This is the eleventh novel in the 'Hap and Leonard' series, according to the chronology, but it's hardly a novel in the usual sense. Joe R. Lansdale calls it a mosaic novel, a term he also uses in his afterword for Ray Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles' and, rather tellingly this time out, Ernest Hemingway's 'Nick Adams Stories'. While the 'Hap and Leonard' books tend to be labelled crime fiction, some have crossed the border into general fiction and none more so than this one, which often does compare as well to Hemingway as anyone else.

The mosaic novel approach is to combine a whole slew of stories, some of which are clearly worthy of the name "short story" but others of which are more like moments in time remembered at the right time and strung alongside others to collectively find meaning. Together, they constitute a picture of Hap Collins's early years, which sometimes but don't always intersect with the equivalents of young Leonard Pine. There are solo Hap stories here and there are stories with Hap and Leonard both, but there are no Leonard stories. This isn't his book.

To underline how this isn't a short story collection, there's no contents page. We simply dive in, with 'Parable of the Stick' and keep going until we're done with 'The Oak and the Pond' and there are no more stories. The framework is Hap and Leonard talking in the present day. There's no broader story for right now, so our intrepid leads do banal things like spar together, visit Dairy Queen and take an unexpected trip back to Marvel Creek, where Hap grew up. As they do so, they reminisce and stories emerge, some that they remember fondly, some not so much.

Some of it is familiar, because it's been hinted at in earlier books, and I recognise at least one story from a short story collection that's given context here. That one's 'The Boy Who Became Invisible', a story from Hap's schooldays that he might regret but not entirely. There are a few of those here, as we learn how Hap and, to a lesser degree, Leonard, weren't all that different as kids. They may have been a little less set in their ways, but their attitudes were there ready to grow. Hap hung out with black kids before Leonard, as his mother taught uncharacteristic tolerance for her day, though there is a brutal story here; that gives its name to the book where that backfires on her in telling fashion because it has to, given the time.

Most regular readers are going to gravitate to 'Tire Fire' the most, because it's the real beginning to the Hap and Leonard story. It recounts where they first met and it's a violent piece, Leonard kicking the ass of a bigger white boy in an organised fight out by the Sabine river. Hap gets to fight too, and there's plenty of tension, racial and otherwise, to please fans of the series. Plus, it's the beginning, a magic moment that's been a long time coming but has finally arrived. It's a good story, but I wouldn't place it in the top five in this book. There are some truly impactful pieces here.

Ones that held my breath as well as my attention included the title story, because of where it went, 'In the River of the Dead' because of what it did, and 'Stopping for Coffee', because as brutally tense as 'In the River of the Dead' got, we knew that Hap and Leonard were both going to survive the story because we've read so much of their later exploits. We didn't know that about any of the characters in 'Stopping for Coffee' except Hap and he's mostly an onlooker. Our heroes have tackled racism time after time and they do it a bunch more times in this book, but it's easier to tackle when it's head on, when you can put up your dukes and your money where your mouth is. In 'Stopping for Coffee', what we get is the sort of racism that's behind the scenes. It manifests in a telephone call that we know is going to leave someone dead. That's a special sort of power and it isn't as easy to battle.

While these stories were written at different times and collected from different places, with five of the fourteen brand new, they seem to grow with the book. I know intellectually that Lansdale didn't sit down in front of a classic typewriter and churn these stories out in order without a break, but it's easy to feel like he kind of did, that there's a progression that flows through the book. It's not just a way to show that Hap and Leonard met, did some stuff together, drifted a little and ended up as firm friends. It's a genre shift as much as anything. Early stories often feel like 'Hap and Leonard' stories, as if they could have been conversations in an actual novel. Later stories don't, because they become more lyrical, more abstract, more general fiction.

And that feels like a notable shift, given that I've got to this point by reading through the entire set of 'Hap and Leonard' books, ten prior novels, four novellas, a novelette and a bunch of short stories. That's a lot of history with this pair and it's enough to tell when Lansdale's shifting genre on us. The final story is the weakest to my genre mind, given that it's just Hap remembering the big tree that had sat behind Leonard's uncle's place, the one they called the Robin Hood Tree because folk could climb it and sleep on its branches. It's pure nostalgia, with no real plot, lesson or meaning, except a sort of inevitable transience to everything. It's a snippet not a story and, if we see this as a novel of genre fiction, it's out of place. However, if we see it as a mosaic novel, an impressionistic take on the young life of Hap Collins, it's a perfect way to wrap things up.

In turn, that makes me wonder about what's coming next. 11.5 in the series is 'Cold Cotton', the final novella in the series thus far, but then come two regular novels, 'Jackrabbit Smile' and 'The Elephant of Surprise'. Are these going to play differently now that Lansdale has turned fully from a novelist of crime into a novelist of literature? Or was that just an experiment taken this one time out to serve a purpose, a purpose that having now been served is done and dusted, so the author can return to his usual approach? We'll find out over the next few months, I guess, as I wrap up a new favourite series. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Joe R Lansdale click here