Honky Tonk Samurai

I'll be doing a full review on the blog later this month but wanted to say here that this is the typical Lansdale, Hap & Leonard thrillfest. A joyful exercise in hilarity and brutality.

I can’t remember laughing so much in the first thirty pages of a book for quite some time, if ever, the humorous dialogue and enigmatic characters help move the book along at a formidable rate of chuckle knots! The humour remains throughout the book, the snide comments, the put me downs, the micky taking and the hilarity, even during the awkward and poignant moments it’s there to help lighten the mood for the reader. I thoroughly enjoyed the approach and Hap and Leonard’s personalities shone like a beacon from start to end.

Honky Tonk Samurai isn’t your typical book, good thing I guess that both Hap and Leonard aren’t your typical private eyes as the book blurb – above - informs us.

While on a routine surveillance operation the ageing pair discovers their boss has just become the chief of police and Hap and Leonard are faced with the news that they have to start a new private eye business – Enter Hap’s girlfriend BETH? I guess she’s the glue that helps bind the two characters together and keeps them on the straight and narrow – as far as that is possible!

Although the book reads well from the outset there was a distinct change of gear and emotion for me when the author introduces a new character – Chance. I’m not going to give anything away so the review remains spoiler free but when Chance enters the frame it just gives the story a new dynamic, nothing too drastic but for me it was noticeable and rounded off a very good plot. Hopefully you’ll know what I mean when you read the book, unless it was just my imagination getting the better of me, because it definitely adds a little something extra to an already gripping storyline.

Hap and Leonard are a tour de force and utterly irresistible, you won’t want to miss this one!

“the front windshield collapsed like a Baptist deacon’s morals at a strip club.”

Honky Tonk Samurai is the eleventh book in author Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series. For those who are unfamiliar with this excellent series, Hap and Leonard are an East Texas pair, who live surrounded by rednecks and racism, are unlikely friends and consider themselves brothers. While the two aren’t exactly itinerants, they are content to live outside of mainstream culture by scraping a living at menial jobs as field hands or day laborers. Their close friendship substitutes for other familial relationships, and while these two men are the best of friends, blood brothers if you will, at other times, especially during humorous bantering sessions, they seem like an old married couple.

Hap Collins is white, Leonard Pine is gay, black, a Vietnam vet. Digging back in Hap and Leonard history, Hap, who was a member of the counter-culture, refused to go to Vietnam, and served time for his opinions. The two men operate as a team, with Hap as our narrator, so the novels clearly lean towards the Hap side of things. Hap is often troubled about acts of violence that take place while Leonard isn’t troubled by moral questions. In all the Hap and Leonard books, somehow or another they are dragged into crime–not that they go looking for trouble; somehow trouble always looks for them. Sometimes it’s a returning ex that heralds trouble (Savage Season), and sometimes it begins with a friend asking for help.

I don’t think we ask for trouble, me and Leonard. It just finds us. It often starts casually, and then something comes loose and starts to rattle, like an unscrewed bolt on a carnival ride. No big thing at first, just a loose, rattling bolt, then the bolt slips completely free and flies out of place, the carnival ride groans and screeches, and it jags and tumbles into a messy mass of jagged parts and twisted metal and wads of bleeding human flesh.

Honky Tonk Samurai finds Hap and Leonard aging and working part-time for a detective agency. Not far into the tale, Hap’s long-term girlfriend, Brett, decides to give up nursing and takes over the company, and the first case appears in the shape of a crotchety, foul-mouthed, sinewy old woman who looks like a “retired hooker.”

“You’re Hap Collins, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I said. “Do we know each other?”

“No, but when I was forty I’d like to have. You and me could have burned a hole in a mattress then. Course, you may not have been born. But you might want to lose a few pounds, honey. You’re beginning to chub up.”

“He’s taken,” Brett said, “Pounds and all.”

The old lady studied Brett. “Aren’t you the Southern belle? I bet you could earn a pretty penny on a Louisiana shrimp boat and never have to cast a net.”

“Listen, you old bag,” Brett said.
“Either say what you want or I’m going to stick that cane up your ass and throw you down the stairs so hard the dye will come out of your hair.”

Turns out the old lady, Lilly Buckner, is the first client of the Brett Sawyer Detective Agency, and she wants Hap to find her missing granddaughter Sandy. Sandy, who graduated with a journalism degree and “found that the newspapers and magazines that did hard news had gone the way of the dodo bird and drive-in theaters” ended up working at a “high-end” used car dealership, but one day she just disappeared. Five years have passed and the case is cold. Hap and Leonard go undercover as potential car buyers at the high-end dealership and discover that the business is selling more than just cars….

On the hunt for Sandy, Hap and Leonard stir up trouble in the form of a biker gang and a mysterious hitman known as the Canceler who has a habit of collecting trophy testicles. Cheap hustlers, petty cons, thugs and psychos populate Hap and Leonard’s colorful world, so expect some old familiar faces (including Jim Bob and his car, the Red Bitch), and some new weirdos. I haven’t read the entire Hap and Leonard series; I read a few of the early books and a couple of the later books, so I’d recommend that if you come to Honky Tonk Samurai you should also have at least Vanilla Ride under your belt.

As always with series characters, the adventure/case runs parallel to developments in the personal lives of the main players. In this instance, Leonard, who never baulks at using violence, is deeply torn over the behaviour of his lover, John who’s struggling with guilt for being homosexual. Hap and Brett face a surprise development when Hap’s past arrives on his doorstep.

It was a pleasure to read Hap and Leonard’s latest adventure. Author Joe R. Lansdale is clearly fond of these characters, and it shows. This is another excellent entry in an excellent series. It’s no surprise that someone finally saw the sense of picking up this unlikely crime fighting duo for a TV series, and I’m certain that this will brings Lansdale a new audience of fans.

Review copy

Honky Tonk Samurai is the 11th book by Joe R Lansdale to feature the entertaining adventures of best friends Hap ‘a former 60s activist and self-proclaimed white trash rebel’ and Leonard ‘a black, gay Vietnam vet and Republican with an addiction to Dr. Pepper and vanilla cookies’.

Their language may be crude, their banter often tasteless but it’s impossible not be charmed by these redneck tough guys whose hearts are usually in the right place. Hap and Leonard may have casual regard for the law, but they share a strong sense of justice, they fiercely defend each other, those they love, and those who need their help.

“I don’t think we ask for trouble, me and Leonard. It just finds us. It often starts casually, and then something comes loose and starts to rattle, like an unscrewed bolt on a carnival ride. No big thing at first, just a loose, rattling bolt, then the bolt slips completely free and flies out of place, the carnival ride groans and screeches, and it sags and tumbles into a messy mass of jagged parts and twisted metal and wads of bleeding human flesh. I’m starting this at the point in the carnival ride when the bolt has started to come loose.”

In Honky Tonk Samurai, Brett, Hap’s live in lady, purchases Marvin Hanson’s private detective agency now that he has been rehired as police chief. The new agency’s first client is an elderly woman who blackmails Hap and Leonard into searching for her granddaughter, who has been missing for five years. Their investigation leads them to an upscale dealership selling much more than just cars, and puts a target on their back.

The plot is fairly simple and a bit of a stretch, but its all in good fun. There is plenty of action and violence on offer as Hap and Leonard, with a little help, take on a biker gang, the Dixie Mafia and a psychotic brotherhood of assassins. The humour is cheeky, often coarse, but the rapid fire banter is laugh out loud funny.

Readers familiar with the series will welcome appearances from characters such as Vanilla Ice, Cason and Jim Bob Luke. Lansdale’s descriptions of the characters that populate his novel are as colourful and vivid as ever.

“That’s when the door opened and a lady came in who was older than dirt but cleaner. She had a cane, which explained the cricket, but the elephant walk was a little more confusing, as she wasn’t much bigger than a minute. She had more dyed red hair than she had the head for. That hair seemed to be an entity unto itself, mounded and teased and red as blood. You could have shaved her like a sheep and knitted a sweater with all that hair, maybe have enough left over for at least one sock or, if not that, a change purse. Her face was dry-looking. She had a lot of makeup on it, as if she were trying to fill a ditch, or several. Her clothes were a little too young for her age, which was somewhere near to that of a mastodon that had survived major climate change but was wounded by it. She had on bright red tight jeans and a sleeveless blue shirt that showed hanging flesh like water wings under her arms. Her breasts were too big, or maybe they were too exposed; the tops of them stuck out of her push-up bra. They looked like aging melons with rot spots, which I supposed were moles or early cancer. “

The last few pages came as a shock but I breathed a sigh of relief when I learned that another Hap and Leonard book (Rusty Puppy) is on its way, and I’m looking forward to the premiere of Hap and Leonard on Sundance TV in March 2016.

I’ve done it again – started reading a well established crime fiction series with its most current book, well after the long histories of the main characters have been firmly planted in the minds of longtime series fans. This time I did it with Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard books about two East Texas good old boys (one white and one black) who somehow manage to survive whatever violent mishap their collective lack of good sense gets them into. But as it turns out, Honky Tonk Samurai is not a bad book for uninitiated Hap and Leonard fans to begin with because it reunites the boys with several colorful characters from their past – and Lansdale kindly provides a short back-story for each of them.

Hap and Leonard haven’t exactly been getting rich working in a small town private detective agency, but when the agency owner decides to sell out so that he can become the town’s new police chief, they are left with two choices: become unemployed or find a way to buy the agency from the new cop. Luckily for them, Hap’s girlfriend, who is unhappy with her nursing job, decides to use her savings to buy herself a career change. Now Hap and Leonard have a new boss.

The agency’s first customer might be an old woman who can barely make it up the stairs to their office, but as soon as she opens her mouth, Hap and Leonard know that she is a fighter. In language that shocks even Leonard at times, the old woman explains that she wants the pair to find her granddaughter, a young woman who several years earlier disappeared along with the $50,000 she stole from her grandmother. She suggests that they begin their search at the upscale classic car dealership that her granddaughter was working at when she disappeared.

Boy, what a can-of-worms that would turn out to be.

Let’s just say that some car dealers sell more than cars from their showroom floor, and because they really don’t want the whole world to know about it, snoopers have to be silenced. Before they know it, Hap and Leonard are outnumbered, outgunned, and hiding from a family of crazy hit men whose terrifyingly creative hits put them in a league all their own. If Hap and Leonard are to survive their first case, it’s time for them to call in the troops.

One of the benefits of coming to a fictional series late in its run is that, if the book clicks, the reader ends up with a whole pile of books to add to the TBR list. And that is exactly what’s happened to me with Honky Tonk Samurai. I plan to spend a lot more time with Hap and Leonard…and their friends.

The 11th book in the Hap and Leonard series, though this is the first novel by Lansdale I've read and I had no problem following along (I did read short stories set in this series a few weeks ago, and actually felt that this book would have made a better introduction than the stories did). Hap is an ex-hippie, a liberal "white trash" guy in his fifties; Leonard is a gay Republican black man of the same age. Together, they're best friends (they call each other "brother") who bounce through life in a series of tough-guy small jobs, from private detective to bouncer to field worker to shifts in factories, all of it in small town East Texas. At the beginning of Honky Tonk Samurai, they get hired to investigate the disappearance of a young woman five years ago, now considered a cold case and given up on by the police. This quickly leads to a used car lot, an expensive prostitution ring, a blackmail scandal, a serial killer, a foul-mouthed grandmother, the mastermind behind a chain of barbeque restaurants, and more. Meanwhile, Hap adopts a puppy and a young woman turns up claiming to be his daughter, which causes problems in his relationship with Brett, his long-term girlfriend. All of it leads up to a climax that's such a cliffhanger I was worried that my ebook was missing the last few pages (it wasn't. It's just that much of a "Oh My God! What happens next!" ending).

The big appeal of the book are the actions scenes (which are intense and frequent) and the humor, which can range from dumb fart jokes to quite clever wordplay. But most of it is just the language, which makes full use of the East Texas way of speaking, and is quirky and fun to read even when it's not exactly a joke:
“Your new dog, Leonard?” she asked.
Leonard roved an eye my way. “Could be,” he said. “Could be yours.”
“Can I have her?” I said. I tried to sound winsome and wistful at the same time. Actually, I’m not sure which part of how I sounded was wistful and which part was winsome. Maybe you can’t do both at the same time. Maybe one sounds a lot like the other.
“Will you throw a hissy if the answer is no?” Brett said.
“Probably.”
“Oh, he can throw a grown-up big-ass cracker-style hissy,” Leonard said. “I’ve seen him do it, and I got to tell you, I was embarrassed. It wasn’t very manly.”
“I can try throwing the hissy in a deep voice,” I said.
“Nope,” Leonard said. “That’s not how a hissy works.”

I wanted something to read this week which was the equivalent of vanilla cookies and Dr. Pepper (Leonard's favorite foods, which tend to come up frequently) for the mind, and this was exactly perfect for that. It's not a deep book, but it's a hell of a pleasant way to spend some time.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1567113504