Cold in July

Richard Dane is woken in the middle of a hot summer night by his wife Ann: someone is breaking into their house. Richard is forced to shoot the armed intruder; for this, he’s lauded as a hero in his small town. He doesn’t enjoy the attention—he’s not the type to enjoy or feel pleased that he shot someone, even if that someone shot first. He and his wife just hate the entire rotten situation.

The police tell him the intruder was a known low-level crook whose father just got out of prison. Daddy, also known as Ben Russel, hasn’t seen his boy in years, but he isn’t any happier about his death than the Danes. He’s planning on visiting. Several confrontations ensue, and some nearly unbearably tense moments result in the trio realizing that the dead burglar is not Russel’s estranged son—and that the corpse has been misidentified on purpose. Why has the local police force set Richard and Ben against each other? They have to get to the bottom of it and find out where Russel’s son really is.

Lansdale’s novels frequently feature a situation that seems simple but rapidly begins to spin out of the protagonist’s control. Cold in July skates on the edge of improbability without quite reaching disbelief—the events are unlikely but could happen. Especially in Lansdale’s Texas. When Ben brings in his old buddy, Jim Bob Luke, to help with the investigation, things get even better. Jim Bob is a wise-cracking fella with a circa-1969 blood-red Cadillac called the Red Bitch, and he possesses serious fighting skills that would seem ridiculous in the hands of most writers. Lansdale is not most writers, and my mother is from Texas. I’m here to tell you that there are definitely a few Jim Bobs around, impossible as they may seem.

A couple of my favorite Lansdale character traits are front and center: for one, wife Ann. Lansdale has the wonderful habit of creating female characters who always kick some ass sooner or later. In one pivotal scene, Ann brains a man with a household object; seen through Richard’s eyes, she appears “like a Valkyrie.” Even if Lansdale’s women start off with the odds stacked against them (Sue Ellen and Jinx in Edge of Dark Water) or very vulnerable and fragile (Becky in The Nightrunners) he always seems to get in a few scenes that illustrate how strong and resourceful a woman can be.

Ann is not the only character who gets a little extra personality in this fast-paced novel. Richard Dane is portrayed as no slouch with his fists, but he’s also a relatively young man. Both Ben Russel and Jim Bob are past middle age and would be peripheral, though fascinating, characters in most books. Lansdale puts them right in the middle of the action and repeatedly demonstrates their endurance and need to make this situation right, long after most people would have given up. He’ll make you believe they can do it, too.

Lansdale has a dark sense of humor and a brilliant ability to translate physical tension onto the page. In this novel, originally published in 1989 (and a film by the time you read this), he blends crime, southern gothic, and his own brand of East Texas noir. Don’t miss it.

COLD IN JULY is one of those books that fools the reader into a false sence of security before sweeping the rug out from underneath. Initially resembling a run of the mill crime novel, COLD IN JULY treats the reader with three distinct acts/stanzas, all a natural progression from one another. Beginning with a home robbery, then turning private eye, to ending a violent vigilante, COLD IN JULY provides three distinct reader experiences each as good as the other.

Woken by the sound of an intruder, husband and father of one, Richard Dane, murders the would-be robber in an act of pure self defense, kill or be killed. Little did he know the mans father would be released from a lengthy stay in jail shortly after learning of his sons murder resulting in more violence and invasion of Danes family home. Revenge runs red in the eyes of the beholder.

Just when you think you know where this story is going, author Joe R Lansdale hits you in the face with a double aught. Que police cover ups, Dixie Mafia, FBI witness protection, snuff films, and broken hearts. Not forgetting an uneasy alliance between Dane and Ben Russell, the recently freed from jail father. Lansdale really makes this multidimensional crime piece simmer in tension, steadily boiling over to violence.

I really enjoyed COLD IN JULY and can't wait to see the film adaptation.

A story that involves a tale about parenting and fears of what a father might do wrong, has done wrong, and what he can do to make one bad a right.
An everyday man, a father thrown into circumstances he would had never fathomed and that make him just see the world with a different lens.
That interloper of his one July day changes things for many involved.

His prose is lean and tight, dialogue and scenes have you in and running the the tale through his voice whipped in a well good sentence.
An author breathing amongst us the likes of the great authors James M Cain and Jim Thompson.
A pulp styled good tale but deeper without too much deepness in narrative just the right amount to be enjoyable wherever you restart reading the tale, right chapters sizes, right story length, all hallmarks of Lansdale’s skill as a storyteller.

Great to see the movie adaptation out there, and i hope more to come with books like that of his other great story The Bottoms.

This author has not been known enough of in some corners of the world, a great mentor, a martial artist, a man of many skills, find out more and check out an interview i had with this author >>>http://more2read.com/review/interview-with-joe-r-lansdale

Cold in July Joe R. Lansdale Review by Vince Darcangelo

“You didn’t just kill a man and not know his name.”
This is one of the many haunting lines in Joe R. Lansdale’s Cold in July, a slithering crime novel that chills, shocks and proves once again why Lansdale is one of the most decorated (and underappreciated) authors alive. Originally published in 1989, Cold in July has been reissued in conjunction with the film version, released earlier this summer.
It begins with a housebreak and a startled Richard Dane digging his seldom-used gun out of storage. Dane—father, husband and small-business owner—is not the cold-blooded noir protagonist, and the weapon is clearly a foreign object to him. Will the thing even fire?
It does, felling the intruder with a lucky shot.
At this point, Lansdale has me. I relate to the bumbling, workaday Dane, who is clearly a different species than, say, Dave Robicheaux. He isn’t a trained killer, and the fact that he took a life—no matter how justified—will haunt him to the grave.
As it would most of us.
“Death in reality certainly wasn’t like television death. It was nasty and it smelled and it clung to you like a bad disease,” Dane thinks.
The hours following the shooting are quietly disarming. The minutia of the aftermath—cleaning up the blood, replacing the couch, hiding it all from their son while getting him ready for school—is unnerving in its normality. Life’s routines and obligations don’t stop because a man died in your living room.
Then a few days later, the intruder’s recently paroled father shows up for the funeral.
This is the first of many twists in Cold in July. The father, Ben Russel, is set on revenge, and he psychologically, and ultimately physically, torments Dane. But just when it seems the book will morph into a tale of the everyman having to learn to fight to survive, Lansdale lends us one of the book’s greatest left turns: Enter Jim Bob Luke, a colorful PI/pig farmer and a walking Texan caricature from another era.
Luke brings comic relief and criminal wits, and his over-the-top persona plays well against Dane’s meekness and Russel’s jailhouse stoicism.
He is the glue that holds together the second half of the novel. It’s one of many bold choices Lansdale makes, but it works. Luke becomes the Virgil that guides Dane through increasingly hellacious depths—grave-digging, street-fighting, a shootout on the set of a snuff film.
Yeah, it’s a wild ride.
As for the film version, director Jim Mickle has created a pulp masterpiece that will introduce this book to a new generation of fans. Unlike Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise? really?), the casting is incredible. Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson play the leads, and they each give an amazing performance. Hall deftly transforms from sure-handed serial killer Dexter to the skittish Dane. The lighting and camera work create dread throughout, and the soundtrack is moody and tense, just like the book. (It will be an injustice if Cold in July doesn’t take home the Oscar for best original score.)
Of course, the film isn’t able to ascend to the higher concepts of the novel. Cold in July is a study of masculinity and the complications it creates. His fellow Texans congratulate Dane on shooting up one of the bad guys (whom they wrongly presume to be a minority), but he only feels sickened by the episode. He struggles with the memory of his father, who killed himself to preserve his honor. (The theme of fathers is an important one. Despite being adversaries, Dane comes to view Russel as a father figure.)
And when he realizes the authorities aren’t going to help him, Dane is willing to risk his own life for the sake of the man code—though he never feels truly comfortable in that role.
Which is fitting. Cold in July bleeds discomfort. Throughout, Dane is the inadequate little brother always having to prove himself. Always out of his element.
It is this misfit dynamic that drives the relationship between the three men and makes this such a compelling read. Cold in July is a modern crime classic that, a quarter-century since its release, is finally getting its due.

It had been a long time since I had read something by Joe R. Lansdale and I planned on changing that when I heard that they made a move adaptation of “Cold in July.” I wanted to read the book before I watched the movie and I finally got my chance to sink my teeth into this Lansdale classic.

When Richard Dane’s wife woke him up in the middle of the night and told him that she heard a noise, he thought nothing of it at first. When he found the armed man in his house, he was happy that he had grabbed his gun to ease his wife’s nerves when he came downstairs to investigate the noise. He is also grateful that he was able to shoot and kill the man before the man killed him. Everyone knew that he had killed the would-be burglar in self-defense and that the burglar had a history of crimes that had led to his unavoidable end. It was an episode that everyone just wanted to fade into the past and it seemed like it may be that way for a couple days until Ben Russel, the father of the man Richard shot, came to town fresh out of prison and looking for revenge.

Even enemies can become friends, or at least allies, in the face of a greater evil and that is the situation that Richard and Russel find themselves in when they uncover a conspiracy that is covering up a much greater crime. With the help of Russel’s eccentric private investigator friend, Jim Bob Luke, the men set off on an unlikely mission to uncover the sins of the past and hopefully redeem their collective conscience and soul. With the mob, corrupt policemen, and the FBI involved, however, the men soon discover that the most they can hope for is that they can survive the deadly game they have entered into.

Joe R. Lansdale has long been a favorite of mine and I think is a greatly overlooked talent. It amazes me that his work has never caught on with a larger audience as Lansdale has the same type of affinity for the eccentric and strange humor that has made Dean Koontz’s “Odd Thomas” books so popular and this is evident in “Cold in July” in the character of Jim Bob Luke. Then again, Lansdale does not dwell in the land of the innocent and his works have a hard edge and this is evident in this novel as well which has sequences that are touching and some that are very brutal. It is the hard edge that Lansdale fans have come to enjoy but it can lead to subject matter that is more in-your-face than readers of mainstream books have come to expect. Lansdale is not afraid to go where many other authors fear to tread and write about the darkest corners of society. What makes Lansdale so good is that he never stoops to the gratuitous when he deals with subject matter such as the snuff films that make their way into “Cold in July.” He brings up the topic in a manner that may make the reader cringe but goes no further with it than it needs to be for the purposes of the story.

“Cold in July” is a hard-hitting crime thriller that is reminiscent of some of Tom Piccirilli’s works as well as the recent crime novels by Lee Thompson. It is a novel that quite literally has everything. Lansdale keeps the book exciting and always on the move but there is a real substance to the novel as it explores basic themes of humanity and morality. Richard gets involved in unravelling the conspiracy because he took a human life and needs to come to grips with what it means to take a life even if it is necessary to do so in self-defense. Russel is on a journey of self-discovery as he tries to understand what makes a good father and what sins of the child are directly attributable to the failures of the father. There is a lot of action and violence in the novel but there is also a heart beating at the center of the story that gives it power. I think that one of the highest compliments that can be paid to “Cold in July” is that there are very few writers who could have written this novel and who would have even dared to undertake the challenge. This book is a rare treat for fans of crime and noir fiction with a dark side and is a testament to just how good of a writer Lansdale is.

I would like to thank Tachyon Publications and NetGalley for this review copy. “Cold in July” is available now.

Crime just doesn't happen in the small east Texas town of LaBorde. It certainly doesn't happen to respectable people like Richard Dane and his family. Until that July night, Richard's toughest job was dealing with his young toddler son and his penchant for always spilling his milk. Then, that one night, he killed a man and everything changed.

Not that he had a choice. Not when his family, Ann and their four year old son Jordan, were at stake. Not when somebody had broken into their house located in the middle of a five acre plot on the lake road outside of town where the closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. Not when the intruder is in their living room and shoots first at Richard Dane.

If the burglar hadn't missed, he might have lived. Instead, Richard Dane, by the sheer luck of it managed to shoot him in the head and drop him dead on his couch. A bullet through the right eye tends to kill a man and the man later identified by the police as Freddy Russel is very much dead.

For the police it is an open and shut case of self-defense. For the local residents who learn of the shooting in the coming hours the event is open to discussion and speculation. The shooting of an intruder is the biggest thing to happen in the area in quite some time. While Richard feels incredible guilt and remorse other folks can’t shut up about it. Though the townsfolk are talking about it and thereby causing stress on Richard and his wife, things are about to get much worse. For Ben Russel, an ex-con and Freddy's absentee father, the death of his son is an injustice that will be avenged.

Originally published in 1989, the book is being released again this month by Tachyon Publishing as a tie in to the upcoming movie starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and Don Johnson. As part of their publicity campaign this reviewer was contacted by their publicist and offered a chance to read and review the book through NetGalley. Having been a fan of Mr. Lansdale's work for years I eagerly accepted despite the numerous problems I have had in recent months with the NetGalley service. Fortunately, in this case, I was able to make the system work and obtained the book.

Somehow, back in the day, I missed this incredibly suspenseful read the first time around. Probably because back in 1989 when this came out I was a father doing the best he could with a two year old son and a full load at night school at The University of Texas at Dallas along with a full-time retail job and a host of other issues. What reading I was doing was mainly for my schoolwork as double major in Literature and History and little else. Back then I was so buried with everything I was doing well to know my own name.

Cold In July features heavy amounts of what I always liked about Joe Lansdale books---normal run of the mill folks who, by some strange occurrence are thrust into situations far from their normal circumstances. Every man Richard Dane is just that---a regular guy, a father and a husband, who runs a small framing shop while doing the level best he can and is not expecting a lot in life. Things are simple and while he chafes a little under the circumstances of day to day life and his role, he truly has no idea how good he has it. Then he kills a man and that event has huge ripple effects, not only on himself, but on many other people.

The read is incredibly good. If the movie closely follows the book, and one gets the idea it will from the forward written by film director Jim Mickle and the afterword from the author, it should be one heck of a movie. Cold In July is one heck of a read and very much worthy of your time.

Cold In July Joe R. Lansdale http://www.joerlansdale.com Tachyon Publications http://www.tachyonpublications.com May 2014 ISBN# 978-1-61696-161-9 Trade Paperback (-e-book available)
288 Pages
$14.95

E-book version received from the Tachyon publicist via NetGalley in exchange for my objective review.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2014