RK: It seems whenever a new Lansdale book comes out, fans and critics hail it as your most violent book yet.
JRL: I never can tell. To me, I don’t notice any difference between this one and that one. I really don’t. When I look at Bad Chili, I think, “Whoa! That was pretty violent.” I always think of it and Two-Bear Mambo has the most violent of the Hap and Leonard series. The Nightrunners and Waltz of Shadows, those are VERY violent. I never think about that. I never think that I’m going to make this scene violent or what. It just sort of arrives. I’ll read these other books, and this book is just as violent as my books. Why don’t they talk about these people? As other people have told me: “But they don’t write violence the same way. They don’t have that kind of poetic description.” I appreciate that.
RK: Your stories are steeped in Texas. Someone once said you’re a writer who practically oozes Texas. Beside the fact that you grew up in Texas, is there another reason? There are plenty of writers who grew up here who don’t have as much Texas flavor to their work.
JRL: First of all, as you said, growing up here. But I also believe that my parents were proud of being Texans. I think their people actually come from somewhere else. But my father was a Texan. My mother was a Texan. Prior to that, we weren’t generations of Texans. But we epitomized what Texas represents, at least in that mythological sense, as being hardcore, independent people. People who literally did pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My father was a person who could not read or write. And I think he was a vast success. He taught himself how to be a mechanic. My mother bought him a Model T and said take this apart and put it back together until you can do it. And he did. That’s how he learned to be a mechanic and, of course, just continued to learn and update his knowledge. He got to where toward the end of his life, he could actually read a little bit and write a couple of sentences here and there. His mother died when he was eight years old and him taking over the family pretty much. His father bein’ a brutal bastard and my father, like I said, not being educated and having to work all these hard physical jobs. I look at my mother coming from a somewhat-better situation but still a poor situation. When they were reaching their adulthood, that was the Great Depression, and I think all of that just epitomizes what people think of when they think of Texans. So whether true or not, there’s that. Something that appealed to me is that as a child, I always loved mythology. I didn’t know that I was living in mythology, because Texas has its own mythology. It’s bigger than life. And my father was the kind of person who’s a real, everyday, down-to-earth person, but was yet somehow bigger than life. He was what John Wayne thought he was.
RK: Since this is an interview for a collection of Hap and Leonard stories, we probably should discuss the stars. Hap is obviously you.
JRL: To a great extent, yeah.
RK: And Leonard is. . . ?
JRL: Leonard is made up of several people I know, both gay and straight. He’s a combination of those. And uh, also the fact that Hap and Leonard in many ways reflect both of my sides, ’cause I’ve always found that the liberals consider me a conservative and the conservatives consider me a liberal. Somebody once said that I’m an Old Testament liberal, which I thought was one of the funniest things and most accurate things I’d heard, even though I’m not by nature a religious person. However, the concept was just perfect. I knew when they said that exactly what they meant. And even though it would be hard to define what that means, it tapped with me . . . that’s exactly right. And I also have a way of just irritating either side, which gets me back to . . . what the hell was the question?
RK: The genesis of Leonard?
JRL: Yeah, so he’s a combination of things. And they’re also BOTH a combination of me. Hap represents more one side of me than the other and Leonard more the other side. But Hap in personality and, I think, the way he talks in the books and attitude and approach is more similar to me, and maybe if I had been less ambitious and hadn’t met my wife, I might have lived like he did. Hopefully not with all the adventures, of course.
RK: You once told me that you were surprised at how popular Hap and Leonard were with older women. Have you ever figured out why?
JRL: I have not. What’s interesting is that it’s not just older women now. The more the series has been around, the more women are responding to it. I only know that people have said that women will never like this because there’s references that they may find offensive. And I think some have.
RK: There are references that we all find offensive.
JRL: That’s part of the point.
I think that’s one thing that a lot of the readers never understand—that there are some people who are offensive just because they are writing offensively, and there are other people who are using it as a tool and sometimes just for the hell of it. Just for the shock of it. But it’s also because this is how a lot of the people I know talk. This is how they really are. And all I’m trying to do is tap into that. A lot of guys have responded to that. They’ve said, this is the way we really talk. When women aren’t around, this is what we say—and you’ve done that. And the women—another thing that I’ve heard is that I’ve had several say, just tell me that Hap is real, please, because I want to marry him. I think what they are responding to somewhat is that Hap is a little bit in need. That people think, well, I can help him out. But the other part of it is that Hap does come across as a good man and that he means well and he’s honest and he’s trying his best. People respond to that. And they respond to that in Leonard, too.
RK: Do you have Hap and Leonard’s lives mapped out?
JRL: No, not really. I have ideas about their lives. I borrow things from my own life, but I also borrow from people I know. It’s not always negative stuff, but it’s elements here and there. I have a general idea of where they are going, but it’s a very general idea. I do some things on instinct. Basically, I’ll have a really small idea that stays with me and I won’t even know why. They aren’t profound. They’re little character things, and those will stay with me. The stories come out of the characters; about little revelations and little ideas. What happens is that there will be little things that will change the whole course of the novel. The characters themselves redirect my plans.
RK: Are you planning on incorporating the burgeoning and changing gay civil rights, such as the legalizing of same-sex marriage, in the stories?
JRL: Yeah, I think that will be more of it. It’s hard to get a whole lot more, because Leonard’s always been pretty damn outspoken. He’s never been the bashful type about it. I’m sure that he’s mentioned gay marriage a couple of times. I think in this one, there are problems with that because his boyfriend is being affected by all this religious brouhaha about changing your sexual orientation and all.
I think the books are better because they are crazy sort of folk tales mixed with reality, but it’s always the social and cultural issues and the two characters that drive the series.
RK: Characters from your other crime novels keep popping in Hap and Leonard. Was this by design all along? Or did it just start happening?
JRL: It’s a mixture. Some planned, most not. Sometimes readers see things that aren’t there, or are coincidental, and sometimes they’re right. I like to let people guess for themselves. It’s more fun this way. Also an author touches on similar ideas frequently. Intentionally, or accidental.
RK: Will we start to see Hap and Leonard in your other books?
JRL: I doubt it. Then they might be described.
I hint at what they look like when Hap tells the stories, but actual descriptions by others might deflate the readers’ imaginations. But, I never say never.
RK: Will some of these characters, such as Jim Bob and Marvin, star in their own stories?
JRL: Marvin does appear in Act of Love and later in “A Bone-Dead Sadness”, a long story. Again more of him, or a Jim Bob story is always possible. I think Vanilla Ride is more likely.
RK: You’ve had periods when you stoppe
d writing Hap and Leonard, including eight- and five-year gaps between novels. Why do you stop, and why do you keep returning to them?
JRL: The first reason is that I wanted a break from the characters. I didn’t mean for it go eight years. A lot of other things I was doing got in the way and took more time than I expected. Probably the biggest reason was that I changed publishers. So my backlist was with one publisher and my frontlist with another. A new publisher doesn’t profit much by the backlist belonging to someone else and they’re not as interested in doing one of the books in that series if they’re not gonna have the backlist. So gradually my agent and I worked to get the backlist back, and it took several years. When we got the Hap and Leonard backlist back, then I went to Knopf, and I actually sold them two of the Hap and Leonard books: Vanilla Ride and Devil Red.
When I left Knopf for Mulholland, I wrote several historical books, including Edge of Dark Water, The Thicket, and Paradise Sky. All the while, I was writing new, shorter Hap and Leonard stories for other publishers, but then Hap’s voice got louder and more insistent, so I wrote the novel Honky Tonk Samurai. He still wouldn’t shut up, so I had to write another, which probably will be called Rusty Puppy.
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 it 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 Cain. 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 that 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 era 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, H
ap 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 fieldworkers, 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.