Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Tachyon Publications on March 14, 2017

Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade is a collection of stories about Hap Collins when he was young and his developing friendship with Leonard Pine. Most of the stories appear here for the first time, although one of the most powerful, a story about bullying and abusive parenting called “The Boy Who Became Invisible,” was published in 2009. The stories are woven together with an overlaid narrative that consists of Hap and Leonard telling stories to each other or to Hap’s family.

After Hap and Leonard discuss the problem with modern schools (they don’t allow self-defense and thus teach kids to be victims), illustrated by a story from Hap’s school days, we learn how Hap and Leonard met. Naturally, it involves a fight. This is followed by the story of the first time they fought together (a story that appears in a volume of Hap and Leonard stories by the same publisher).

Some of the other stories are light, some are dark, most are a mix. Some tell about Hap’s family and the town where he grew up. Some are about crimes he witnessed, or their aftermath. One is a ghost story his daddy told him. One is a story about snakes and what they teach us about people. Leonard appears in some, but not all, of the stories. This is a Hap-centric volume.

The best stories are about tolerance, an American value that has always been in short supply in much of America. The title story, “Blood and Lemonade,” is about perceptions of race in Texas during Hap’s childhood. As Leonard says at a couple of different points in the book, things have changed, but not enough. The story teaches a profound lesson about taking the good with the bad, and not allowing the bad to taint the good.

All of the stories are solid contributions to Hap and Leonard lore, but they are also solid stories of the kind that Joe Lansdale does so well.

RECOMMENDED

Miguel's Gift by Bruce Kading

Published by Chicago Review Press on April 1, 2017

Nick Hayden is an immigration agent. He keeps himself busy arresting undocumented aliens in 1987 Chicago. His trainer, Charlie McCloud, has burned through his humanity from too many years on the job, but wants Hayden to view immigrants as people. Hayden struggles with that lesson for much of the novel.

Hayden joined the INS (as the agency was then known) to learn why an agent died on the job. To that end, he had to lie on his application. His job will be jeopardized if his secret becomes known, since the agent was Hayden’s father.

The Miguel who appears in the title is Miguel Chavez, a Mexican who crosses the border, travels to Chicago, buys a fake green card, gets a factory job, arranges for his wife and children to join him, and lives happily for two years before INS gets a tip from a disgruntled worker who is unhappy that Miguel got promoted ahead of him.

Hayden and his partner want Miguel to work with them to bust a Chicago supplier of counterfeit green cards. Being an informant is dangerous, and Hayden’s partner wants to follow the law enforcement tradition of making false promises of safety and future benefits to induce Miguel’s cooperation. Hayden sees Miguel as a decent person, not as a wetback, and struggles with putting Miguel’s life in danger. Not wanting to be deported and give up the life he has made for his family, Miguel agrees to take the risk.

I like the novel’s realistic depiction of inter-agency strife, particularly between the INS, which wants to deport undocumented aliens, and DEA, which wants to keep them in the country and use them as drug informants. I also appreciate the novel’s portrayal of government agents who view perjury and violating the Constitution as appropriate tools of law enforcement.

The recognition that law enforcement agents too often consider the law to apply to everyone but themselves leads to a nice discussion of the gladiator syndrome: law enforcement agents come to think of themselves as heroic figures who, feeling hamstrung by the requirement that they obey the law, decide to operate outside the law because they feel justified in their righteous crusade. After walling themselves off from social norms and developing a bunker mentality, gladiators become self-righteous assholes who can only find companionship in taverns with other gladiators.

At the same time, the novel offers a balanced view of INS agents, praising them for professionalism and efficiency while recognizing that some agents fail to meet that standard. Miguel’s Gift also offers a balanced view of immigration, making the point that politicians pander to the angry white men who condemn illegal immigrants while taking no action against the vast number of American employers that depend on illegal immigrants for cheap labor. Unless, of course, a politician needs INS to enforce laws against one business in order to help a competing business.

Ultimately, what happened to Hayden’s father, Hayden’s search for the truth, and Miguel’s career as an informant are all stories of politics within INS, the politics of bureaucracy. The bottom line is that politicians pretend to squawk about illegal immigration, but businesses need illegal immigrants to keep wages low, and politicians are in the pockets of business leaders. The novel illustrates how immigration enforcement hurts immigrants when the government tries to put on a show, while protecting businesses that create a demand for illegal workers from the risk that they get in trouble for hiring them. The novel is set 30 years in the past, but none of that has changed, other than an escalating level of angry rhetoric.

I give Bruce Kading credit for telling an entertaining if unchallenging story, but also for telling the truth about the politics of immigration policy. And I give him credit for illustrating the truth in a touching ending that good people are good people, even if they are branded as “illegals.” Miguel might be a bit too one dimensional, a bit too saintly, but it is nevertheless encouraging to see an undocumented immigrant portrayed in a positive light.

RECOMMENDED

Mangrove Lightning by Randy Wayne White

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 21, 2017

I get a kick out of the characters in the Doc Ford novels. The secondary characters primarily exist to provide comic relief. Tomlinson, in particular, is a perfect foil to Doc Ford. Tomlinson is good-hearted but annoying, and he’s a magnet for trouble, not that Ford can’t find enough trouble on his own.

In Mangrove Lightning, Ford and Tomlinson find themselves chasing crazy people in Florida’s mangroves, the kind who capture young women and find creative ways to torture and kill them. Ford is drawn into the investigation by Tomlinson, who is concerned about the disappearance of Gracie, the niece of legendary fishing guide Tootsie Barlow. Ford thinks he should know better than to listen to Tomlinson, but it turns out (as it has in other books in the series) that Tomlinson’s tenuous connection to the world sometimes delivers insights that less addled individuals fail to perceive.

In any event, finding the creepy swamp dwellers is only the start of Doc Ford’s latest adventure. The mystery, largely driven by Tomlinson’s spiritual awareness (or drug consumption), addresses the connection between the present and a history of Chinese slavery, rum runners from Cuba, gangsters, land developers in southern Florida, and demons from Chinese mythology … unless they aren’t mythological. There are even crazy killers who kill with lightning, which is a creative twist on the crazy killer theme.

The plot is strange in a good way, the story more about Tomlinson than Doc Ford, who is off on a romp of his own, investigating a child porn ring. I didn’t have a problem with spotlighting Tomlinson since the character really shines in this story. Hannah Smith, another good character from the past, also plays a key role. The creepiness of the villains might be a bit much for sensitive readers, but the story isn’t overly graphic. Randy Wayne White allows the reader’s imagination to fill in the bloodier gaps.

Despite the novel’s tongue-in-cheek nature, Mangrove Lightning races to a powerful conclusion. The ending is very dark, much more so than the story that precedes it, and generally darker than is common in the series. It might not be a good fit for readers who want unfailingly happy endings. There is nevertheless some light in the darkness, in that this turns out to be a story about courage and endurance in the face of extreme peril … and creepiness.

RECOMMENDED

Executive Order by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 11, 2017

Executive Order is the last of a trilogy involving largely unrelated stories that focus on the three branches of government. The first two are Supreme Justice and Fate of the Union.

I’m not generally a fan of “massive conspiracy of hidden government employees in all branches of government who plan an overthrow” novels, unless they were written decades ago by Robert Ludlum or Fredrick Forsythe. The subgenre has pretty well run its course and it is increasingly difficult to believe that the self-proclaimed “patriots” who would engage in such a conspiracy are capable of ordering lunch at a drive-thru, much less organizing hundreds of conspirators at the highest levels of government (and keeping it all a secret). Executive Order isn’t a particularly plausible conspiracy novel, for exactly those reasons, but I enjoyed it anyway.

In 2031, the Russians are threatening to invade Azbekistan and the CIA has sent four operatives to watch. They get caught in a firefight, which cheeses off President Harrison, who ordered the CIA not to send operatives into the potential war zone. Harrison wants to know who violated his orders by sending CIA operatives to die.

The answer involves a conspiracy to provoke a war with Russian on the ground that Harrison is a “tepid” president who will not take action unless he is forced to do so by right-thinking patriots who do not feel bound by the constraints of democracy or morality. To that extent, the novel has political overtones and might not be appreciated by readers who believe that defending freedom means taking it away from everyone they don’t like.

Realizing he can’t trust the CIA director or the military, the president asks Joe Reeder to find out who would be so foolish as to want to start a needless war with Russia. Meanwhile, Reeder believes that the Secretary of the Interior, who died of a food allergy, was murdered. He passes that tip along to Patti Rogers, who needs to find and solve a high-profile crime to assure that her elite FBI unit will continue to be funded.

With that background established, Reeder and Rogers and a handful of good guys begin an action-filled race to learn the truth before full-scale war breaks out. The plot isn’t special — it’s a little late in the day for a conspiracy novel to feel special, unless it contains original elements that Executive Order lacks — but it moves quickly, the action scenes are mostly credible, and the Reeder/Rogers team is an easy one to like.

Sometimes a novel that requires a small number of heroic figures to defeat overwhelming numbers of adversaries with military training are fun and sometimes they’re preposterous. Executive Order is both. My “aw, c’mon” reaction as Reeder breaches some of the world’s toughest security was stifled a bit when Max Allan Collins later provided a plausible explanation for Reeder’s success. The explanation only makes the whole scenario slightly less preposterous, but the book is still fun. Executive Order stretched my willingness to suspend disbelief, but in the end, I enjoyed the story.

RECOMMENDED

A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas

Published in France in 2015; published in translation by Penguin Books on March 7, 2017

A Climate of Fear contains the memorable line, “Please, fetch me some horse manure. I want it now.” What more could a reader ask?

Alice Gauthier, with some help she never learns about, posts a letter just before she dies. Her death is regarded as a suicide, but the retired maths teacher seems an unlikely candidate to take her own life. She drew a sign before she died, and Commandant Adrien Danglard of the Serious Crime Squad is called upon to puzzle out its meaning due to his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure facts.

Tracking down the letter leads Danglard and Jean Baptiste Adamsberg and a few other Parisian crime investigators to another apparent suicide where the same strange sign appears, as well as an suspicious deaths in Iceland ten years earlier. The investigation begins with a myth about an Icelandic island where a warm stone is said to offer eternal life. There does, we eventually learn, seem to be something creepy about the island, where visitors seem more likely to find eternal death.

The investigation takes a twist when evidence suggests that the victims were studying the writings of Robespierre, sending the detectives to a club where the government of Robespierre is reenacted. Some members seem to have infiltrated the club to spy on others. Some members are secret descendants of people who were guillotined during the Revolution, and who may be pursuing an agenda of their own.

The various characters in the club get a bit carried away, which I might not find credible except that Americans get a bit carried away with their Civil War reenactments, so perhaps the French are no different in the allegiance to one side or the other in their colorful history.

Fred Vargas has a background in history and archeology, both of which play a role in A Climate of Fear. In fact, I learned considerably more about Robespierre than I really needed to know. Still, the detail with which Vargas reconstructs French history is also evident in the detailed plot, which ties together multiple killings in an odd conspiracy — but then, all conspiracies seem odd to people who have not embraced them.

A Climate of Fear moves at a sedate pace, taking time to develop characters and (mostly) background. The pace might be a bit too sedate, but that’s preferable to modern thriller writers who, sacrificing content for speed, don’t want to burden readers with sentences of more than five words. The pace does pick up a bit at the end, before the traditional information dump in which Adamsberg explains the plot and ties the storylines together.

The police characters have obviously been developed throughout the series (this is the first Adamsberg novel I’ve read) and their personalities are clearly established. The novel might have been tighter, but the complex mystery should appeal to readers who enjoy misdirection and the opportunitiy to unravel complex mysteries.

RECOMMENDED