Writer Joe Lansdale gives ‘Hap and Leonard’ its East Texas twang

HOUSTON — Joe Lansdale projects a warm, ebullient personality for a guy who routinely drops horrific scenes of violence into the minds of his readers. At Murder by the Book, one of Houston’s independent bookstores, Lansdale could pass for one of his own fans: white hair, bright eyes and a switchblade smile, a pop-culture enthusiast wearing a denim jacket from Sun Studio in Memphis. Gathered early at the store are some of those fans, who convened for the release of “Honky Tonk Samurai,” Lansdale’s ninth novel about Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, two East Texas characters who often find themselves nudged from the periphery of criminal activity into a more precarious spot. Hap and Leonard have spent enough time uncovering and unraveling nefarious plans that in Lansdale’s latest, they’re working for Hap’s girlfriend, who runs a detective agency. Lansdale says he never really put together a film version of the book in his head, though at one point he could have seen Jeff Bridges and Laurence Fishburne in the roles. [...] popular culture has finally begun to catch up with Lansdale, a 64-year-old Gladewater native whose grisly, radiant body of work includes crime, horror, science fiction, Westerns and other genres in novels, short stories, graphic novels and comics. Lansdale’s career looks as if it may begin to mirror that of his good friend George R.R. Martin, who enjoyed success as a genre-fiction writer but experienced frustrations working in film and TV until his novel “A Game of Thrones” became a television hit. A Lansdale novella about Elvis Presley living in a retirement home became cult-cinema favorite “Bubba Ho-Tep” in 2002. Writing wasn’t a vocation Lansdale considered growing up, the son of a mechanic who couldn’t read but possessed a gift for storytelling, and a mother who greatly valued having books in the house. For years, Lansdale has been based in Nacogdoches, where he works as the writer in residence at Stephen F. Austin State University and runs a martial arts school. In the pilot of the TV show, they’re lured into an opportunity for a cash grab by Trudy, a classic genre femme fatale played by Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men.” While the key three roles in “Hap & Leonard” are likely to make strong impressions, Lansdale works his real magic in the margins. The ability to create such memorable characters in part is responsible for the word “fun” getting tagged to Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard books in reviews. The characters are created with a sort of joyfulness — for language and the provocative power it possesses — but the visual violence in Lansdale’s dark, dark world is far from whimsical.