June 25, 2009

Hap and Leonard Ride Again

Share: posted by Josh Haney at 01:47 PM

Dormant since 2001's Captains Outrageous, the crass vigilantes Hap Collins and Leonard Pine return with a vengeance in Vanilla Ride, the eighth installment of Texas author Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard series, which kicked off in 1990 with Savage Season. The novel, which comes out June 30, follows the diametrically opposed duo — Hap is white and unmistakably hetero, while Leonard is black and as gay as the day is long — as they attempt to rescue a friend's daughter from the grips of a drug-dealing Dixie Mafia foot soldier. As you might expect, the Mafia feels the offense warrants some retaliation. And for that they hire the eponymous assassin, a particularly merciless femme fatale.

In the excerpt below Hap, the narrator, sizes up his neighborhood at the beginning of the story.  

We went out in the yard to talk so Brett wouldn't be bothered by our big mouths. She had bought some metal lawn chairs and put them out there, and I kept expecting to come out some morning and find they'd been chair-napped, as our part of the neighborhood was getting bad. Used to, you could leave your wallet on the porch swing and no one would bother it. These days, you left a cheese grater out, someone would steal the holes.

It was a nice night and there weren't many lights on our street, and the sky was clear so you could look up through the limbs of the elm tree at the edge of the yard and see the stars. It was too cool for crickets and there wasn't any traffic on the road out front. The air smelled fresh and a little sweet, like a baby's breath, and in that moment I was glad we lived there in that house with that yard and that big elm, in what the old books about the South used to call genteel poverty.

Lansdale will be at Houston bookstore Murder by the Book on July 7 and at Austin's Bookpeople July 8. Make sure to check out his Web site for other upcoming appearances. In the meantime, you can read the Observer's recent look at Lansdale here.

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