Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Joe R. Lansdale
Vanilla Ride
Knopf
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
There’s no more-welcome sign of the summer reading season than Joe R. Lansdale’s Vanilla Ride, featuring the troublemaking and problem-solving escapades of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The unlikely pair of crime fighters (Hap is a white, determinedly heterosexual, underemployed construction worker; Leonard is a black, loudly queer, underemployed nightclub bouncer) last appeared in 2001’s Captains Outrageous, which found them dodging bandits in Mexico. Now they’re back in their East Texas stomping grounds, where an old pal, Marvin Hanson, begs them to bring home his granddaughter, Gadget (née Julia), who has taken to selling dope with some local lowlifes. After kicking the snot out of the punks and flushing their product, the two-man wrecking crew learns that the dealers were fronting for Dixie Mafia mobsters—and the messy affair does not come to a halt until the FBI, a posse of assorted tough guys, and a hired killer get involved. Vanilla Ride’s over-the-top action is an excuse to turn Hap and Leonard loose in their smart-ass, self-deprecating style, and after eight years in mothballs, their rowdy bonhomie and Mother-cover-the-kiddies’-ears repartee fairly leap off the pages. One suspects this book was not released so much as it flat-out escaped. Knopf, $23.95
Steve Hockensmith
The Crack in the Lens
Minotaur
It took four novels for Steve Hockensmith to steer his sleuthing ranch hand brothers, Gustav “Old Red” and Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer, to Texas, but the budding town of San Marcos circa 1893 proves a fine fit for The Crack in the Lens and its unpretentious brand of mystery. The series was launched in 2006 with Holmes on the Range, in which Otto passes the time on a trail ride by reading a Sherlock Holmes story to the illiterate Gus, who decides to emulate the great man and solve crimes through deductive reasoning. Having displayed a surprising knack for “detectiving,” the saddle-bum Sherlock has now ridden off, Otto in tow, to the Lucky Seven ranch, in the Hill Country, where he is determined to unravel a heinous crime with a deeply personal connection: the brutal murder five years earlier of his darling Gertie Eichelberger. Deflecting nonstop threats from a series of rough characters with knuckles, guns, knives, and nooses, the brothers proceed with a suitably Holmes-ian investigation that is seasoned with a goodly serving of laughs. Hockensmith has ginned up a likable and compelling team, and he might do well to send the Amlingmeyers to the Capitol dome a few miles north to see what evildoers there require their attentions. Minotaur, $24.95
David Liss
David Liss
Photograph by Trish Simonite
The San Antonio author has exhibited an impressive sense of worldliness with his literary mysteries, the settings of which range from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to twentieth-century Florida. The Devil’s Company, his sixth novel, returns to eighteenth-century London, where pugilist-turned-PI Benjamin Weaver—who first appeared in A Conspiracy of Paper and later in A Spectacle of Corruption—becomes embroiled in the intrigues of the British East India Company. Liss has regularly appeared on the New York Times Notable Books list and was the 2001 winner of the Barry, Macavity, and Edgar awards for best first novel.
Compare your current perspective on writing with your attitude after your first book, A Conspiracy of Paper. When I started out, it was a much more desperate kind of writing. With my first book, I wanted to produce something that I could publish. With my second novel, I was terrified I would not be able to do it again. Now I write with the knowledge that—barring any major disasters in publishing, and these days nothing can be ruled out—I am going to get it published, and that is very liberating.
Why are you drawn to the past for your settings? When I set out to write my first novel, I was in grad school studying eighteenth-century British lit, and I went with the adage “Write what you know.” There is a genuine pleasure in excavating and working with historical cultures and subjectivities. In some ways, writing about the past allows me to make fairly broad arguments about the present.
What was it like bringing back Benjamin Weaver? There is something very comfortable in returning to a familiar character and narrative. On the other hand, I think doing only that would get very dull very quickly. This new novel, for example, does not work with a mystery format. It is more of an espionage thriller. I get rid of some of the secondary characters from the previous books and introduce some new ones that will stick around should I decide to return to this universe again.
You tend to mine the world marketplace for plots, as with The Coffee Trader and The Whiskey Rebels. Does international finance play a role in the new book? I am interested in financial history, and that shows in The Devil’s Company, which is very much concerned with the eighteenth-century forerunners of modern corporations. There are a number of interesting points of contact between the economic conditions in the background of the novel and our own economic climate today.
By informing your readers about the past, do you perhaps sway their actions in the here and now? Trying to make a significant difference with a single novel, or even a whole body of work, is a losing strategy. I want to be one part of a provocative discourse that will, in some way, stand on the side of the scale that represents a broader cultural awareness. I’d rather be one of the grains of sand that could tip the scale toward social responsibility than to be off the scale entirely.
Your brand of history and mystery would make good film fodder. Have you fielded much interest on that front? There are projects under various stages of development for The Coffee Trader, A Conspiracy of Paper, and a short story I wrote called “Minesweeper.” I’ve had enough dealings with the film industry that I’m fairly cynical at this point.
Who would be your ideal Benjamin Weaver on-screen? When the Conspiracy project was hot the first time around, I thought the guy perfect for the job was an up-and-coming actor with whom most people were not familiar named Russell Crowe. Today I would be inclined toward Clive Owen or maybe Daniel Craig—clearly the best gentile to play a bad-ass Jew.
Read an excerpt of The Devil’s Company. Random House, $25
