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 stopped 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 b
ook, 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 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.
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 it 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 its 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—hence 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 it, one a kind of mysterious assassin novel, the other 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.” My comic-book script for an as yet unpublished comic that I produced for a German publisher is included in this book. 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 an
d 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.
Another related novella was Marvin Hanson’s first solo adventure since his introduction in my very first crime novel Act of Love (way back in 1981). A Bone-Dead Sadness is a bit different than much of my crime work, a kind of locked-room crime. Since Marvin is a recurring character throughout many of the Hap and Leonard stories, it’s included in this very collection.
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.
The Big Book of Hap and Leonard Page 30
