It's Christmastime, which Leonard Pine is celebrating by burning down the crack house next door for the 3rd time. At least one of those prior times, his buddy Hap Collins helped him with, so they both get hauled in by a local cop acquaintance. But one of the cop's is (or was) dating Hap's ex-girlfriend, Florida, and she went missing in Grovestown, an extremely racist town a couple of hours away. Hap and Leonard can go investigate, or they can spend some time in jail. They choose to investigate.
All told, they'd have been better off in jail.
I think Lansdale's written several of these "Hap & Leonard" stories. Enough it had a 3 season (18 episodes) TV show on, Sundance Channel. I caught a few episodes via some streaming service Alex let me bum off him, but I couldn't quite get in the flow of it.
I'm not sure I did much better with the book. Two-Bear Mambo isn't so much about Florida being missing, so much as it feels like it's Hap and Leonard needing to recognize their self-destructive tendencies. They agree to investigate, even though Hap is quite aware neither of them are anything like a detective. But Leonard owns a lot of guns, and the two of them have kicked a lot of ass, and they figure that'll be enough.
It's not. They only finally get anywhere on locating Florida after most of the people who would give them trouble have fled the town, expecting the dam upstream to fail. Previously, they'd gotten the shit kicked out of them, and Leonard nearly castrated, by a mob of racists they decided to rile up. Because they'd always gotten away with it before, so there's no reason to even consider whether discretion is the better part of valor. Leonard's arsenal never even had a chance to come into play, and they spent weeks recuperating at home.
Hap is continually thinking the sheriff is some dumb racist, and while Cantuck is indeed somewhat racist (on the mild end for Grovestown, however), he's not stupid. One black man that lets them recover from the beating at his house ends up tarred. They can't do a thing for him but offer useless "sorry"s. They find Florida far too late, and it seems like she was just on some get-rich scheme to use some dead musician's rep, anyway.
It all has the feel of the end of an era. Hap needs to actually find a job, some kind of job, and pay some bills, and stop moping over Florida leaving him. Leonard needs to stop being so hellbent on trying to fistfight the entire world, and pissing away potential chances at happiness. They sort of dance around it near the end, when they're sitting in a shitty pickup truck in a nearly-flooded town, with no idea what they're doing, and Leonard remarks he could have been at home, having dinner with his boyfriend, and maybe getting a little that night. Whether these two are actually capable of learning a lesson, that I'm less sure of.
Having only read this one Lansdale story, I don't know if it's typical, but he uses the word "nigger" so heavily I expect Taratino would have advised him to dial it down. It is a story about some really racist people, and they're the ones who mostly use it. The remainder being mostly Leonard, who as a black man, seems to be using it to throw it back in their face, or show that they aren't going to cow him in submission with it. I don't know educational standards in East Texas in the late-80s, but I'm thinking they need more vocabulary quizzes.
Beyond that, there's a lot of metaphors for the size of a person of their anatomy, or a lot of time spent describing how beat to hell a character is. The one bit I think might be a Lansdale recurring thing is the character in an existential quandary where they ask themselves a bunch of questions they don't know the answer to (or won't admit.) Elvis did it partway through Bubba Ho-Tep, wondering if he'd take the money and the fame back if he could, and Hap does something similar here. A certain similarity in the phrasing, the cadence of the questions in this story, that echoed the movie.
This book didn't exactly sell me on Lansdale's writing, but it didn't put me off him entirely, either. I think I'd try a book with different characters next time, though.
'When the laughter slowed, Leonard said, "You know, every one of us, when you think about it, just missed about this much," Leonard held up his hand and made a C with his thumb and forefinger, "being a turd. Every one of us. I mean, there's only about this much space between one hole and the other. And we all missed the shithole by this much." Leonard lowered his hand, looked at Gray Suit, and smiled, "Except you, mister. You made it. Your mama shit a turd, put a suit on it, and named it you."'
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