Joe R. Lansdale has been crankin’ out Hap & Leonard stories for 34 years. Let that sink in! It was 1990 when I first picked up Savage Season, a nasty little paperback thriller with one of the coolest cover paintings I’d ever seen. Heck, you’re a Lansdale nut, so you’re picturing that image in your head right now. (Well, I’ve plastered it down below there for you anyway.) I was an impressionable young college student, an English major, when that book appeared in the university bookstore, and it set my mind on fire. This was what was possible in crime fiction. Easy banter, dark criminal acts, quirky contrasting best friends, prurient humor, deadly stakes. Lansdale opened my eyes to possibilities as much as anything I learned at school over four years. And as I continued to broaden my own reading and writing horizons, Lansdale began pumping out what would become an outrageous and impressive oeuvre of cult classics—including (ultimately) a baker’s dozen Hap & Leonard novels and assorted novellas and short stories that are also part of the series. Hap and Leonard may have begun their literary lives in a modest, slim, lurid paperback, but the duo has weathered myriad adventures over the years, both on the page and on the small screen. They’re a juggernaut laidback downhome private-detective team now, having surrounded themselves with a corral of extremely capable supporting characters, and they’ve never lost their twangy Texas stylings. And that sentence pretty accurately sums up their latest adventure, Sugar on the Bones.
You can count on Hap & Leonard. And of course you can count on Joe R. Lansdale.
Sugar on the Bones gets going on Landale’s trademark east-Texas drawl, a bit of narration from Hap that foreshadows the nasty business with which the book will concern itself. The narrative burbles pleasantly to life after Hap and his long-time love Brett—in her latest capacity as chief investigator of Brett Sawyer Investigations—visit one Minnie Polson, high-society liberal with a chip on her shoulder, to potentially take her on as a client. The woman is feeling a little paranoid, see, and as Brett goes mean-spirited and insults the woman, there’s also the sense of a lot going on beneath Minnie’s surface. Following that uncomfortably awkward interview, Minnie gets ticked off and dismisses Hap and Brett—and then promptly turns up dead. Burned up in a suspicious-looking house fire. At that point, Hap enlists Leonard’s help, and Brett gains some perspective, and the group begins to dig into the matter. Sure enough, a little sleuthing reveals that there are shadowy sinister forces at work, just as Minnie suspected, not least of which is the fact that Minnie’s daughter Alice has vanished, and a big insurance payout for Minnie’s death looms large. The family dynamics surrounding the mystery of Minnie’s death—also involving her ex-husband Al—gradually become complex and frightening, particularly as our boys are directly threatened, and soon an attempt is made on their lives.
Clearly, it’s time to bring in the big guns, and that’s what Lansdale does. Just as Hap warned us from the start, Sugar on the Bones plans to let us spend some quality time with several fan-favorite characters that the series has introduced in previous books. There’s Brett (of course), who goes all the way back to Savage Season, and there’s former police detective Marvin Hanson, whom I believe debuted in Mucho Mojo, and then there’s Jim Bob Luke, who goes all the way back to Cold in July. Oh, and there’s that wiliest of assassins Vanilla Ride, introduced in Vanilla Ride. (Vanilla always reminds me of the lethal Miho from Frank Miller’s Sin City, an extremely skillful no-nonsense young-lady assassin who can strike without warning from anywhere.) There are established relationships, humorous banter, and naughty flirtations among this crew that make the constant Lansdale reader smile pretty widely. And just as the easygoing repartee flows, so does the ease of the storytelling.
With this mighty crew surrounding them, Hap and Leonard and Brett are nigh invincible. As the characters make a surprising trip my way to Colorado, I felt myself easing into my chair not so much to devour the plot machinations but to luxuriate in Lansdale’s voice. Each of his side characters enjoys his or her time in the spotlight, unleashing hell on the bad guys, engaging in sacrifice here and there, and finding the appropriate opportunity to exhibit their focused strengths in service of Texas-style justice. And that’s a big part of this whole endeavor, as with all Hap & Leonard stories: These guys are still the good ol’ boys they’ve always been, administering simple deep-south law and order—a sense of old-timey southerly fair play. They’re anachronistic truth-seekers in an increasingly flat, complex world, making each book more and more pleasing to read. Lansdale excels at delivering nostalgia tinged with a sharp understanding of today.
Sugar on the Bones is a fun and often hilarious Hap & Leonard adventure. There’s an overriding sense of simply enjoying the ride, of well-crafted characters—major and minor—chatting and finding their well-worn grooves. There are quite a few meetings and discussions herein, most played for laughs as the serious stuff is strategized, and there’s also a feeling of inevitability to the solving of the mystery. These sound like criticisms, but in Lansdale’s hands they’re strengths. These characters have earned the aplomb with which they carry out their crime-solving. Whereas earlier adventures might have had deeper senses of danger, rougher times, and more eye-opening violence, Sugar on the Bones has that ephemeral notion of good guys shootin’ the shit and of savory adventures among old friends. There’s no getting around the sense that this book feels like a later one in a series, and for this reader anyway, there’s gratitude in that.
