And they also become embroiled in situations involving friends ( Vanilla Ride) and ex-lovers ( Savage Season).Īny novel series needs to create characters that we want to return to…again and again, and this is most certainly the case with Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard. They operate outside of the law–which is just as well since most of the lawmen in their neck of the woods are as rotten as rancid bacon.

Hap & Leonard are a throw-back to the cowboy days. Sometimes they seem to be blood-brothers at other times they even seem like an old married couple, and then there are times that they are a couple of unemployed comedians. And while that brief cliched description may lead to the conclusion that they have little in common, the two men the best of friends. Leonard, on the other hand, is a black, gay, Vietnam veteran. He was part of the 60s counter-culture and served time in prison for refusing to go to Vietnam. Hap Collins, the narrator, is white and straight. Their close friendship substitutes for other familial relationships, and they are content to scrape a living at menial jobs as field hands or day labourers. While the two aren’t exactly itinerants, they don’t pursue ‘the American Dream’ of a house in suburbia. Surrounded by rednecks and racism, Hap and Leonard rise above the negative aspects of their environment and appear to mentally thrive because of it. These are men who are products of their environment, yet not in the way we would normally assume. If there are any other people out there who haven’t yet heard a thing about Hap & Leonard, here’s the run-d0wn: Hap Collins & Leonard Pine are friends who live in East Texas. This brings me to the first book in the series, Savage Season. Is my book antenna out-of-order? How many other great books are slipping by unnoticed? But then I discovered something else…Lansdale wrote the short story that became the weird and wonderful film Bubba Ho Tep, and I love that film. Things were beginning to fall into place…and I knew it was my mission to read all the Hap and Leonard novels in the series. It’s at times like this I wonder what I am doing wrong. So why was discovering Lansdale disturbing? I read a lot of books and yet I hadn’t heard about this author. Anyway, I read and reviewed the second novel in the series Mucho Mojo for Then I read and reviewed Vanilla Ride and even managed to cop an interview with Lansdale at the same time. But then I discovered that he’d written an entire series featuring two characters: Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Last year I made a disturbing discovering about author Joe Lansdale…he’s written a lot of wonderful books and I’d never heard of him.įirst I read one of Lansdale’s stand-alone thrillers, Leather Maiden.

Savage season joe lansdale