Customer Reviews

The Two-Bear Mambo: A Hap and Leonard Novel (3) (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

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Hap and Leonard just can't seem to keep themselves out of trouble. At the beginning of The Two-Bear Mambo, Leonard is yet again setting fire to the drug dealers' house next door. Their friend Lt. Hanson has to take them in just because, but when Hap's ex-girlfriend -- and Hanson's current squeeze -- Florida Grange goes missing, Hanson agrees to drop the charges if Hap and Leonard will go look for her in Grovetown, a burg in East Texas known for its violent Klan members, and where Florida was last seen.

The Two-Bear Mambo is so far the most unflinching in its portrayal of Southern racism. Grovetown is even worse than I could have imagined and Lansdale does not look away for a moment. Leonard is the obvious target, but Hap's association with him brings him into the fray of violence as well. And as for Florida: well, no one as yet has admitted to even seeing her...

My white Southern guilt was intensified while reading The Two-Bear Mambo; the characters, their ideas, and their violence are all-too familiar from my upbringing. So much so that I could barely even bring myself to read it in public, afraid of what the people around me -- seeing the N-word on nearly every page -- would think I was reading (as if the barely euphemistic title weren't embarrassing enough).

But the trademark Lansdale humor abounds in sarcastic remarks and in the first-person narration of Hap -- whose difference from the author himself seems to be getting less and less. Lansdale has said that he is very comfortable with the voice of Hap and the easy-going prose makes that obvious. Despite my emotional reaction to the book, I look forward to continuing the adventures of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. I'm glad they can't keep away from trouble; if they did, I'd be reading some other book that isn't nearly as fun.

THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO by Joe R. Lansdale continues the saga of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine where MUCHO MOJO left off. It starts out with Hap arriving at Leonard's house on Christmas Eve night. Blasting out of his friend's home is the music to "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and Leonard is next door, kicking righteous butt and burning down the neighborhood crack house once again. The police pull Hap and Leonard in, but Lieutenant Marvin Hanson gets them off the hook, provided they do him a small favor. It seems that Hap's old girlfriend, Florida Grange (the one who left him for Hanson) took off to Grovetown, Texas to do an article on a black musician who supposedly hung himself while in the custody of the local police. Florida has suddenly vanished, and Hanson wants Hap and Leonard to pay a visit to Grovetown to see if they can find out anything. The only problem is that this particular Texas town is right out of the fifties and sixties. It's a viper's nest filled with Klansmen, led by Jackson Brown, who enjoy murdering the black folks and seem to be getting away with it. Both Hap and Leonard know that they're going to have their hands full just trying to stay alive as they attempt to investigate Florida's disappearance. Even together, as tough as they are, both men are going to find out that they've bitten off more than they can chew when they take on the populace of Grovetown. They'll find themselves in the middle of free-for-all that would put Billy Jack to shame and come very close to getting beaten to death. Both men will discover true fear for the first time in their lives and have to find a way of dealing with it as their injuries heal, if they want to be able to face each other again, as well as solve the mystery of what happened to Florida when they eventually return to Grovetown to face the evil of its people. THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO will give you a slightly different perspective of our two heroes this time around, making them more flawed and human. As tough as Hap and Leonard are, they're not invincible, and both of them come very close to death as they seek to right a wrong. They will find out things about themselves that will at first be difficult to face; yet, in the long run will make them stronger. Though a part of me knows that these two characters are fictional, the writing is so good that another part of me almost believes that they're real. These are guys that I'd simply love to hang out with, and it's a tribute to the talent of Joe R. Lansdale that he's created such believable characters...characters who are funny, skilled martial artists, almost always unemployed, who have the same kinds of problems with relationships that real people do, and who have a strong sense of honor and justice that gets them into trouble more often than not. Mr. Lansdale is able to do this because he has a unique skill in writing that comes off as being natural and down to earth, but is actually a master craftsman at work. He knows how to make each and every character in the novel come alive in ways I wish other authors could emulate. I never know how each book is going to end; and, quite often, I find myself stunned by who gets killed off. As you can probably tell, the "Hap Collins/Leonard Pine" series has swept me off of my feet in a way that few other books have, and it's one I can highly recommend to any reader who loves novels filled with action, humor, self-reflection, and characters that make you truly believe. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do after I read SAVAGE SEASON and then CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS. I wish I could sit down with Hap and Leonard, have a beer, and talk about this particular problem. Of course, I wouldn't get any sympathy from them. In fact, I'd probably have to spend an hour or more listening to their problems!!

These Hap Collins/Leonard Pine books is probably the best series you've never heard of. If you're already a fan of the books , you know what to expect, a good plot, great characters, and maybe the best dialogue in the business. Two-Bear Mambo is my personal favorite. If you just discovered this series , start with the first book "Savage Season" and jump right in.

In this novel, Joe Lansdale continues and deepens the partnership/friendship of Hap and Leonard, seen previously in Savage Season and Mucho Mojo.More than any other current writer, Lansdale has the uncanny knack of placing more hilarious dialogue and description on virtually every page, while he follows this seemingly mismatched pair's quest to find a friend who has disappeared deep in Klan country. Lansdale manages to shine his literary light on racism, southern culture, human relationships and foibles, all within the context of this gripping suspense novel. I guarantee that you'll not only set aside this book at times to think, but that you'll have to stop reading regularly to laugh out loud. A most wonderfully human novel from this gifted writer

Lansdale delivers another fine novel featuring Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, one of the oddest (and toughest) couples in mystery fiction. Hap, straight and white, and Leonard, gay and black, travel to Grovetown, Texas, a city that makes Johannesburg look like a bastion of racial unity. They are searching for Hap's ex-girlfriend Florida Grange, last seen there. Wisecracking all the way (even when they're getting the s**t kicked out of `em), the boys stir up a hornet's nest, and in the process learn some hard lessons about themselves and the nature of their friendship.

Two Bear evoked memories of the best of Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald. Parker, because of the dialogue, and MacDonald because of the characterization. Lansdale's characters are real people who can get hurt, even killed-- he really puts them through the wringer. Their adversaries aren't cardboard villains, twirling handlebar mustaches. Menacing and memorable, driven by hate, greed, prejudice, lust and ignorance, these folks are scary because you might meet them in real life.

In short, The Two Bear Mambo is classic Lansdale--a good, tough thoroughly enjoyable book that you will remember long after finishing.

Joe R. Lansdale's THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO also enjoys professional reader Phil Gigante's smooth voice as it packs suspense and humor into the story of two who search for Florida Grange, a gorgeous lawyer and former lover who has vanished in Texas as she was investigating a mysterious jailhouse death. Tension and intrigue mount in a satisfying audio story.

Two-Bear Mambo was my first Lansdale novel. The characters are wonderful and the dialogue is reminiscent of Robert S. Parker's Spenser and Hawk. I live in Texas and am very familiar with East Texas - the location of Hap and Leonard's escapades. I can smell the piney woods of East Texas when I read the book. The plot was not as complex as I have come to love in James Lee Burke novels. There was enough in this novel, however, to make me want to read more. I just ordered Vanilla Ride.

Joe Lansdale again shows off his unique talent in "The Two-Bear Mambo", third in the cynically funny series of homespun east-Texas yarns featuring arguably pop fiction's most bizarre and unlikely crime fighting pair: Hap Collins and Leonard Pine.

As with "Savage Season" and "Mucho Mojo" before it, the action and laughs never take a pause, but also serve only as a thin veneer over serious themes of racism and bigotry. This time around, Hap and Leonard pick up where "Mojo" left off - complete with yet another crack house fire of not-so-curious origin. The plot thickens when our heroes pack their sack lunches into Leonard's wreck, and with Hank Williams crooning on the cassette deck, head out for Grovetown, a redneck enclave run - at least unofficially - by the Klan. And the last place on earth where very black, and very gay, Leonard wants to be. But Hap's old flame Florida Grange has gone missing trying to budt a mystery surrounding some undiscovered recordings of a legendary local bluesman, tangled up with the suspicious jailhouse "suicide" of his mostly worthless son. Hap and Leonard, hardly seasoned investigators, stumble around Grovetown un-welcome and, with little to show for their efforts, soon find themselves predictably over their heads, out manned, out witted, most definitely out-gunned, and out of luck.

As Lansdale's superb series progresses, it also becomes darker and weightier. Never a stranger to violence, Lansdale tightens the thumbscrews in this one, taking head-on difficult and uncomfortable themes. Unlike the mostly unmitigated swagger of Hap and Leonard in the first two installments, Landale's sardonic slang exposes some very real fear and vulnerability hear, lending some realism to plots - and main characters - that could easy slide down a slippery slope to pure fantasy. Like the classic storytellers of this and prior generations, Lansdale again demonstrates that wisdom isn't synonymous with an unabriged dictionary-class vocabulary.

I picked this up as an audio-book in my library, without realizing that this was part of a Hap-Leonard series. It's a story of two friends, one white and straight and the other black and gay, trying to find a missing friend in the most racist town in the country.

Looking back, I wish that I had started with the first novel in the series. This novel was very funny, and the writing was earthy, graphic, irreverent, and engaging. The reader of the audio-book was excellent, doing a variety of voices as well as any reader that I can recall. At the start of the novel, it took me a while to get to know Leonard and Hap, and appreciate their friendship. It was as if the author expected you to have read the other books in the series, and this just picked things up where the series had left off. The plot was not especially interesting, and the secondary characters were humorous stereotypes who often made me smile but did not come alive to me. If you love this book, it will be because you already like Hap and Leonard and you want more of them. Leonard is a great character, and by the end of this, I began to appreciate Leonard and Hap as a twosome.

As a stand-alone novel, this was only fair to me. Judging from other reviewers, this might be much stronger novel if you go into this already knowing the main characters.

Books like these are what everyone should be reading. It's damn near a crime that they aren't, but I guess it makes those of us who ARE fans a special little group.

Lansdale is completely unafraid to do what he has to do to further his stories. That means people you like will die, or turn out to be bad folks. It means you can't get too comfortable and think you know what's going to happen when you settle down with one of Lansdale's masterpieces.

"Two-Bear Mambo" continues the Hap & Leonard friendship: a white heterosexual Democrat and a black homosexual Republican, respectively. The story begins on Christmas Eve, where Leonard is burning down the crackhouse next door for the third time. The two friends are approached by their police buddies and sent on a mission to track down their friend: Florida Grange - Hap's old flame and Leonard's lawyer. Grange was last seen in Grovetown, a real, live throwback to the heavily segregated racist '60's.

Of course, they leave right away, and once again start stirring up trouble and townfolk in the flooded little town. As previously mentioned, no one is ever who you think they are, and things are never what they seem.

Bravo, Lansdale.