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It happens that you're there, nurturing your sloth, caressing it, and enjoying it while you roll up your lost hours and smoke them with a Dr. Pepper in one hand and a vanilla cookie in the other. You would like to continue like this, but no. A friend hands you a potential new client. You don’t take the job, but then they die; partly out of guilt and partly out of curiosity, you end up right in the usual mess.
Welcome back to the world of Hap & Leonard: two friends, two opposite characters, one single certainty – if something can go wrong, it will probably do so spectacularly.
Compared to the saga's first chapters, "Honky Tonk Samurai" feels less wild than "Mucho Mojo" and less explosive than "Rumble Tumble," but darker. More introspective. More... autumnal, if we want to use an adjective for people who read with a blanket on their legs and cinnamon tea. Yet the usual Lansdale is all there: the language is sharp, the dialogue crackles, and Texas... well, Texas remains that strip of land where civilization arrives two hundred years late and then apologizes.
Hap is still the same: white, idealistic, with the soul of a blues poet and the back of someone who’s done too many underpaid jobs. Leonard is his perfect alter ego: black, ex-marine, gay, and endowed with an enviable skill in pinpointing the exact target to mock or punch. In "Honky Tonk Samurai," the two seem more tired, but also more bonded than ever. They don’t need to say anything to each other: just a look is enough to get started. Or to stop before it's too late.
The plot – let’s clarify right away – is not the strong point. The mystery begins well but concludes with less impact than in other volumes. If in "The Two-Bear Mambo" the investigation was a mad jazz dance, here it's more of a slow dance with some stumbling. Yet you don’t really care, because Lansdale isn’t one to write to make you shout at a plot twist. He wants to tell you about the nuances of his Texas: dirty, brutal, tender in its own way.
The beauty of "Honky Tonk Samurai" is that you find yourself in it even when you think you know it all. You read and feel the dust on you, the humidity on your temples, the smell of overcooked vanilla cookies that brings you back to a grandmother you never had. And in the secondary characters – suspicious old ladies, cops with flexible morals, relatives buried under the weight of secrets – you find that talent Lansdale has for bringing to life even those who only pass for a page.
In short: not the most sparkling chapter of the saga, but one of the most mature. A novel that, rather than trying to amaze, takes you by the arm and says: “Come, I'll show you where the road really ends.”
And in the end, even if you haven't discovered America, you've seen something worth watching.
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