oil rigger, and his best friend Leonard is a gay black Vietnam veteran, too surly to even keep his bouncing job. And, to give you a feel for the tone of this book, when we meet them in the first chapter, Hap gets savaged by a rabid squirrel:

We broke and ran. The squirrel, however, was not a quitter. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that it was in fact gaining on us, and Leonard's cussing was having absolutely no effect, other than to perhaps further enrage the animal, who might have had Baptist leanings.

Probably the best way to describe this book and its flavor, the blurbiest way, is "Elmore Leonard in East Texas." Or Carl Hiaasen, or Tim Dorsey, or whichever of that Florida crime novel cadre you want to use. Bad Chili isn't a detective novel, nor an adventure story, nor really a typical crime novel. Its cover describes it as a "novel of suspense", but that still doesn't quite get it right. It simply is what it is, which mostly involves weird and dangerous things happening to two good ol' boys.

As with the Florida novelists I mentioned, it's not the plot that matters; the plot is just an excuse to create vivid and memorable characters, have crazy stuff happen to them, and give them rich, distinctive, hard-bitten, hilarious, colorful, quotable dialogue. My favorite line in the book: "He had an expression on his face like a man who had just been told he was going to have to swallow and pass a bowling ball, then bowl a strike with it."

Lansdale is the guy who wrote the story the film Bubba Ho-Tep was based on, so, if you've seen that, maybe you've got an idea of what I'm talking about here.

The Magic Wagon is an earlier, lesser effort, but still enjoyable. It's a Western, and it involves a traveling medicine show, Indian mysticism, surreally malevolent weather, and the mummified corpse of Wild Bill Hickock. Its tone is much tamer than the other book -- Bad Chili has non-stop foul language, a thoughtful but very frank approach to sex, and much more brutal violence -- but it still ain't for kids.

Lansdale is a real discovery for me, one I should've discovered much sooner. I plan on going through as much Lansdale as I can find in short order, starting with the remainder of the Hap and Leonard series.

Caveat: Lansdale uses the "n-word" in his books. And he uses it a lot. A lot. Same with any number of gay-directed epithets. Does he use them in a manner accurately reflecting the speech of certain real East Texans, both modern and historical? Yes. Does he use them in a prurient fashion, for cheap shock value, in an irresponsible way? No, absolutely not. He makes it very clear that the people who use those terms are generally vile, ignorant, racist, homophobic buffoons. But, for those with more delicate sensibilities, it's perhaps best to be aware of that little fact going in.