It feels like it's been a long while since I've read an honest to goodness novel in Joe R. Lansdale's long running 'Hap & Leonard' series, but it's really only been four months since 'Honky Tonk Samurai'. However, that was the only other novel in half a year. Joe really did get into shorter dips into the series, a novelette and especially a whole slew of novellas, in the 2010s. However, this one does sit well alongside those shorter books because of its levels of complexity or, rather, its lack of them.

This one has a good mystery to it, but it's one that I figured out reasonably early, as it doesn't require a lot of imagination to see through. That's something that Lansdale's novellas do, because of considerations of page count, but his earlier novels didn't, his old formula of having an a serious escalation halfway through when the initial job had been done apparently left firmly in the past. It could be suggested that these novellas and this novel are ways by which he could focus more on character than plot.

And there's plenty of that here, with both Hap and Leonard in fine fettle and a superb new addition to the cast, albeit presumably one who isn't likely to return to the series in a future book. The back cover blurb memorably describes her as a "vengeance-filled vampire midget", but the text tends to use "four-hundred-year-old midget vampire", a quote of Leonard's to describe a foul-mouthed, hard-bargaining little girl called Reba who lives on the projects and likes to devour McDonalds.

The kick-off point for this one is an actual case that Hap takes for the princely sum of sixty five dollars, twenty-eight cents and a pile of lint. It's emptied out onto his desk by Louise Elton, whose son was murdered over in Camp Rapture, probably by its notably racist cops. Hap takes pity on the young lady, not only because she lives over the street from Brett's detective agency, and so he wanders over to the projects on his own to get some information from the one witness to Jamar's fatal beating.

For those wondering where Leonard is, because he and Hap tend to be attached at the hip in these stories, he's out playing the field because he and John are still on hiatus. A gentleman he met on the internet doesn't work out but a LaBorde cop does and we do wonder if John's going to finally get his Dear John letter. He shows up soon enough to help Hap out, because a white boy asking questions in the projects was never going to be his brightest idea. Our intrepid duo aren't apart here for long.

Of course, they stir things up because that's what Hap and Leonard do. Of course, they piss off the local cops, because said local cops are (for the most part) corrupt and racist and perfectly willing to bend every law in the book whenever they feel like it. One local car thief was found with five bullet holes in the back of his head but went down in the books as a suicide. Camp Rapture is that sort of place. My favourite Leonard moment, though, because it's usually Leonard rather than Hap, comes at a joint called the Joint when Leonard responds to their unfriendly welcome by pissing against the bar. Hey, he did ask where the restroom was but the bartender didn't want to help.

If Hap and Leonard's interplay with each other is top notch and their stirring things up is as good as ever, what ends up being notable by its absence is their habit of getting into fights, at least for a while. About halfway through, I realised that there had only been one fight thus far and that over so quickly that it's not even worthy of the name. That's odd, especially given that violence is right at the heart of the case that Hap has taken, but what happens does so off screen, in dialogue, and done by characters other than our heroes.

I have to assume that this was a very deliberate decision by a master storyteller, going against the run of the series for effect, given where we end up by the end of the novel. Trust me, there's violence coming, and it's memorable violence too. It's just balanced in a different way to usual. Instead of using violent scenes almost as punctuation, here it's a slow but inexorable build. It starts off screen and is constantly threatened, but it builds like water filling a tank in it that it merely promises until it finally overflows and floods everywhere.

If we put all that together, this is a highly enjoyable entry in the series but one I'm still trying to weigh from a very high level. Some things are givens. The dialogue is right up there with the best of these books but Lansdale can do that in his sleep. The character focus this time out is welcome, if sometimes a little restrictive: Brett and Chance stay sick for the whole thing and there's some opportunity for Marvin Handon, but mostly this is about our two shit-stirring heroes, with the addition of the magnificent Reba as arguably one of their best foils yet. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of fun.

But Lansdale's shift from his usual approach to these novels to one that he takes in his novellas is potentially problematic. It makes this work less well from the standpoint of plot, even though there are pretty powerful messages buried within that, namely that it's shockingly easy for a town to go corrupt but that it's shockingly easy to take down a corrupt town just by poking your nose where it doesn't belong and not dying. It's really not that straightforward but it kinda is and that's important. Maybe this needed to be a simple plot, just to get those messages across. I'm unconvinced.

What's next isn't 'Cold Cotton', as I'd believed, as that novella comes midway between 'Blood and Lemonade', a mosaic novel, and 'Jackrabbit Smile', the next novel proper. I do find it interesting that Lansdale, who gradually grew this series over a long period of time—eight novels, a couple of novellas and a short story over the span of a quarter of a century—then launched into a sudden burst of activity in 2016 and 2017, with no fewer than three novels, three novellas and a novelette in those two years alone, and a pair of novels since. He got so busy that it's hard to figure out the order. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Joe R Lansdale click here