Hap and Leonard

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Yes, you did,” I said. “But by all accounts, he had it coming.”

  “He did, you know.”

  “Never doubted it.”

  “I love you, Hap.”

  “And I love you, Brett.”

  “Want to lose five minutes out of your life the hard way?” she said.

  I laughed. “Now that’s not nice.”

  She laughed, rolled over, and turned off the light. And then she was very nice.

  Joe R. Lansdale Interviews

  Hap Collins and Leonard Pine

  Q. Hap, I’m going to start with you. You strike me as an intelligent guy. Why don’t you try and make a little bit more of your life?

  Hap: Haven’t a clue. I keep thinking I will, but I seem to take wrong turns.

  Q. Why not back off from the situations you get yourself into? You deserve a little better, don’t you?

  Hap: I get into them before I mean to. It’s like they’re kind of lurking out there. I turn left to avoid them, there’s more trouble comin’ the other way.

  Leonard: And he drags me in after him. Can I say something?

  Q. Be my guest.

  Leonard: Hap’s bright, but doesn’t fully believe it. He thinks because he hasn’t come up with the formula for something like Coca-Cola, or has done him some brain surgery, or cured a disease, he hasn’t lived up to his expectations. Problem with Hap is, he coasts. Ain’t sayin’ he’s lazy. He works hard. When he works. But he hasn’t got any rudder.

  Q. Now, don’t take this wrong, Leonard, but what’s your excuse?

  Leonard: I don’t make any. I’m doing what I want to do. That’s the difference between me and my brother here. He isn’t entirely happy being him. I’m damn ecstatic about being me. I work hard. I don’t worry that much about the future. A little. But nothing serious. Hap, he’s nothing but a big ol’ bag of worry.

  Hap: I thought I was a love machine.

  Leonard: You’re a love machine can’t keep a woman.

  Hap: You’ve had a bit of a problem maintaining relationships yourself, my good man.

  Leonard: Yeah. But, you know what? I think I’ve found a man finally.

  Q. That’s another thing. Don’t the people you guys care about seem to . . . well, you know?

  Leonard: Yeah, they seem to give us bad luck. We haven’t figured that one out yet.

  Q. Well, they’re the ones get killed.

  Leonard: Yeah. We haven’t figured that out either.

  Q. This one’s for you, Leonard. Do you feel that as you get older you’re gettin’ your temper under control?

  Leonard: What temper?

  Q. Well. . . .

  Leonard: Hey, answer the question. I didn’t stutter. What temper?

  Q. I was merely sayin’. . . .

  Leonard: You haven’t said anything yet. You asked if I had a temper. I don’t have any damn temper.

  Hap: Yes you do.

  Leonard: Hey, you want a piece of me, brother? You want to wake up with a crowd around you?

  Hap: Hey, bubba. You and me get into, you better brought yourself a sack lunch, ’cause we’re gonna be here all night.

  Leonard: Yeah?

  Hap: Yeah.

  Q. Let’s change the subject. You guys seem to survive through pure tenacity and a feeling of quarrelsome brotherhood. . . .

  Leonard: Quarrelsome. Who you callin’—

  Hap: You’re right. We do. There’s this, Lansdale. You can have all the money there is, every damn thing, and what it comes down to finally, like it or not, you got to have someone to lean on.

  Leonard and I aren’t brothers by birth. But we are brothers. Like our lawyer friend Andrew Vachss says, “It’s the family you choose that counts.” We stand by that. It can be your blood kin, certainly, but it doesn’t have to be. Way we see it, we can argue and fight with each other, but no one else better think they can. Least not in any serious manner.

  Q. All right. Let me ask this: What are future plans?

  Hap: Hard to say.

  Leonard: Charlie Blank and Hanson have some ideas for us. They’ve got a little private investigator’s agency, and we may be picking up a few jobs from them. Nothing technical. Just little stuff, you know. Hap here, he’ll still be looking for a date. Watching his weight. Sticking to nonalcoholic beer and losing his hair. I’ll still be cool and calm in my JCPenney’s suit.

  Hap: You may be calm, but that cheap suit is enough to make anyone else nervous.

  Q. I have just a few more questions.

  Leonard: Actually, we got to go. We borrowed the truck we’re in to get over here, and we promised to have it back. Our junkers are in the shop. Guy needs this one back to go to work.

  Hap: And there’s a monster movie showing on channel 38 I want to see.

  Leonard: Not that he hasn’t seen it about a hundred times.

  Q. Well, thanks, guys. And be careful out there.

  Leonard: Hell, careful’s our middle name, man.

  The Care and Feeding and Raising Up of Hap and Leonard

  Careers have phases, and I’ve had a few.

  My early career was merely struggling to sell. I managed early on to write some mystery material, and then horror, mostly short fiction. I wrote some books I’m proud of in my early career—The Nightrunners, Dead in the West, The Magic Wagon, The Drive-In, and Cold in July come to mind.

  I remember these were all written in a house on Christian Street. I also wrote there the stories that ended up in my first collection, By Bizarre Hands, as well as Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy.

  Shortly after I finished Cold in July, we moved to the far side of town, another rural area, to have more room for our kids. Before moving, my study became our daughter’s room. She had her crib assembled, amid piles of books, next to my desk, which eventually became covered with baby supplies. I ended up ejected and working on a small, wobbly desk in our bedroom.

  Our new house was massive compared to our old one. I had an entire floor for my study, for all my books. With this house came a large desk that I have used ever since, although that is about to change. We are moving. I wrote a lot of books and stories and articles and screenplays and comics on that desk in our middle house, as I have christened it. Our children were raised here.

  We are in the process of moving, and as we make efforts in that direction, it occurred to me that this is the house where Hap and Leonard were born. Other characters and stories, and some of my best critically received novels, were birthed here as well, but it somehow seems more significant to me that the boys were born here. There has always been something about Hap and Leonard that has engaged readers in a different way than what I might think of as my more “literary” novels. It’s not so much their adventures that keep pulling people back, although that’s part of it, but is instead the guys themselves. The way they interact with one another and others. A true odd couple. I feel as if I can hardly take credit for them. They seemed to leap into my skull whole born, like Athena bursting forth from the head of Zeus. And like Athena, their creation was not by design. It was a happy accident.

  Let’s back up a bit.

  I wrote Cold in July in the Christian Street house, the one before the house we are about to move from; it was one of a two-book contract I had with Bantam. I wanted, at least then, to write books that I thought would be like modern Gold Medal novels, Gold Medal being a division of Fawcett Books, now defunct. Gold Medal was known specifically for crime books, although they certainly produced Westerns, science fiction, and so on. But it was the crime Gold Medals that hooked me in my late teens, and throughout my twenties. Outside Gold Medal, I was influenced heavily by the usual suspects—Chandler, Hammett, and Caine. But there was a tone in the Gold Medal novels that was quite different. They were an overall collective of hardboiled deeds, capers, thefts, and poor suckers riding life trains to oblivion, with no chance to brake or leap off.

  I loved that stuff. I collected Gold Medal books for years, and still do, when I can find one tha
t isn’t falling apart or that I don’t already have. And sometimes even if I do have it, I buy it anyway. They are becoming rarer each day. Where they were once stacked in droves at garage sales and used bookstores fairly dripped with them, they are now as unusual to find as the three-toed sloth in your living room.

  With my two-book contract at Bantam, I thought it would be fun to riff on the old Gold Medal books, and after a very vivid dream that led to Cold in July, I was fired up even more. I thought that one had worked out quite well, and I wanted to do yet another in the same tone. Savage Season certainly tasted like Gold Medal, but there was something different about it from Cold in July. It was more deliberate, casual, purposely paced, and although it had twists and a dynamic climax, I found I was writing about my past, at least in a symbolic way, about how my life might have been if certain things had gone another direction. They were fiction, of course, but I must ’fess up and say that a lot in the Hap and Leonard books, especially the first three, was taken directly from events in my life, or the lives of others I knew, extrapolated and made a lot more exciting and dangerous.

  I was also writing about the sixties, about how that shook out, at least for me. I found a symbolic way of doing that by writing a novel that took place in the late eighties, a reflective book, with Hap feeling the changes, wondering how one morning it was the sixties and early seventies—because much of the time when we talk about the sixties, we’re really talking about the early seventies as well—and then, the world was new and more consumer-driven, far less idealistic, and the music kind of sucked. In the mid-seventies, the Vietnam War finally wrapped up and the soldiers came home. All of us who had yelled about civil rights and an unjust war, and so many things—gay rights, women’s rights—suddenly felt vindicated. But in the long run, as Leonard says in Savage Season, the sixties were just the eighties in tie-dyed T-shirts. I’m not as cynical as Leonard, but there’s something to be said, at least partially, for that point of view.

  The book I was writing was not then called Savage Season but tentatively titled Ice Birds. Problem was everyone thought I was saying Ice Bergs, so I changed the title to Savage Season. It was originally something like A Strange and Savage Season, but that was too long and, frankly, didn’t quite fit. It sounded a smidgen pretentious. Therefore, the final decision for a briefer and simpler title. I started writing the book, as I said, pulling from my own life, adding things that never happened, and this guy named Leonard showed up. With his arrival at the first of the novel, I knew then it was a buddy story. I love those. But then Leonard surprised me, not only by showing up but by revealing in a sideways manner that he was gay, Republican, a supporter of the Vietnam War, and a war hero. I hadn’t known that going in. Hap Collins, my hero of the book, or at least the one who tells the tale, for Leonard is in many ways just as prominent a character, knew that about Leonard, but he didn’t tell me until the moment Leonard revealed it. At the time of writing that book, gay characters were uncommon in crime fiction. There were exceptions, but they were rare. Even more rare were black Republicans, and rarer yet, gay Republicans. They existed, of course, but were generally more uncommon than a three-toed sloth in your living room. They were, in fact, as uncommon as a three-toed sloth in your living room wearing a propeller beanie. Also, male gay characters who were, in appearance and action, more masculine were also underrepresented. Yet I knew they existed, so why not represent them as well? I wasn’t thinking about breaking new ground, or anything really, just about writing honest characters who weren’t all white and straight and middle-class.

  Anyway, there I was, writing along, and Leonard showed up, and he and Hap were best friends, and different of opinion in many ways, as many of my friends are different from me, but at the core, Hap and Leonard are one and the same. Honorable men, smart men, who took a wrong boat in life and ended up on the ragged edge of the American Dream.

  At the time of that writing, I was not far removed from that very position in life. My wife, Karen, was my saving grace. She directed me in such a way that I moved in a straight line, not in circles. She and I worked as farm field workers, ran a goat dairy, butchered our own meat, and raised our own vegetables. Karen had come from a more middle-class background than I had, but she had dove right in with me, making ends meet as best she could, having faith that our life together would be a good one, and that the American Dream, which I believe in—how can I not? I’m living it—was ours for the taking.

  We took hold of it, and have kept our teeth securely clamped there ever since. I know it’s an elusive dream, and dream is the right word. It’s something we all want, and sometimes it’s something, through hard work, inheritance, or accident, that we can have. But, for the most part, it’s an opportunity, not a promise. That’s all it’s ever been, except for the fact that here in our country, that dream is supposedly more obtainable than elsewhere.

  Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not.

  That, too, went into the book. In his own way, Hap is, like Gatsby, standing on the pier, reaching out for the green light across the bay. His life is a lot more blue-collar in nature, and the green light represents to him less than it meant to Gatsby. Not great riches and fine clothes and bringing back the past, just less-back-breaking work, a library card, and a TV that gets what was then all three network channels. A home where he can have a good wife and a happy sex life, raise fine kids to whom he can pass along the dreams he holds dear. Fair play. Common sense. A decent bank account. And with a little luck, a quick death in old age without lingering illness, or a tube in his pecker and adult diapers steaming with shit.

  So Hap, in his own small, blue-collar way, is my Gatsby. At least he is in the first few novels. In time, that changes, as all our lives must change.

  Leonard, he just wants to be left alone. He doesn’t care about anyone’s club. He’s gay, and he’s all right with that. He’s black, and if you don’t like it, you can ram a stick up your nose. He’s a lot less introspective than Hap. He’s one of those guys like my dad was. It is what it is. Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.

  After Savage Season, I had no idea that I would ever write about Hap and Leonard again. I didn’t intend to, and it was three years before I did. I had moved from Bantam to Mysterious Press by that time, a kind of movement not uncommon to authors, especially in those days when we still had a number of publishers to choose from, and we didn’t have computer sales numbers following us around. My then agent managed to get me a two-book contract at Mysterious, and my first book for them wasn’t going so well. I put it aside and very quickly wrote another. When I sat down to write it, Hap started speaking to me, and he took over. Even then, I thought, this is it, two and out. But the book really hit a nerve with the publisher and the readers, and a series was born. And boy, did I love Hap and Leonard.

  Savage Season, the first, has its funny moments, but compared to the others in the series, it is a little more dour. It was followed by seven others, funnier on the whole, although still dark in places, and variable in tone and themes. The first was my caper book, or as close as I’ll get to that; the second was the mysterious murder that is tied to the heroes; the third was the Bad Town novel; and the fourth was . . . well, wacky. The fifth was a road novel, the sixth a fish-out-of-water novel. I left the series for eight years to write other things at yet another publisher, Knopf, and for one of their paperback lines, Vintage.

  At that time Mysterious Press had the original Hap and Leonard novels, and Knopf wasn’t interested in carrying the series forward because of that. That’s why the eight-year wait. Finally, the Hap and Leonard books went out of print, and Vintage picked them up. I wrote two new Hap and Leonard books back to back for them. One was a kind of mysterious assassin novel, the other was a dangerous cult book. The latest, Honky Tonk Samurai, forthcoming in 2016 from my current publisher, Mulholland, is what I call putting the crew together for one big event. It will be followed by Rusty Puppy. The definition of that one is yet to be
decided. I never know until I’m finished, and frankly, even then I’m not absolutely certain. What remains in all the books are those guys, their close friendship, their personal histories, and the adventures.

  I mention all of this to show how long Hap and Leonard have been with me. After the first six novels, I ceased aging them except when they were having books written about them. So the eight-year wait between number six, Captains Outrageous, and number seven, Vanilla Ride, is in my mind only a few months later, and so on. If I didn’t do that, my guys would be in wheelchairs right now, fighting it out in rest homes with villains who were trying to take their desserts and piss in their bedpans.

  But between all that waiting, now and again, I wrote shorter pieces about them. After Vanilla Ride and Devil Red, numbers seven and eight in the series, I wrote a novella, Hyenas, about them, and a short story that is among my favorites, a dark piece titled “The Boy Who Became Invisible.” I followed this with Dead Aim, another novella. Some years before these, however, my brother Andrew Vachss and I collaborated on a Hap and Leonard novella that to my taste is one of the oddest pieces I’ve been involved with, unique because Andrew is unique. He added a character to the Hap and Leonard mythology, Veil, and he appears in Veil’s Visit, also included here, and although it’s not exactly rare, it’s a story that, until now, has been hard to capture. Veil, like my brother Andrew, is smart and unpredictable. A man couldn’t ask for a better brother and friend than Andrew Vachss, whom I love and admire, as does my entire family. He thinks outside the box as a writer, as a lawyer, and as a protector of children. For my own children, he is Uncle Andrew, and they love him and think the world of him. Of course, they should.

  What else is here?

  I also had a promotional piece I had written to advertise Bad Chili, the fourth book in the series. It was “cleverly” called “Death by Chili.” It went out to reviewers and whoever received galleys of Bad Chili, part of a promotional package that included the story and a hot pepper glued to the page. I still have one or two of those promotional packets somewhere.