I'm a couple of months behind on my Hap and Leonard runthrough, but that actually worked out because I've reached a busy 2017 for Joe R. Lansdale, starting out with a novella called 'Coco Butternut' and hey, what's that that just arrived for review, but 'Born for Trouble: The Further Adventures of Hap and Leonard'? This is a collection of stories due for publication next March and it kicks off with 'Coco Butternut'. I'll take that on around its release date but, for now, here's the pertinent part of it!

And, while I enjoyed 'Coco Butternut' because Lansdale has become so effortless with his prose about Hap and Leonard this far into the series and it's nigh on impossible to not like it, it seemed a little simplistic to someone who's read everything preceding it. I've had this problem to at least some degree with each of the shorter works, whether that was 'Hyenas' and 'Dead Aim' or 'Briar Patch Boogie' and 'Hoodoo Harry'. It's the same here but more so because I found myself actively missing the complications.

The formula for Hap and Leonard stories invariably begins with them getting caught up in something. Often, at this point, it's a case and Coco Butternut is the case that's being explained to Brett, Hap's much better half who's running the private detective agency nowadays. She's a dog, a dead dog at that, a show dachshund who passed and was mummified and wrapped and buried at Oak Rest. Now her body has been stolen and the family of her owner want it back from the bad guys ransoming it and so hire Hap and Leonard to handle the exchange.

So far so good, and the next step plays out as expected too. Of course, things turn out to be a little bit more complicated than that and we aren't surprised when it doesn't go quite as smoothly as expected. We're also not too surprised to discover what turns up to complicate matters: there's a human corpse under a secret bottom in the coffin. Hap and Leonard stories usually acquire at least one human corpse at some point and this is a neat way to introduce one.

However, in the regular novels, discovering and solving that first mystery isn't close to being enough. Doing so inevitably brings in other people, probably capable bad guys who try to take down our heroes, come off the worse of it but score some victories too and everything escalates agreeably. In the novellas and especially in the novelette, it doesn't happen that way because there simply isn't enough room. So we get the first mystery and that's about it. And that's what happens here.

I'm guessing that some people enjoy these little dips into Hap and Leonard's world as kind of palate cleansers. The novels are full immersion and we feel the best ones right along with the heroes. Maybe a simpler case and a quicker solution can be refreshing, showing that not everything that they touch turns to crap. One of the best aspects of these characters for me is that they're not know-it-alls. They're not stupid either, but they walk into traps and make mistakes and things go sideways on them regularly and that's great. Maybe I should be happy that, every once in a while, that doesn't happen much and they can just chalk off another case like that.

But part of me wants more. This case feels like it doesn't really deserve a novella. It's the sort of case that I ought to hear from the boys at Leonard's kitchen table over Dr. Pepper and vanilla wafers rather than in the more formal setting of a book. Don't get me wrong, it's good stuff but it's skimpy stuff for this series and, reading at the fairly accelerated pace of one published title per month, I've just covered four novellas and a novelette in six months. I enjoyed all of them but it's the one novel in and amongst them that's stayed with me. It's like I've had five snacks and one meal.

And that means that, as enjoyable as this was, I'm notably looking forward to getting my teeth into the upcoming novels. There is one more novella to come, 'Cold Cotton', another inclusion in this trade paperback, along with 'Sad Onions', which looks like a short story, but otherwise it will be novels. 'Rusty Puppy' is next, the first of two from 2017, the second being a "mosaic novel" called 'Blood and Lemonade'. Then it's 'Jackrabbit Smile' from 2018 and 'The Elephant of Surprise' from 2019. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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