The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on April 1, 2024

Edgar Allen Poe is credited with creating the first fictional detective. Some years ago, Joe Lansdale contributed to a collection of new stories about Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Lansdale brings Dupin back in the novella-length The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor.

A young man named Julien has been investigating the catacombs in Paris. A series of gruesome murders has coincided with his investigation. Pieces of one victim’s body were scattered in the catacombs. A disemboweled victim was found on the doorstep of Julien’s sister Aline. Fortunately for Aline, Julien has paid a tavern owner to lock her inside her room at night. Unfortunately for Aline, Julien has disappeared. She visits Dupin in the hope that the famous solver of mysteries can find her brother.

The story takes on an air of the macabre when the tavern owner explains how he was chased by a demonic entity on his last visit to lock Aline’s door. Julien has a collection of books that describe portals to supernatural dimensions. He seems to have made a particular study of the Lord of the Razor (who happens to be an early Lansdale creation). If one of the Razor’s sharp instruments causes someone to bleed, the Lord of the Razor enters that person’s soul.

Dupin and his assistant (the story’s nameless narrator) embark on a search for Julien that takes them on a couple of trips to the catacombs. Bones and skulls and rats provide an appropriate setting for a confrontation with a demon.

Lansdale is a versatile writer. He dabbles in crime, humor, science fiction, and westerns, often mixing genres in original ways, but he is also one of the better horror storytellers in the business. The Bottoms is one of the most frightening books I’ve read. This novella is a bit too conventional to be truly scary, but the Lord of the Razor is sufficiently creepy to inspire a few chills.

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Born for Trouble by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Tachyon Publications on March 21, 2022

I always enjoy Joe Lansdale’s stories about Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. I always enjoy anything Lansdale writes. Born for Trouble collects five Hap and Leonard stories. For readers who are unfamiliar with the duo, this is as good a place to start as any. These are excellent tales by a skilled storyteller.

The two longest entries I’ve read and reviewed before. “Coco Butternut” and “Hoodoo Harry” were published in their own volumes.

The other three:

“Sad Onions.” Hap and Leonard come upon a woman in the road who walked away from a single-car accident that killed her husband. The accident doesn’t seem right to Hap or Leonard. Since it is none of their business, they look into it. The wife is young, white, and beautiful. Her dead husband was a wealthy, older black man. The police don’t seem interested. Hap and Leonard uncover a murder plot and make their usual irreverent jokes as they try to avoid becoming the next victims.

“The Briar Patch Boogie” begins with a funny conversation about how perspectives change as we age. On a miserable camping and fishing trip that might have been fun when they were young, Hap and Leonard witness a murder. The killers are guys who make a sport of killing hookers. The story eventually turns into a “Most Dangerous Game” plot, with the twist that the hunters use bows and arrows. The story delivers a true rush of adrenalin.

“Cold Cotton.” Hap’s doctor recommends a once-over by a therapist named Carol Cotton as an alternative to Viagra when Hap isn’t getting the desired results with his wife Brenda. Perhaps Hap is stressed by the evil in the world or by his violent response to it (although he’s made a point of being less violent after moving past his midlife point). Before Hap decides whether to call the therapist, she hires Hap and Leonard (and Brenda and Leonard’s lover Pookie) to provide security in response to threats she’s received. The story takes a couple of unexpected turns and ends with the kind of bloodbath that Hap and Leonard regularly encounter. No wonder Hap needs therapy for his limp organ.

Hap narrates the stories and isn’t shy about sharing his opinions. Like, “in Texas every asshole walks around with a gun and thinks they’re Wyatt Earp.” All the characters, including minor characters, regularly exchange good natured insults; snappy dialog is part of the fun.

These stories reflect aging characters. Hap, at least, is mellowing. Leonard still views violence as a first option when villains deserve a good thrashing (or a good killing), as they usually do. The enduring value of the stories is that Lansdale has imagined a world in which a straight white liberal and a gay black Republican can agree on something — in fact, on most things. Their mutual understanding that human dignity, respectful behavior, and fishing are fundamentally important provide a bond that transcends their political views. Hap and Leonard could be role models for us all (regardless of how we feel about fishing).

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Of Mice and Minestrone by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Tachyon Publications on May 28, 2020

The prolific and versatile Joe Lansdale has done us the favor of writing some new Hap and Leonard stories, most of which appear here for the first time. The volume is subtitled “Hap and Leonard: The Early Years.” While the duo appeared in a three-season television series that I haven’t seen, Lansdale explains in an introduction that the television series and the print stories depart a bit in how the two friends first met. The print version of that meeting is told in a story that appears in Blood and Lemonade.

The first story in this volume, “The Kitchen,” sets the scene by describing Hap’s enjoyment of the smells in his mother’s kitchen. The volume begins to show Lansdale’s grit and wit in the next story, the two-part “Of Mice and Minestrone.” As events progress, Hap explains why, as a teen, he wanted out of Marvel Creek, Texas. “You might call it a one-horse town, and if you did, that horse was crippled and blind in one eye and needed to be put down.” Hap had a summer job mopping floors and doing errands for the local police, putting him in a position to see an older guy named Dash who abused his wife Minnie. Hap does his best to help but Minnie pays a price when she stands up for herself. The story then turns into a murder investigation. Hap’s contribution consists of sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong. He learns a lesson about making assumptions — his own and the opposing “good old boy” assumptions made by Dash’s buddy on the police force. The story showcases Lansdale’s ability to write powerful scenes that linger in memory.

Leonard finally makes an appearance in “The Watering Shed,” a story about friendship and racism in a slowly desegregating South. As always, Lansdale recognizes the complexity of race as an issue. Some of the characters are racists, some aren’t, some are in between. By the end of the story, Hap learns something about the importance of standing up for what’s right. In the last story, “The Sabine Was High,” Hap and Leonard meet for the first time after Hap’s release from prison and Leonard’s return from Vietnam. Leonard is proud that he served and Hap is proud that he went to prison for refusing the draft. Their experiences have changed them, but their friendship has only strengthened. The story is a reminder of a time in history when Americans could disagree about politics and still go fishing together as friends.

In between “The Watering Shed” and “The Sabine Was High,” Leonard enlists Hap to work as a sparring partner in the aptly titled “Sparring Partner.” Hap and Leonard are both decent amateur boxers. The small-time promoter who hires them has a history of finding black boxers to match against white boxers. The promoter doesn’t really care if the boxers are good, a callous attitude that places his boxers at risk. The trainer knows better but wants to keep his job. The story culminates in Leonard switching places with an untalented boxer and going up against a slow but monstrous brute. This might be the best boxing story I’ve ever read, but apart from the fight itself, the story addresses collateral characters who confront moral dilemmas and, in a couple of cases, make a selfless choice. This is a heartwarming story and my favorite in the volume.

The collection ends with recipes for southern delicacies (chili and pies and the like) that appear in the stories. Not being much of a cook, I can’t comment on whether they are good, but they did make me hungry for pie.

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Jane Goes North by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2020

In these troubled times, we take joy where we can find it. I always find it when I read Joe Lansdale. When he isn’t scaring the crap out of me in a horror novel, he’s making me laugh out loud, a reaction that few authors can consistently provoke. Jane Goes North is a perfect respite from gloomy reality.

Jane is in her thirties, living alone in Texas. She was recently fired from her job in a laundry. She was nearly arrested after a night of drinking, when a backseat dalliance with a preacher in a church parking lot sent her sprinting naked into the woods to avoid inquisitive police officers. That’s how her life goes.

Jane has been invited to the wedding of her snooty sister near Boston. She’s not sure she wants to go, but spite motivates her to make the trip. Her car, on the other hand, is certain it doesn’t want to move another mile. A ride sharing notice on a bulletin board brings her to Henrietta, a tough old lady who calls herself Henry. She has one working eye and a car that runs. Henry is going to Boston for a medical appointment, but since she has a tendency to collide with things she can’t see, Jane insists on driving. The two women instantly dislike each other but bond over the course of the novel.

The road trip turns into an adventure that includes an improbable kidnapping. The women are pretty much unfazed by their ordeal because random crap happens in life and they’ve gotten used to it. The trip becomes more pleasant after they meet a washed-up country singer who uses her two hit singles as fuel for a career playing music at dives filled with drunken audiences.

The three women are loaded with personality — they’re sort of like Thelma and Louise with an extra friend — but collateral characters add to the humor with conversations that spin off in amusing tangents. My favorite is a desk clerk’s discussion of roaches that get stuck in toasters (“I call them Roach Toasties”).

Jane Goes North offers at least one laugh per page, often two or three. Here’s Jane talking to her sisters: “You wouldn’t be interesting, none of you, if you had propellers up your asses and could fly around the room with them.” An East Texas summer is “so damn hot during the day a lizard needed a straw hat.”

Jane is changed in a positive way by her road trip. Henry faces a change in Boston that the reader won’t expect. The ending is warm and heartening, reminding us that friendships, however unlikely they might be, are just what we need in difficult times. So, for that matter, is Joe Lansdale.

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Hoodoo Harry by Joe R. Lansdale

First published in 2016; published digitally by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on August 1, 2017

Hoodoo Harry is Joe R. Lansdale’s contribution to the Bibliomysteries series of stand-alone mystery stories by popular crime writers in which books, bookstores, libraries, or manuscripts play a central role.

Hap and Leonard are run off the road by a bookmobile bus in a part of the country that is still fighting the Civil War. The bookmobile disappeared fifteen years earlier, along with its driver, Harriet Hoodalay, who was known after her disappearance as Hoodoo Harry.

A 12-year-old kid whose unfortunate life is cut short was driving the bus. Of course, Hap and Leonard make it their business to find out why. They engage in their usual wisecracks and make their customary observations about how “neighborliness” in East Texas now consists of shooting anyone who comes too close to a home or business after dark … or maybe even in daylight.

The story blossoms into a murder investigation with multiple victims. Like most of the Hap and Leonard series, this isn’t as powerful as Lansdale’s best work. Hoodoo Harry is an average Hap and Leonard story, which means it entertains. That’s all it’s meant to do, and since it succeeds, I recommend it.

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