The Two Bear Mambo

The Two-Bear Mambo (the title refers to a scene in a nature documentary the characters in the book watch, where two bears have sex), the third Hap and Leonard novel, takes up a few months after the events of Mucho Mojo. As it opens, Leonard is again burning down the crackhouse next door, and Hap’s girlfriend, Florida, has left him for a friend on the police force. After the two are arrested for aggravated arson, Florida’s new beau tells them Florida has disappeared while researching an article in a small, ultra-racist town of Grovetown, and he will drop the charges if the two will go to Grovetown and find her. The duo reluctantly agree, and find greater problems than they could have imagined.

As always, no one equals Lansdale when it comes to blending genres, with hysterically funny dialogue mixing with chilling suspense. Grovetown is an example of a small, racist Southern town that I hope does not exist anymore (although I know it does). As usual with a Lansdale book, not for the easily offended, but great nonetheless.

Music To Murder By

I’m always looking for something to fill space on this website, so I thought, Why not a list? That will fill space. So I did (very) little thinking and decided to develop a list of songs that are appropriate to the sort of novels I’ve been reading recently, crime novels from the 50s (mostly).. Sort of music noir. So here is a list of 16 songs that I think match the tone of our crime novels. I used an arbitrary cut-off date of my lifetime, since the early twentieth century saw the popularity of “murder ballads”, which would have made the list too large to be manageable, and tried to limit to no more than one song per artist (Springsteen’s Nebraska album was composed completely of songs that would qualify). Inclusion in this list is entirely subjective to the listener. For instance, every time I hear “My Humps” by the Black-Eyed Peas, I want to kill someone, but I realize most people like that sort of thing.. One word of explanation: traditional country songs have a disproportionate representation on such lists, since in trad country, once the cheatin’ started, somebody was goin’ to get shot.

“Songs To Murder By”


“The Red Right Hand”, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
“Shoot Out The Lights”, Richard and Linda Thompson
“Rose In Paradise”, Waylon Jennings
“The Beast In Me”, Nick Lowe
“Long Black Veil”, Johnny Cash
“Decoration Day”, The Drive-By Truckers
“Lilli Schull” Uncle Tupelo
“Cold Cold Ground” Tom Waits
“Private Investigations”, Dire Straits
“Down By The River”, Neil Young
“In Germany, Before The War”, Randy Newman
“Jailbreak”, AC/DC
“I Fought The Law”, The Clash
“I’m Not The Man”, 10,000 Maniacs
“The House Of The Rising Sun”, The Animals
“Nebraska”, Bruce Springsteen
“Heroin”, The Velvet Underground
"Killing Just For Fun", Tito & Tarantula

{Note: This is a reprint of a much older post, on a different, now defunct blog.}
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Bust

Those who like novels about the seedy side of life, leavened with black humor, should check this one out. Bust, written by Ken Bruen Jason Starr, is the story of someone who hires the wrong hitman, and the spiral of calamities that follow. As the promotional material states, in Bust you learn five important lessons:

1. When you hire someone to kill your wife, don’t hire a psychopath.
2. Drano is not the best tool for getting rid of a dead body.
3. Those locks on hotel room doors? Not very secure.
4. A curly blond wig isn’t much of a disguise.
5. Secrets can kill.


A good read, as long as you don’t mind a group of completely immoral, bumbling characters. There is no one in the book who is not out after their own self-interest; or who has the slightest idea how to achieve it. Highly recommended, another in the Hard Case Crime series.
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Galaxy of Terror

Over the course of a very long career, Roger Corman served as producer on a huge number of low budget movies. Some of them turned out to be classics in spite of their budget (Piranha), and some turned out to be campy fun (Humanoids from the Deep). Most of them, unfortunately, turned out like Galaxy of Terror.

Released in 1981, this sci-fi horror film features a fairly recognizable cast. There’s Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi, beginning a downward career cycle), Edward Albert (sporting quite the pornstache), Ray Walston, and genre mainstays Robert Englund and Sid Haig. I doubt that anyone of them puts it on their résumé in bold print. Reportedly, Sid Haig was so disgusted with the dialogue he asked permission to play his character as a more-or-less mute (he has one line.). If you’ve seen a lot of Sid’s movies, you know dialogue that shocks him has to be a high level of bad.

The movie is mostly a rip-off of Alien, with a bit of Star Wars’ New Age bull thrown in for good measure. In the future, a distress call from a crashed ship is received by The Master, the leader of the world. We know he’s special because his head is a glowing red light. He spends his time playing a future version of checkers with an old woman, but pauses long enough to dispatch a rescue expedition, whose crew is carefully chosen because they all hate each other to various degrees and for various reasons. They also all come completely apart under the slightest pressure, a great trait for their jobs, no doubt. Moran plays a psychic, but if she was any good at it, she would have seen how the movie would turn out, and gone to work at Waffle House instead.

After a harrowing 45 second trip through space, the hapless crew arrives on the Planet of the Bad Matte Paintings. There, they are killed one by one by their worst fears. Sid Haig declares “I live and die for crystals” and before you can figure out what the hell he’s talking about, a crystal kills him. The blonde crew member mentions she hates worms, and gets raped to death by a giant maggot. You might want to read that sentence again, just in case you didn’t want to grasp it. A woman gets fairly graphically raped by a giant maggot. It is possible this was intended to be titillating, but it is a woman being forcibly sexually penetrated by a giant worm, and I don’t want to meet the person who is turned on by that.

Some terrible special effects and listless acting later, and the movie comes to an early and much appreciated end. Along the way, we are treated to some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard, so I think Sid was on to something. My favorite line is probably “I’m too scared to be afraid” but there are plenty of howlers.

The most interesting fact about the movie is it served as the debut of James Cameron, who was the production designer and second unit director. Reportedly, he got the job by demonstrating how to get maggots to move on a fake severed arm (he ran electric current through it). Bill Paxton, who would become better known as an actor and frequent collaborator of Cameron, was a set dresser on the production.

Probably the best thing to say about this film is that most of the cast and crew had better things in their future. If you take my advice, you’ll give this one a miss. You probably won’t.
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Grave Descend

John Lange’s novel Grave Descend is a crime/adventure story of the old school. The hero, James McGregor is a Jamaica-based diver hired to investigate a rich man’s sunken yacht, and determine why it went down. He is suspicious at being overpaid for the job, and reconnoiters the dive site a day early. To his surprise, he finds the yacht moored there, not sunken…yet.

This is one of those books of which you say “they don’t write ‘em like that anymore”, and with good reason. The novel was originally published in 1970, when it was an Edgar Award finalist. It betrays its age most in its somewhat anachronistic mores, belonging to the age when men were men and women were objectified. Despite its flaws, it is an enjoyable, quick read. Although the nautical yarn isn’t deep (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk), it is entertaining. Recommended for those who like this sort of thing.

The reprint was published courtesy of “Hard Case Crime”, a Dorchester Publications imprint. Hard Case Crime publishes mostly noirish crime novels, a mixture of originals and reprints. Thus far, they have published crime novels by such notables as Stephen King, Richard Stark, Ken Bruen, and so on. The books are all paperbacks, with retro covers very similar to the old Fawcett Gold Medal line. You’re old if you remember those, as I do.

One more note: Researching the book, I found that “John Lange” was a pseudonym for Michael Crichton, who wrote several crime novels under this name while in medical school. Before his untimely death,he left all this behind him, and moved on to bestsellers based on astonishingly bad science for the most part.
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Mucho Mojo

Five years after bringing us the first adventures of Hap and Leonard in Savage Season, Joe Lansdale brought their second installment to us in Mucho Mojo. When the story opens, Hap is back at work in the rose fields, putting rose sticks into the ground (“the job they give to sinners in hell” he describes it) while Leonard is still recovering from the injuries received in the first book, when Leonard learns he has inherited a house from his Uncle Chester. Leonard and Hap move into the home to fix it up so it can be sold, and make some disquieting discoveries.

The first is the once-quiet African-American neighborhood is being terrorized by a crack house located next to Leonard’s new property. This leads to confrontations between Leonard and the drug dealers, and eventually to Leonard burning down the crack house, an event that will be repeated until it becomes something of a running gag in the series. The second is even grimmer. Beneath some rotten floorboard, the duo finds a box filled with child pornography – and the skeleton of a small boy. When the police are none too keen on following up the disappearances of black children in the area, Hap and Leonard take it on themselves to uncover the truth. The result is the usual mix of grim criminal activity and hilarity, as only Lansdale seems able to pull off.

Oh, and the title refers to the bottle tree placed by Uncle Chester in front of his property. According to the book, the bottles are supposed to catch and trap evil spirits. Bottle trees are also common in some parts of Alabama, although I've never heard that particular explanation.
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Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

I think anyone who has enjoyed the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft would also enjoy this even-handed documentary on his life. Born to a father soon to die in madness of syphilis and an over-protective yet emotionally distant mother, Lovecraft’s brand of horror set the template we still follow today. He famously rejected the vampires, werewolves, ghosts, et al of traditional weird fiction for his own cosmography, the greatest of which has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a figurative sandbox authors still play in today. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of his writing was the use of antagonists who are often not truly evil, but indifferent to human fate.

The film doesn’t flinch from the less-attractive aspects of his personality, the xenophobia and racism common to his time that he unfortunately didn’t escape. (I had forgotten the name he gave to the cat in “The Rats in the Walls” and somewhat wish it was still forgotten) It also examines the personality quirks that caused him to be the harshest critic of his own work, and limited both his output and his ability to enjoy his role as one of the fathers of modern weird fiction.

The film makers assembled an all-star team of interviewees for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, with Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon and many others going before the camera to talk about Lovecraft and his place in history. Interwoven into the narrative are also brief examinations of some of his most popular stories.

Highly recommended.
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