Rusty Puppy

by Joe R. Lansdale

Edition 2017

Mulholland Books

Review by Roberto Matteucci

click here for Italian version

"... and buy me something good from McDonald's too."

"Do McDonald's sell good things?" (Chapter 25)

In an increasingly controversial human relationship in America, the friendship between Hap and Leonard should form a social basis, an example for the entire nation.

Hap and Leonard are not two movie or football stars but characters of the fantasy and imagination of a brilliant American writer Joe R. Lansdale.

The two courageous are actually very human and full of defects, intelligent features that have turned them into a widespread literary series, with adventures and many strong misadventures, all with similar characteristics, such as the beautiful setting in Texas.

Rusty Puppy written by Joe R. Lansdale in 2017 (Mulholland Books) is a fundamental episode both for the plot, every time exciting, both for the new and old characters that liven up the story.

A complicated Texas appears in the difference between the districts, those well administered, populated by well-off people and other more difficult areas, occupied by marginalized people, in economic and social difficulty. They are victims of both the police, which manages an authority at the limit of legality and criminal gangs, which use these areas as a base for their criminal activities. The writer points out how the beautiful neighborhoods are inhabited by whites and the others by African Americans. Distinction obviously not true.

The reality is differently commented on by the two protagonists, a peculiarity necessary in character formation.

For Leonard, black, gay, republican and conservative, being African-American is not a justification, everyone should be aware of their own lives and not use trivial excuses to provoke an aura of victimization, assigning guilt to bad society.

Hap is the opposite. Liberal, straight, white, and he carefully analyses the phenomena, recognizing how the personal will, desires and ambitions clashes with impassable walls, not positioned by themselves but by others.

It is the quality of the Lansdale series. The two personalities are overturned, forming the psychological and social situations of the novel; contrasts do not reject them, rather they approach them. The skill of Lansdale is to add his linguistic and structural style.

The plot is essential. The detectives - for passion and not for money - have to face a murder committed in Camp Rapture, a bad neighborhood. Hap and Leonard discover all the aberrations in Camp Rapture and with their attitude everything explodes, with its corruption, drug dealing, clandestine fighting between dogs, violence against women, rape of minors; all crime behaviors favored by incapable police, up to take the lead of criminal activities.

The setting confirms the presence of no-limit areas, led by various gangs. For police, these spaces are very difficult, and many times they mix with the bands. Hap and Leonard instead tackle it with skill, without fear and without any action politically correct; if they have to hit a mischievous and blackmailer black girl, they have no scruples, and they do it willingly, with the pleasure of the reader.

Like all Lansdale books, the conclusion is a duel like a classic western. Hap and Leonard face the bandits, usually helped by a strong and determined woman, a lover of guns: Manny. She helps them, she is hard and honest reinforcement and looks like a cowboy in the final scene. The arrival of the cavalry helps solves all problems.

The tone is ironic, full of jokes, teasing, mocking, with many role-playing games between the two characters, with long pages they deride each other, and they describe, mixing the truth to exaggeration. But the literary intimacies contain reflections on life and on their friendship until they go into issues of sex at the limit of the particular disproportionate.

The example is a the pages writes about an old tree, which has long been raised as a symbol of friendship. The end of the plant is obvious because life goes ahead by erasing any sort of sentimentality.

The speed of the wisecrack is the center of the novel. If they did not have such lively dialogues, Hap and Leonard would not exist. Dialogues are rapid quickly, cinematic dialogues, with a shot-reverse shot, there is no time to reflect and another sentence arrives inflexible.

Hap has a cynical and ruthless concept of the life, without superficiality and without the intrusion of God:

"... I would have wanted to stick a pair of forceps up their ass and tell them to see if Jesus could yank those out for them." (Chapter 1)

"She had a journalism degree, which is kind of like a degree in Latin. The uses are small." (Chapter 1)

In the opposite Leonard is scrupulous to people, he does not give two possibilities. Cynical destiny or bad society has nothing to do with it, it is personal and individual choice, and who make mistakes must take their responsibilities:

“Shit, man, you drove by white-trash fucker's house and seen it falling down, a washing machine and a stack of tires on the lawn, you 'd just think he was lazy-ass trash. You see black folk living like pigs, then you start handing out your liberal bullshit about how they are downtrodden.” (Chapter 4)

“... but a lot of what runs them over is their own self-pity. I was taught to work” (Chapter 4)