Synopsis/blurb.....

From the Edgar Award-winning author of the Hap and Leonard series, a hard-boiled novel set in 1960s Texas in which a no-nonsense car salesman faces a tempting decision, a dangerous deal, and an alluring affair.

Ed Edwards is in the used car business, a business built on adjusted odometers, extra-fine print, and the belief that "buyers better beware." Burdened by an aging, alcoholic mother constantly on his case to do something worthier of his lighter skin tone and dreaming of a brighter future for himself and his plucky little sister, Ed is ready to get out of the game.

When Dave, his lazy, grease-stained boss at the eponymous dealership Smiling Dave's sends him to repossess a Cadillac, Ed finally gets the chance to escape his miserable life.

The Cadillac in question was purchased by Frank Craig and his beautiful wife Nancy, owners of a local drive-in and pet cemetery. Fed up with her deadbeat husband and with unfulfilled desires of her own, Nancy suggests to Ed -- in the throes of their salacious affair -- that they kill Frank and claim his insurance policy. It is a tantalizing offer: the girl, the car, and not one, but two businesses. Ed could finally say goodbye to Smiling Dave's, and maybe even send his sister to college. But does he have what it takes to see the plan through?

Told with Joe Lansdale's trademark grit, wit, and dark humor, More Better Deals is a gripping tale of the strange characters and odd dealings that define 1960s East Texas.
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My take....

Great fun was had reading this latest one from Joe R. Lansdale - More Better Deals. I've read Lansdale on and off for the best part of 30 years, starting back when I was still into horror fiction. I think the Drive In 1 and 2 were my earliest reads. Since then I've enjoyed a couple of his Hap and Leonard books and other bits and bobs of his crime and mystery fiction output. Lansdale's one of those authors (there's more than a few) whose books I seem to buy and then stockpile as opposed to getting stuck right into. Maybe 2020 I'll have a brain fart and try and work my way through some of the stash, rather than just talking about working my way through them. If they prove to be half as entertaining as this one, it will be time well rewarded.

More Better Deals - 60s East Texas setting, and a used car salesman crosses paths with a sort of femme fatale, soon followed by sex, crime, more sex and death all of which has serious repurcussions for our main characters - Ed the car salesman and Nancy the dissatisfied wife.

Breezy pace, great time frame, a back drop of a car showroom, a pet cemetery and a fair ground, booze, sex, marital grief, discontent, race, family conflict, dreams and some low level scheming and downright crookedness. All served up with a liberal dollop of spicy humour.

Fantastic writing, great characters, an interesting story with a few twists which keep you guessing as to the final outcome - an ending which satisfied and put the final tick in the box

5 from 5

Lansdale's The Thicket, Dead Aim, Briar Patch Boogie, Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back, The Steel Valentine, Bullets and Fire, Incident On and Off a Mountain Road - a varied output of novels, novellas and short stories have all been enjoyed to a greater or lesser extent since I started blogging about books.

Read - August, 2020
Publihsed - 2020
Page count - 232
Source - Net Galley review copy
Format - ePUB read on laptop

https://col2910.blogspot.com/2020/09/joe-r-lansdale-more-better-deals-2020.html

All the right ingredients for perfect Lansdale noir.
Loved the characters, black widow, seemingly inept with lust saleman
All great elements

MORE BETTER DEALS
Joe R. Lansdale
Mulholland Books
ISBN 978-0-316-47991-2
Hardcover
Thriller

Joe R. Lansdale has of late --- actually, for the last several years --- been publishing novels as if he hears the clock winding down. That may be so, but the quantity of his work has certainly not affected the quality. So it is that MORE BETTER DEALS, which is his third --- fourth? Fifth? --- book of this year is one of his best, loaded with Lansdale’s dark imagery, hilariously layered dialog, tight plotting, and unforgettable characters. It is also one of the must-read novels of this or any year.

MORE BETTER DEALS is told in the voice of Ed Edwards, an unapologetic crook, shyster, and thief. He has the opportunity to being all of these vocational qualities to bear in his profession as a used car salesman. Ed is a walking, talking cliche, only worse. While the tale is set in 1964 in east Texas, it could take place in 2020 in central Ohio or anywhere that a used car dealership is set up in a former gas station lot festooned with pennant flags. We learn all that we need to know about Ed and his employer, Smiling Dave, within the first few paragraphs of MORE BETTER DEALS. Lansdale makes the introductions and then wastes very little time getting things rolling when Dave tasks Ed with repossessing a Cadillac recently sold to a couple named Frank and Nancy Craig. Frank isn’t home when Ed gets there, but Nancy most certainly is, and it doesn’t take long for Ed and Nancy to become mutually ensnared and working out a way to get Frank out of the picture permanently. If this is starting to sound like a certain James M. Cain novel or your favorite Kathleen Turner movie you would be correct, at least at first. What longtime or even short-term readers of Lansdale already know, however, is that a Lansdale book is going to be special and it is going to be different. Even if Lansdale adapted THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE it would come out differently. Lansdale doesn’t do that. He instead matter-of-factly throws in a little bit of a surprise about Ed, tosses a drive-in movie theater into the mix, adds a pet cemetery as an additional factor, and makes the reader wonder whether Ed is going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or vice versa. What occurs is what happens when folks get together to work for a common cause but for different reasons and don’t know when to stop. I was reminded at various points of the film Bad Lieutenant, a Warren Zevon song (NOT “Werewolves of London”) as well as the book and movie I alluded to previously. MORE BETTER DEALS is different than all of them while being absolutely, positively classic Lansdale right up to the last page.

As one might expect, MORE BETTER DEALS is worth reading through twice (or more) for the dialog alone. There is one description where Lansdale, with just a few words, potentially angers everyone at all points on the political spectrum for entirely different reasons. As for the characters, any adult who has ever bought a used car, been in a relationship with someone more attractive than they are, or feels like they have a target on their back will immediately identify with Ed, among others. Put MORE BETTER DEALS at the top of your must-read pile. You won’t be sorry if you do and you will hate yourself if you don’t. Very strongly recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2020, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

“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.

More better deals

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

Poor Ed Edwards, living deep behind the Pine Curtain, in east Texas. Ed is passing, at a time when African-Americans could be lynched for consorting with a white woman. Nancy Craig is married to Fred Craig, who buys a used Cadillac from Smilin' Dave's, where Ed works as a rather successful salesman. But, when Fred is past due on three months' payments, Ed goes over to the Craigs' and discovers Nancy exercises considerable wiles to get her own way. She talks Ed into some really nefarious deeds and things do not turn out to Ed's advantage. Joe Lansdale always writes a good book. He can paint a scene that has the reader sweating in the damp Texas heat.

Ed Edwards is a used car salesman in 1960s Texas. He is biracial, but he and his sister pass in Jim Crow Texas. His white mother, who resents her absent black husband, is constantly reminding them both how much better they should be doing than their brother, who moved north years earlier. As a result, he is constantly searching for that more better deal to get him where he should be, while worrying constantly that he or his sister will be outed.

When Ed goes to repossess a Cadillac he meets Nancy, the beautiful and abused wife of Frank. The couple own a drive-in and a pet cemetery, and when Nancy tells Ed about the life insurance policy on her drunken husband, he starts seeing a different future for himself and his sister. How far will Ed go to get what he thinks he deserves, and who will he take down in the process?

More Better Deals is a stand-alone novel from prolific crime fiction writer Joe Lansdale. Written in his typical no-nonsense style with plenty of sex and violence to keep his fans happy, there is some substance to Ed Edwards beyond his get rich quick schemes. He battles his experiences in the Korean War; the disapproval of his mother and her comparisons to his brother; his absent father; the constant threat of being outed; and his dreams of having the life he’s been taught is owed to every white man, and wanting it for his sister, too.

Fans of Lansdale and new readers alike will be fans of More Better Deals.

Great book. One of Joe's best. I interviewed him about the novel on my podcast, GHOULISH, found here: http://www.ghoulishpod.com/2020/06/20/40-drive-ins-with-joe-r-lansdale/

This was a bit unexpected. Not because it broke new ground; more because . . . it didn't. This is a straight-up noir tale of a man whose life is a lie (he passes for white in a highly racist part of Texas, he sells used cars for a living) who falls for a femme fatale and they get involved in schemes that go wrong and yeah, we've been here before. It's Landsdale, so it's good, but it's not the inventive best of Landsdale. Fans of noir should get a kick out of his take on the genre, though.

More Better Deals sees Joe R. Lansdale on plenty of familiar turf in this 1960s Texas noir.

Used car salesman Ed Edwards is set to repo a fancy red Cadillac after payments stop coming in, but in the process finds himself seduced by the car owner's wife, Nancy. As their tawdry one-night fling turns into a regular romance, Ed learns that Frank routinely beats his wife, and, having fallen hard for Nancy, decides he'll do anything for her. Like help her kill Frank, for instance, and cash in on the insurance policy he leaves behind, as well as the drive-in movie theater and pet cemetery he owns and operates. There's a lot of benefit to killing Frank beyond staking a claim to honey pot Nancy, Ed decides, and their plan is foolproof. What could go wrong?

Well, if you've ever read a noir story before, you'll know there is, in fact, plenty that can go wrong, and it certainly does to be sure. Lansdale knows exactly what kind of story More Better Deals is, and he tells it with assured style. The main problem is, from the standpoint of the plot, is that it's not particularly fresh or original. It is entertaining as hell, to be sure, but the general terrain of it all is so well-trod that there's not much room for surprises or fresh discoveries. You can figure out all the twists in the book's latter half pretty well right from the get-go, making this a book that's ultimately less about the destination as the journey to get there. It isn't ever a question of who's going to ultimately betray whom, but when and how.

While the plot feels very much like a clone of a thousand other noirs, it does at least have that Lansdale flair for the unusual to keep your interest. What other noir, and what other author, would be able to present the prizes of a drive-in theater and pet cemetery, and maybe the chance to open their own used car lot, as satisfactory recompose for murder? It's so odd you can't help but be engaged by its outlandishness!

Equally compelling is the character of Ed Edwards and his burgeoning relationship with Nancy. Ed's got a real smart mouth on him, and plenty of ambition in the hopes that he can finally succeed well enough to stop his alcoholic mama from badgering him. He's got some additional shades of complexity to him, as well, being of mixed race but able to pass as a white man in racist, post-Korean War Texas. If anybody found out he had even a drop of Black blood in his veins, his life would be radically upended, or just ended altogether. The racial element plays into the plot rather nicely, and provides plenty of social commentary on the state of the 60s in the south.

Lansdale writing, too, is enough to keep you turning the pages, and his prose is so honeyed and smooth the pages damn near turn their own selves for you. He keeps the chapters short, which helps a lot too, making the pace rapid-fire while you think, over and over, "well, just one more chapter." You'll have this thing read right quick, it flows so nice.

Interesting characters and great dialogue keep an otherwise all-too-familiar story afloat, and More Better Deals succeeds at being an easy comfort read.

This novel is classic Lansdale. Great dialogue, an interesting, noir-ish story, and some discussion of race that doesn’t feel heavy handed. Another fantastic book from one of the great American writers.

Ed Edwards is a used car salesman sent to repossess a car. His life is never the same!

Ed's life is nothing to brag about-hell, he sells used cars after all. He's a combat veteran that served in Korea and he has seen some things. When he's sent to the house of Frank and Nancy Craig to take back the car they haven't paid for, he cannot help but give Nancy a second look-maybe even a third. Nancy tells him how terrible Frank is, how he's a philanderer, a no-good wife beater and an alcoholic. Before you know it, Nancy and Ed concoct a scheme to knock Frank off and we're off to the races! Are they successful? Will they live happily ever after together? You'll have to read this to find out.

With a serious James M. Cain vibe, (Double Indemnity,especially), the reader knows from the outset that things aren't going to go smoothly. In true Lansdale style though, one cannot guess just how far off the rails this plan went. Dealing with so many problems, racism being one of them, his boss dying yet another, you can't help but feel a little sorry for Ed. He's not the best guy in the world, but when he goes to visit his mother, we can see he did pretty well considering where he started.

Every twist and turn adds another new aspect to the tale, until as Ed himself says "One thing weighs on the other, and finally it all just gets too heavy." I loved how everything came together in the end because it wasn't all dolled up in a new dress. The finale was true to the story, painful and harsh. I loved it.

Joe Lansdale is a national treasure. In any genre, in anything he sets his mind to he has a distinctive voice. It's one I've grown to love over the years and I'll bet you love it too if you decide to give his books a try. I recommend all of them!

Available July 21st, but you can pre-order here: https://amzn.to/2XyMYP9

*Thanks to Joe Lansdale, Mulholland Books and NetGalley for the digital copy in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it!*

I know they can’t all be winners, but for this unpolished turd of a cliché with hardly a story propelling it forward to have come from the mind of the man who created Hap and Leonard and who is capable of writing some seriously stellar grit lit is practically a crime. If you’re looking for some modern noir, might I recommend dipping your toe in the lady pond and picking up Sunburn.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley!

Fantastic, clever noir by a master of storytelling. “More Better Deals” is a classic crime noir mixing elements of “Double Indemnity”, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and a touch of “The Big Sleep” wrapped in Lansdale’s humorous banter that weaves throughout the story. I’m a big fan of Lansdale’s work, especially his Hap and Leonard series, and “More Better Deals” delivers the goods.

This was a quick, easy, interesting little thriller that passed the time just fine and one that would make a great vacation read. The hints of racism were not what I expected but they drove home a unexpected point, which I liked. I was not a huge fan of the ending but other than that, I'm glad I read it.

I finished this book in one sitting and immediately messaged my friend Char of Char’s Horror Corner (and fellow Joe Lansdale fan), telling her she needs to get her hands on this book ASAP. Luckily she has an ARC, and I eagerly await her review... :)

<i>More Better Deals</i> is Joe Lansdale doing what he does best: telling a kick-ass East Texas story filled with memorable characters and wacky happenings and twists you’ll never see coming. Well, I didn’t see them coming anyway!

When I found out this one was set in the early ‘60s and was about a used car salesmen helping a young wife kill her husband for his insurance money, I just knew I had to read it—and it didn’t disappoint. Lansdale takes this setup and runs wild, never taking foot off the gas pedal but instead ratcheting up the tension and suspense until the reader almost can’t take it anymore. It reminded me of the very best of Hap & Leonard (a series I still desperately need to finish . . .)

Interested in checking out Lansdale? Start here. Already a Lansdale fan? Well, what are you waiting for. A gritty crime noir wrapped up in some horror and suspense, this is a delectable gumbo as could be cooked by only the Champion Mojo Storyteller.

<i>More Better Deals</i> releases in July. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC!