Joe Lansdale’s Mucho Mojo is a commercial crime novel about two middle-aged, Odd-Coupley best friends who talk smack to each other while solving mysteries. Lansdale himself is perhaps the most well-known contemporary writer who wears his pulp influences so plainly on his sleeve (guys like Stephen King do too, but most of King’s books read like an alien meteor crashed into Our Town), frequently writing weird westerns, pirate adventure stories, and geriatric creature features starring the King of Rock ‘n Roll. One wouldn’t be surprised if he started such a series novel with the discovery of a body or other crime--that’s usually the starting place in crime fiction for a reason. It’s expected, and frankly it’s easy. But Lansdale makes a different decision here, and delivers a much more interesting book because of it.
Mucho Mojo opens with narrator and East Texas redneck Hap Collins working in a rose field. It’s a nice little slice of life bit, detailing the back-breaking work available to a guy whose circumstances match Hap’s (much like Lansdale himself, a former rose field worker). The scene orients us nicely in our setting; foreshadows the fact Hap’s going to solve the central crime of the novel by literally digging, constantly; and also illustrates that like a rubber band he’s snapped back into ordinary guy shape after the events of the previous novel (which I’ve yet to read, having accidentally picked up Mucho Mojo thinking it was the first in the series, not the second--yeah, I’m a dummy).
Given that it’s a buddy novel, the writer has to set such an expectation in the first chapter. While one can indeed introduce a partner or sidekick for your protagonist up until the midpoint or so, that’s a fundamentally different kind of story, usually about a relative loner learning to connect with the world around him. This ain’t that, the emotional core of the story is the love Hap and Leonard have for each other, a bond that’s continually being strengthened through constant shit-talk and getting into and out of jams. So it’s no surprise that Leonard Pine shows up at the rose fields before the end of the first chapter to drag Hap away from sweaty mundanity and into their next adventure (the symbolism of a gay black man pulling a straight white man away from his day-to-day life into something more interesting is noted). Lansdale almost plays a joke on the reader, here--in a typical pulp novel, we’d be expecting a body right about here, by the end of the first chapter, and Lansdale gives us one.
But it’s not the body we expect.
Leonard’s at the rose fields not to recruit Hap’s help in solving a mystery, rather to report the passing of his estranged uncle and press Hap into a different kind of service--getting drunk with him on the front porch. UNCLE PINE was not found dead under mysterious circumstances, necessitating an investigation (which is the trick a lesser writer, or at least a less-interesting writer, would employ). Rather, he’s found dead under pretty depressing ones, belly-up in a hoarder house courtesy of natural causes.
In fact, it’s not for another sixty pages before we get to the body in the book, the reason why we’re peeking in on these people’s lives in the first place: a dead child buried under UNCLE’s floorboards. Before that, it’s funerals and heart-to-hearts and Hap and Leonard doing renovations (which made me picture them as a partly-gender-swapped Chip and Joanna Gaines. In a perfect world HGTV would pick up Hap and Leonard and have James Purefoy and Michael K. Williams give us a home improvement show that would blow Vanilla Ice and the Property Brothers out of the water). Outside of a brawl with the drug-dealing neighbors, a helpful signpost inserted by Lansdale to remind us what kind of novel we’re in, the opening to the book feels like it could be a straight up literary novel rather than a series entry on the genre shelves, and that’s pretty damn cool.
A quick aside, I do get pretty annoyed at the term literary fiction (elevated horror, too). There’s rhyme and reason to how this stuff gets shelved, sure, but it’s not content, otherwise books like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell would be sitting in the SF & Fantasy section, and Beloved would be in Horror. Hell, I’ve been to stores where they’ve shelved Stephen King in three different places. I mention bookstore shelving practices because that’s a useful proxy for our collective attitude about a book. Is it literature? Or is it something else? To me, it’s all literature, or it’s all “genre,” or it’s all both, because at the end of the day every writer is trying to make the reader feel something (even if it’s a desire to go out and purchase the next six books in their Transformers tie-in series). Books that are tagged as “genre” have the potential to do everything that a “literary” novel can do, with the added benefit of a bunch of extra tools. Besides, many books that are now considered literature began life as kissing cousins of pulp. I’m talking about pay-by-the-word, serialized Dickensian prose. If Tragedy + Time = Comedy, maybe Pulp + Time = Literature?
The reason I bring all this up is because Lansdale’s the kind of writer who can fuse all this stuff together, take a pulp framework and make it something more, tell us something real and true about the way we relate to each other, about the world around us. He does it again and again with the crime genre--I can’t imagine a better meditation on fathers, sons, and the perils of unconditional paternal love than Cold in July. Lansdale’s the kind of writer I very much look up to, because he so effortlessly and constantly shows us that the genres we love can do it all, all the same emotional and philosophical heavy lifting that a doorstop by some dead Russian guy can. He’s so good at hooking us from an emotional standpoint that he can wait fifty or sixty pages to get going, and none of it feels like filler, it all feels like part of the story. He’s got an advantage, stylistically, for sure. But he also knows how to build a story where I’m primarily concerned about how Leonard’s going to learn to forgive his uncle, and how he’s going to forgive himself for not trying harder to make amends while his uncle was still alive.
That first dead body? That’s the one that matters, not the one the back cover promises us. That other one? That’s just gravy.