Sleeping Policemen
Sleeping Policemen by Dale Bailey & Jack Slay, Jr.
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A sleeping policeman, according to the opening pages of the book, is another term for a speed bump. This was my first encounter with the phrase, so I looked it up, and sure enough, this is a common term in Britain, Malta, and the Caribbean. It comes up early in the story because three of the main characters are returning from a night out and run over a pedestrian. One of the characters — oddly enough, the one born and raised amid the Louisiana oil rigs, who was least likely to know the phrase — says it aloud when they hit the man, making the connection, but as the story progresses, we learn that the phrase has a double meaning. As the characters try to escape and evade what they’ve done, they’re drawn into a circle of crime involving corrupt police, who are effectively sleeping, waiting for their opportunity. Their downward spiral is dark, profane, and graphic.
Bailey and Slay seem to be channeling Jack Ketchum with this story. It’s chock full of violence and sex and the fine line that exists between the two, but it’s lacking whatever it is that exists in Ketchum’s fiction (“charm” isn’t the right word, though it’s the one that comes to mind) to elevate it to that level. Part of it, I think, is that the characters aren’t that likable. The authors do a good job of giving them much to lose — three of them come from privileged backgrounds, while the fourth is looking to leave his dead-end hometown — but they don’t do much to make us like them. Nick, the main character, is the closest thing to a protagonist here, but early in the story, a choice he makes distances the reader from him, so there’s a drive to see how the story ends for these characters, but there’s no connection with them to make us care for them.
The authors have a great command of the language. Their style is introspective and poetic, and their observations on the human condition are thoughtful and apt. The story itself, though, is brutal and difficult to read, which is odd because the language and the tension kept me engaged. It’s the kind of story that shocks and might offend, but it’s also the kind of story that you can’t turn away from.
Sleeping Policemen is a dark journey into youth, privilege, and greed. I enjoyed reading the book for the narrative voice, but not for the story itself. I get the feeling that, a year from now, when I try to recall details from the book, I’ll come up blank, though I’ll definitely remember the imagery and certain scenes. Fans of dark, nihilistic fiction, like Jack Ketchum or Chuck Palahniuk, are probably the right audience for this book.
Hot in December
Hot in December by Joe R. Lansdale
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Now, this is the kind of Lansdale book one should expect. A random encounter starts off a downward slide into criminal activity, forcing the good guys to make a stand against them and fight their way through. This time around, someone witnesses a fatal hit-and-run. Given that the driver of the car is in a local gang and Tom is the only witness, things get hairy when he presses to be a witness to the crime.
One of my favorite things about Lansdale as a writer is how well he understands the “show, don’t tell” adage of writing. Here’s a good example:
I rinsed them and opened up the washer, put them in, poured myself a cup of coffee, sat at the table and thought about things. The coffee went cold in the cup.
A less experienced writer might tell us “I thought about things for a long time”, but Lansdale shows us by writing “The coffee went cold in the cup.” If I taught a fiction writing class, I would use Lansdale as an example for how to do it right.
This novella exists in the same universe as Hap and Leonard and Cason Statler, and Lansdale throws in references to those characters here. For the most part, they work (there’s reference to Leonard that establishes mood, and could have been anyone, and Cason is an integral character to the story), but the reference to Sunset and Sawdust doesn’t make any sense unless you know the story. Later, Cason tells the narrator that Hap and Leonard would be perfect for what he needs, but they’re not available. The narrator then tells him what we’re thinking: “Don’t tell me about the guys I can’t have.” I wonder what readers unfamiliar with those characters think of the references.
The story hits the usual Lansdale beats, so longtime readers might be able to predict what’s going to happen when, but what makes his stories unique isn’t so much the structure as the way he tells it. There’s a certain cadence, a particular flow to his narrative that I’ve never found in other writers. Other writers may be as compelling or as tight as Lansdale, but there’s simply no one else who writes the way he does.
Lansdale’s novellas are the perfect length for these kinds of stories. His stories are already lean, but stripped down to this length (about 120 pages), they move quickly, enough so that it’s easy to sit down with it and not look up until you’re finished. That wasn’t quite the case with this one (stupid work), but had I not had any interruptions, I would have torn through it like rice paper. Lansdale fans should like it just fine.
A Bone Dead Sadness
A Bone Dead Sadness by Joe R. Lansdale
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This popped up as a recommendation in my Kindle app, and given that (a) I dig Joe Lansdale’s fiction, (b) I hadn’t heard of this story before, and (c) it was only 99 cents, I bought it. I found out afterward that this is a story Lansdale wrote to include in a reprint of Act of Love, and features Marvin Hanson many years after the events in that novel. It’s also set many years after Marvin befriended Hap & Leonard, though they don’t make an appearance in the story.
A Bone Dead Sadness starts with Marvin receiving an email from a local woman who wants him to investigate the disappearance of her son from twenty-five years before. The story is just that investigation, though Lansdale throws in some of his usual style to give it a little something more. It doesn’t have the snappy dialogue one comes to expect from a Lansdale story; there’s a hint of it when Marvin has a meeting with the Chief of Police, but most of his conversation is with his wife, with the mother, and with her daughter-in-law. There’s not much room for his trademark dialogue, though that’s not saying there’s anything wrong with what is there. It’s just not what one would expect from a Lansdale story.
The story is fine, and serviceable, though it’s nothing spectacular. All the events take place in the past, so the story is all about interviewing people and hoping to put all the pieces together. If you pay attention to how Lansdale sets up the story, you’ll figure out how it will end, but I didn’t catch it myself. I think Lansdale sets up his stories craftily enough so the clues aren’t obvious, but if you go into the story looking for clues, I think you’ll figure it out.
I’d recommend this story for Lansdale completists, but other readers, including Lansdale fans, might want to give it a pass. It’s a brief read (it took me an hour, tops, to breeze through it), and it’s cheap, but there’s better Lansdale fiction out there. If you just can’t find anything else to read, though, then sure, give it a go. I’ve read worse stories, after all.
Dead Aim
Dead Aim by Joe R. Lansdale
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As much as I like the Hap & Leonard series, reading several of the books back-to-back probably isn’t recommended. Each book makes a show of comparing Hap with Leonard in how they deal with the terrible things they sometimes have to do, with Hap brooding over some thing or another, and Leonard telling him he copes with it because he knows those things had to happen. Hap broods some more, but manages to come to terms with them. For now.
While it’s an interesting contrast between the characters, and while it highlights the differences between how they justify their morality, it gets tiresome to read it over and over again. Read as they’re published, the books probably don’t have that kind of repetition to them; read over a single weekend, they do.
Also of note is the number of times we read about Leonard’s obsession with vanilla cookies and Dr. Pepper. I swear, Hap & Leonard 11 is just going to be about Leonard’s trip to the dentist.
Dead Aim is another novella about the length of Hyenas, and is probably the more memorable of the two stories. Hyenas was straightforward, with no real twists and turns to the story; Dead Aim goes a little bit further, and makes more of a mystery out the circumstances. It’s still not as deep as the Vanilla Ride/Devil Red diptych, and unlike Hyenas, it’s not a good place to start with Hap and Leonard, but it was a more interesting, engaging read than Hyenas.
It’s a little strange to review this novella based on everything else Hap and Leonard, but it does make sense to get an idea of where it sits within the entire series. Regardless, anyone who’s come this far with the pair should like this story, too.
Hyenas
Hyenas by Joe R. Lansdale
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What makes a good Hap & Leonard story is the weird confluence of events that starts in one place and takes you to on a roller coaster ride to a conclusion so far from the beginning that you have to look back to see how you got there. It doesn’t usually feel convoluted (Captains Outrageous notwithstanding), and it’s usually pretty tight. Since most Hap & Leonard stories are novels, this is a fine thing.
A Hap & Leonard novella, though, is something a little different. It doesn’t have the time nor the pacing to develop a series of events like that, and what you’re left with is a shorter work which is basically just the setup that would occur in a novel. Here, Leonard gets into a bar brawl that takes him to helping one of the brawlers protect his younger brother from getting involved with a criminal group. It’s a satisfying story with the usual wit and grit one would expect from Hap and Leonard, but it wasn’t quite the same as experiencing a full novel.
Anything by Lansdale is worth reading, though, and even if Hyenas is just mediocre when compared to the rest of the series, it’s still worth the hour it will take to read it. Plus, if you’ve never read anything by Lansdale, this would be a good start. It’s sort of like getting a sampler at a bar before ordering the 22-oz. growler.
Devil Red
Devil Red by Joe R. Lansdale
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Devil Red begins like most Hap & Leonard novels begin: our two main characters are out doing an odd job out of the kindness of their hearts, and the events turn pretty violent. Said odd job begins a chain of events that pits them against some heavy duty antagonists, and with the help of their usual gang of friends, Hap and Leonard go up against them, despite the odds not being in their favor. This time around, it involves a series of murders surrounding a vampire cult from a couple of years ago.
Cason Statler and Camp Rapture, both from Leather Maiden, make an appearance here, which was sort of odd. There’s nothing in any of Lansdale’s crime fiction to make you think that they’re set in an individual universe, and the lack of anything supernatural means that these could all be “real world” novels, but since there’s never been any crossover between his books before, aside from Leather Maiden taking place in the same town as Sunset and Sawdust (albeit a good 70 years in the future), this one caught me by surprise. Towns have been mentioned before, and I’m pretty sure Camp Rapture has already been mentioned in the Hap & Leonard series, but Cason isn’t just a mention or a cameo; he has a full-blown part in the investigation and the plot. He doesn’t get involved with the nitty gritty of the story (this is, after all, a Hap & Leonard novel), but without him, the story doesn’t progress. I’m not sure if that means anything beyond Lansdale just wanting to see how these characters interact, but it does make me wonder if we’re seeing the last of Hap and Leonard in full novels.
The themes of these last two novels has been heftier, with Hap seriously thinking about his life and what he’s doing with it. He’s always been a more introspective character, who’s not always comfortable with some of the terrible things he has to do, but Vanilla Ride and Devil Red delve more deeply than the series has in the past. I wonder, again, if this is some sign of the end of the series all together, with Cason possibly moving in to replace them, but that theme has made these novels feel more significant. It also doesn’t hurt that these last two novels have been more like a true pair of novels to be read in sequence, and not just standalone books with the same characters. I said with Vanilla Ride that the books could be read pretty much in any order, but Devil Red proves me wrong.
The series overall is worth reading for anyone who likes gritty, witty, realistic crime fiction, but these last two books bring the series to a pinnacle. I could easily see him ending the series here or continuing it, either way, though I won’t lie; I hope he’s going to continue telling us what kind of trouble Hap and Leonard get up to. Lansdale’s always been a good writer, but it’s been within the last ten years or so where he’s really become a great one.
Vanilla Ride
Vanilla Ride by Joe R. Lansdale
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One of the running gags in the Hap & Leonard books is that Leonard loves himself some vanilla cookies. Given that piece of trivia, I expected the title of this book to somehow relate to that obsession. I was surprised to see that it wasn’t.
This time around, Hap and Leonard find themselves going up against some low-level drug dealers after they get involved rescuing a friend’s daughter from said dealers. The two miscreants manage to rescue the daughter, get the dealers on their bad side, and then have to deal with that fallout. The fallout leads to another set of circumstances, which leads them to another group of people, and so on and so forth until a lot of violence and witticisms are thrown about.
Summarizing a Hap & Leonard book makes them sound kinda stupid and a little bit ridiculous, but the thing is, reading a Lansdale book is an experience that can’t be matched by other writers. The stories might sound a little ridiculous when you’re explaining them to someone else, but the real treat is Lansdale’s voice. He has a real knack for dialogue and voice, and his imagination for characters and odd events makes any of his books a wild ride. Captains Outrageous was a bit of a disappointment because it read more like a standard crime novel than a Lansdale novel, but it’s worth noting that he’s back on track with Vanilla Ride. There was an eight-year gap between those two novels, though, and in that time, he managed to write A Fine Dark Line and Sunset and Sawdust, so that this one is so much better doesn’t surprise me at all.
It’s not necessary to read all of the Hap & Leonard books in order. It helps, since there are usually throw-backs to characters from previous works, but Lansdale gives us one or two sentences to explain who they are and what role they’ve played. It’s neat, though, to have the whole picture and know all the details from the previous books. But you don’t have to worry that the antagonist who shows up in one novel is one that the boys have already encountered, and is looking for some revenge; each novel is self-contained.
Lansdale fans should definitely seek out Vanilla Ride. The rest of you might like it, too, but this far into the series, it might be worth starting at the beginning with Savage Season.
Shelf Indulgence 