NECON is summer camp for writers, artists, and fans of speculative fiction!
Every year in Turin in the frame of the Lingotto Fiere the entire book supply chain gathers: publishing houses, writers, booksellers, librarians, agents, illustrators, translators and many, many readers. For publishers, from large groups to independents, the Show is the most important opportunity to sell and present editorial news. For all readers, the Salone is a great international culture festival: 2,000 guests from all over the world for a total of 1,200 events. Every year the authors who have made the history of literature of the twentieth century and our century arrive at the Salone.
Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (translation courtesy of Google)
Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino offers a massive programming schedule including events featuring Joe R Lansdale and Lavie Tidhar.
At what point is science fiction? The ideas, discoveries, history and stories of the publisher who marked a literary genre
With Simone Bonaccorso, Aurora Cancian, Loredana Lipperini, Maurizio Manzieri, Lavie Tidhar and Francesco Verso
(translation courtesy of Google)
Vietnam vet, sometimes private investigator, sometimes bouncer, and all around bad ass, Leonard Pine is a gay, politically conservative black man from LaBorde, TX. Alongside his “brother” Hap Collins, who is straight, white, and liberal, Pine challenges the seedier and more unpleasant elements of East Texas. The, at times, bumbling duo has fought the Klan, the Dixie Mafia, murders, kidnappers, and all sorts of other notorious hombres.
Pine has zero tolerance for racist or anti-gay slurs and will challenge the offenders with strong fists and a barbed tongue. His aggressive nature has led to many encounters with the law, most notably regarding his repeated torching of neighborhood crackhouses.
Beginning with Savage Season (1990), Joe R. Lansdale used his adventures with Collins, as the basis for the popular Hap and Leonard series. The 25 published books include five titles currently available from Tachyon Publications: HAP AND LEONARD (2016), THE BIG BOOK OF HAP AND LEONARD (2018), HAP AND LEONARD: BLOOD AND LEMONADE (2018), OF MICE AND MINESTRONE (2020), and BORN FOR TROUBLE: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HAP AND LEONARD (2022). The pair’s life also inspired the TV series, Hap and Leonard, which is currently available on Netflix.
All of us at Tachyon wish a happy birthday to Leonard, our favorite cantankerous moral enforcer. May your day be filled with vanilla cookies and Dr. Pepper.
In celebration of the release of Joe R. Lansdale’s outstanding BORN FOR TROUBLE: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HAP AND LEONARD, Tachyon presents glimpses from the new collection.
Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard stories are right up there with Richard Stark’s Parker books to me. With a prose style that makes it all look easy, he continues to write about these characters until I feel like they’re old friends coming for a visit, or taking me on a road trip that I know is going to go wrong, but I want to go on anyway. An inspiration to all of us who make our living in the crime fiction section, BORN FOR TROUBLE is yet another masterclass in how it’s done.
—Ed Brubaker, author of The Fade Out and Pulp
Joe Lansdale’s compassion and humanity have touched thousands of readers, me included, right where we live. Of all his vivid and lived-in characters, none are as beloved as Hap and Leonard, and this new collection, BORN FOR TROUBLE: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HAP AND LEONARD will delight Hap and Leonard fans all over the world.
—Lewis Shiner, author of Glimpses and Outside the Gates of Eden
“You know I’ll love you, no matter what,” Brett said, “but I think maybe you ought to get something.”
“Something?” I said.
We were lying in bed. I had just made an attempt to make love to my wife and had failed. It was starting to be a regular thing. I had the urge, and just looking at her always warmed me up, but now my mind warmed, but the tool for the job didn’t.
“You aren’t a spring chicken anymore,” Brett said.
“But we aren’t that old, either,” I said.
“I know I’m not,” Brett said, “but we’re talking about you.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Okay, here’s the thing. You can’t get the sock to fill up, you can always do other things.”
“I’m all for that,” I said, “and we already do other things, but what’s the end game for me?”
“Yeah, I guess it ought to be good for you too.”
“Ha, ha.”
“All I’m asking is you go see your doctor, ask him about it.”
“Don’t think I need pills.”
“You can be sure with a checkup.”
“What’s he going to ask me do, get a hard-on in his office, jack me off? I don’t think so. It’s all guesswork.”
“Right now, it’s not any kind of work.”
I turned on my side and looked at her. She showed me a Bugs Bunny grin.
“Love you,” she said.
Who would have thought me worrying about my erection problem was going to lead to murder?
“I think I’m okay, just tired,” I said.
I was in the doctor’s office and he had me sitting on the end of one of those tables they have, a paper cover stretched over it. I was only wearing my shorts and socks, as he’d given me an overall exam. I noticed one of my socks had a hole where the big toe goes.
“You’re okay, but you can’t get it up?” Doctor Sylvan asked.
“I haven’t been able to get it up lately. It’s a phase.”
“How long is lately?”
“I don’t know, couple months.”
“You are older, but you know, we can fix that.”
“You can make me young again?”
“Very funny. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, they couldn’t put your ass together again.”
“You mean Viagra?”
“Perhaps. You know, Hap, been your doctor a long time, and we’re close. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my finger up your ass feeling your prostate—”
“Always my favorite part of an exam,” I said.
“And mine. You are about as affable as anyone I know, a little smart-mouthed, but considering I have that disease, I let that go. Thing is, though, there’s rumors all over town about you and Leonard.”
“About our clandestine sexual encounters in the men’s restroom at the bus station?”
“No. About how maybe you two have done some things that are, shall we say, on the dark side.”
“Rumors. Said it yourself.”
“Lot of rumors, and some from good sources, and listen here, any of what I’ve heard is true, you’re doing what a lot of us would like to do.”
“Really?”
“I too would love to fuck sheep, but, you know, I have to be careful, being a doctor.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Look. Not kidding. I know you and Leonard have had your moments with miscreants. I tend to believe
those stories. Some of the scars you got, I didn’t sew those up, and some of the work looks like it might have been done by a veterinarian.”
“Their work looks different?”
“Not so much, but I can spot a different kind of stitch, also, some of those scars you got, they look to me to have been from knives, and gunshots.”
“I’ve been in the hospital for being stabbed, Doc. You know that. You were there.”
“Uh-huh, but a lot of those wounds, don’t remember those.”
“I was out of town. I live a clumsy life.”
“Here’s what I’m getting at, Hap. I’m all for giving you a pill that will turn your pecker into a Zeppelin, but I’m not eager to give out things like that if I think there might be another reason.”
“You’re buying that whole thing about me being tired?”
“Nope. You look pretty perky to me, and you’re in good health for someone your age.”
“I think Mickey Mantle said if he knew he was going to live this long he’d taken better care of himself.”
“What I’m going to suggest is you see a therapist.”
“A therapist? What the hell for?”
“If, and I say if, you have done what I think you’ve done, you might ought to talk to someone. Things like I think you might have done, and we’ll say it in code, killing a lot of fucking people, might build on your con science. This tough guy thing, I don’t buy it.”
“I’m not really trying to sell that image. And by the way, that wasn’t code.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Gonna give you a name. See her a couple times, and there doesn’t seem to be something under the surface, we’ll talk about Viagra. Thing is, though, if it is something other than needing lead in your pencil, and this other stuff is causing it, it’s probably affecting you in other ways as well.”
He leaned over and tapped my head with his finger.
“Might be a lot of stuff in there you’re dealing with and you just don’t know it. Little therapy might help you do more than get a stiff one back.”
“I don’t know Doc.”
“I’ll go get her card.”
If you already know Joe Lansdale, you don’t need me to tell you to read BORN FOR TROUBLE. If you don’t, you’re in for a hell of a ride. Pulpy, blackly humorous, compulsively readable, and somehow both wildly surreal and down-to-earth. Lansdale is a national fucking treasure.
—Christa Faust, author of Money Shot
We left our fishing gear up on the rise and found her at the bottom of the hill lying in the leaves with her head on a rotting log. She was a young woman with long blonde hair, in her thirties I figured. She might have been pretty before, but the way she had been beat, it was hard to tell. She wasn’t wearing much, a formerly white blouse now mostly the color of the leaves and dirt. She wasn’t wearing pants or underwear. Her head was swollen and she was bruised on the arms and legs, and her bare feet were a bloody mess. She was lying in an ant bed and was covered with ant bites.
All of that she could get over in time, but the wound in her side wasn’t something that merely required bed rest and a couple of aspirin. Something was sticking out of her. I looked. It was an arrow with plastic feathers on the end of the shaft.
I brushed the ants off of her, and we picked her up, Leonard at her head, me at her feet. We carried her to a pile of leaves that was better than the ant bed.
Her eyes were slits. She had taken such a beating she couldn’t quite open them, at least not completely. She looked up at me and cried.
Leonard said to her, “We’ll get an ambulance.”
“They’re out there,” she said, and when she opened her mouth I could see her front teeth were chipped.
“Who’s out there?” I said.
“Those men.”
“How many?” I said.
“Two men and two women. They rented me. Like a carnival ride.”
“You saying you’re a working girl?” Leonard said.
She nodded.
“They’re after me. They’re hunting me.”
“Who’s after you?” I said.
“Them.” By then she hardly had the breath to speak.
I took my canteen off my belt, slipped my hand under her head, lifted her up and gave her a drink of water. She gulped greedily. I only let her have a small amount to keep from making her sick, then I laid her head down gently on the leaves.
“They took me off a Houston street,” she said. “I do it for my daughter.”
“No judgment from us,” Leonard said.
“They spent days raping and beating me, and then they took me out here, drove out onto a trail, made me walk deep in the woods. They raped me again and set me loose, said I had an hour. They caught up with me and shot me with an arrow, but I got away. I don’t know how I did it, but I got away. But they’re coming. They’ll find me.”
“Take it easy,” Leonard said. “When did you last see them?”
“I don’t know. It was night. That’s what helped me. Oh, Jesus, my head is swimming.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
She quit talking and lay still.
“We got to get her back to the car, drive her to a hospital,” Leonard said.
My thought was she wouldn’t make it that long. That wound in her side was bad and she had lost a lot of blood.
“Hap,” Leonard said.
She had stopped moving. One moment she had been talking and now she wasn’t saying anything or making any sounds, no moaning, no breathing. Her face was slack and her lips were turning blue.
I put my head to her chest. No heartbeat. I touched her throat to feel a pulse. Nada.
“She checked out,” I said.
“Damn. . . . Do you believe her story?”
“There’s an arrow sticking out of her. She was either telling the truth or Robin Hood missed a shot at a deer.”
That’s when we heard a noise, someone coming, being loud, purposely. My guess was they wanted her to hear them coming and cause fear.
Two men began to call out.
Every Lansdale book is a gift, and this collection of Hap and Leonard stories is no different. If you already love the characters, you absolutely need this. If you’re new, this is a fine place to meet them. I hope these stories go on forever.
—Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim series
“Born for Trouble”—well, you can say that again. Hap and Leonard are a raucous, daredevil duo with more lives each than the proverbial cat, and really, thank goodness for that. Their adventures are a pleasure to follow, the hijinks and shenanigans anchored by the warmth of camaraderie and a steady flow of excellent jokes.”
—Stephanie Cha, author of Your House Will Pay
Me and Leonard were cruising back from a fishing trip.
We’d been at a cabin Leonard’s boyfriend, Pookie, owned on the lake. Pookie couldn’t make it, but we had the key, and we spent a partial day and a lot of the night sitting in lawn chairs on the cabin’s deck where it over-hung the water, sitting with big glasses of iced tea, now and again casting our fishing lines, hiding during the day under the shadows of our wide-brimmed straw hats, pushing them back on our foreheads at night to feel the cool breeze blowing off the lake, rippling the dark water.
We caught four fish and threw them all back. Those fish would have stories to tell. Hope word didn’t get back to Aquaman. Things might turn nasty.
Of course, the trip wasn’t about fishing, it was about me and Leonard hanging, without distractions, talking. We had been through the mill as of late, and some time off was doing us good, and it probably wasn’t hurting my wife’s feelings either. She and my daughter were spending a day doing pretty much the same thing Leonard and I were doing, minus the fish.
Now it was over and it was deep night, and I was driving us home. The moon was a silver slice. Shadows hung from the trees on either side of the narrow road like crepe paper at a funeral. We were fifty or sixty miles from home. I was driving Leonard’s pickup and he was dozing on the passenger side. There were a lot of curves in the road and the headlights danced around the curves. I wasn’t driving real fast, but I wasn’t messing around either. I was ready to be home and in my own bed with Brett.
The road straightened out finally, rose up a hill where the trees were thick on my left and thin on my right. As the truck’s headlights topped the hill a woman showed up in my lane, waving her hands.
I swerved and crossed into the left lane, wheeled around her, found the right lane again, skidded to a tooth-rattling stop that nearly sent me off the edge of the road, where I would have bumped over a short drop of weeds and rocks, and possibly would have fetched up against a barbed-wire fence. If the fence snapped, they might have found us and the pickup wearing a couple of cows.
Leonard came awake with a shout, looked at me. I didn’t say anything. I got out of the truck and rushed back to where the woman stood in the road wringing her hands, crying and yelling, “He’s down there.”
She was pale of skin, had her blonde hair up in a pile. Strands of it had slipped loose and had fallen across her face like leaking vanilla. By moonlight, and I assumed by any light, she had a very nice face. She was carrying a white purse. It was draped over her shoulder by a long strap. She was wearing an expensive looking white dress and had on a silver necklace and matching double bracelets on both wrists; they clattered together like the wagging tail of a rattlesnake. She wasn’t wearing any shoes.
By that time Leonard was with us. His black skin looked like sweat-wet chocolate in the bright moonlight. It was that kind of weather, even late at night.
I said, “I’m going down for a look.”
“I’ll get her out of the road,” Leonard said. “Come on, lady.”
Leonard gently touched her arm, guided her toward his pickup. I watched them go away, him walking slow, her balancing on her naked toes like a ballerina, trying to put as little of her foot on the blacktop as she could manage.
I went down the hill. I could see a white Lincoln at the bottom of it. A ridge of trees stood in front of it, and between the trees I could see the barbed-wire fence that ran behind them. The car was mashed up primarily against a sweetgum tree, though part of an oak had got into the act. White smoke was hissing out from under the hood. The windshield was shattered, but still in place, the front of the Lincoln was as crumpled as an accordion.
You could call BORN FOR TROUBLE a collection of stories. But that’s like calling Paradise Lost by Milton a poem. BORN FOR TROUBLE is a road map through 20th-century crime fiction, and your guides are two of the greatest, most intriguing characters ever created, Hap and Leonard. Rambunctious, complex, and endlessly fascinating, these two best friends offer a clear yet sometimes painful view of America in general, and East Texas in particular. Oh, by the way the cartographer of that map is one of the most original inventive and masterful storytellers to put pen to paper, Joe R. Lansdale. BORN FOR TROUBLE is bound to be a classic.
—S.A. Cosby author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland
The sun was falling behind the trees as we came over the hill in Leonard’s pickup, pulling a boat trailer loaded down with our small boat. We had been fishing and had caught a few. Our usual method was we terrorized the poor fish and threw them back at the end of the day, which for the fish, if you considered the alternative, wasn’t so bad.
On this day however we caught about a half dozen good-sized perch and a couple of bass, and we thought we’d clean them and dip them in a thick batter and fry them in a deep Dutch oven full of popping grease.
I’ve cut back on my fried foods for years now, but once in a while a bit of fried fish or fried chicken sets me right for quite a few months and I thought this would be one of those times. But our intended fish fry was cut short before the fish so much as got cleaned for frying.
As we came over the hill, the trees crowding in on us from both sides, we saw there was a blue bus coming down the road, straddling the middle line. Leonard made with an evasive maneuver, but by this point the trees on the right side were gone, and there was a shallow creek visible, one that fed into the private lake where we had been fishing. There was no other place to go.
The bus seemed to come for us as we veered, and I saw right before impact that there was a black kid at the wheel, his eyes wild, working the steering wheel with everything he had, but it wasn’t enough. He was out of control. The bus hit us with a loud smack and I remember suddenly feeling the odd sensation of the tires leaving the ground and the truck turning over in mid-air. I heard the trailer snap loose and saw the boat sailing along in front of us, and then it was out of sight and we were in the creek, the roof of the truck on the bottom of the creek bed, water coming in through the damaged windows.
I heard a slow groaning of metal and realized the bus was on top of the truck and the roof of the truck was slowly crunching down into the creek bed and the floor of the truck was coming down to meet us. Another few seconds and me and Leonard would be pressed like sandwich meat.
I tried to get out of my seat belt, but nothing doing. I might as well have been fastened to that seat with duct tape. I held my breath as the water rushed in through the shattered windows, but the belt still wouldn’t come loose. A little, cardboard, pine-tree-shaped air freshener floated in front of my face, a shadowed shape against the dying sunlight leaking in at the edges of the side truck windows. A moment later the belt struggle was too much and I passed out, feeling as if I were drowning. Last thing I remember before going out was Leonard had hold of my arm—
That was it.
When I came to, I was lying on the ground on my side by the edge of the creek. I was dizzy and felt like I’d been swallowed by a snake and shit down a hole. My throat was raw, and I knew I had most likely puked a batch of creek water.
I turned my head and could see the bus, which I realized now was a bookmobile. rolling literature was painted in large white letters on the side. It was sitting with its tires on top of Leonard’s truck, the windshield blown out. I could still hear the groaning sound as the weight of it slowly squashed the truck and shoved it deeper into the creek bed. Leonard was holding an open pocketknife in his hand, the one he had used to cut my belt loose. He looked exhausted.
“Good thing you come around,” Leonard said. “Mouth to mouth wasn’t going to happen, pal. Come to that, I was going to be walking home alone.”
“The kid?”
Leonard shook his head. “What’s left of him oozed out through the bus’s windshield. Glass worked on him like a cheese grater.”
“Shit,” I said, sitting up.
“I was you, wouldn’t go look. You don’t need that in your head. Bet he ain’t more than twelve years old.”
Books were floating out of the shattered windows of the bookmobile and were pushed along gradually by the current like dead fish. The water was either red with sunlight or with blood. Night settled in and the red in the creek turned black as ink and the bus looked like a small island out there in the shallow water.
