The Two-Bear MamboJoe R Lansdale
Gollancz paperback, 308 pages, £8.99
Published April 1996
ISBN 0575062207
Review by David Kendall (1996)
I loved last year’s Mucho Mojo and was curious to see what Lansdale would follow it with. Two-Bear Mambo is a sequel to Mojo, featuring the same cast of bemused males centred around the odd couple of Leonard and Hap.
Leonard is in trouble again after torching the crack house opposite for the third time. Hap is in trouble because of their friendship, strained as this has become by Leonard’s spending time with new lover Raul. Fortunately an opportunity for Leonard and Hap to work out some of their frustrations presents itself; Florida Grange, Hap’s one-time lover from Mojo has disappeared while investigating the cell death of a famous bluesman’s grandson. To avoid jail the pair are persuaded to nose around Grovetown, where she went missing. Grovetown is log-jammed into a time-warp pre-sixties world where civil rights are something only over-educated college liberals whine about. So enter Leonard (gay and black) and Hap (white trash companion) and characters and reader alike know it’s only a matter of time before the good ol’ boys of Grovetown grab their pointy white hats and shotguns and slaver themselves into a lynch mob.
So much for the plot, then. This isn’t where Lansdale works his magic or what makes the pages turn so fast. His two offbeat heroes are drawn with vitriolic precision, their relationship picked over with painful honesty, as are the sticking plasters of political correctness which too often conceal rather than deal with the problems behind words. One of the most interesting and believable characters is Grovetown’s Chief of Police Cantuck, who is no mere knee-jerk bad guy set up for the reader to feel justifiable rage against.
The code of violence Leonard and Hap live with rather than stand for is also explored in greater depth than in Mojo. From the beginning the reader is set up to anticipate a glorious battle between the two and the bad guys in the bedsheets with our heroes emerging bruised but victorious. This expectation is mercilessly exploited by Lansdale as he shows Leonard and Hap having to face harsh reality; maybe they aren’t invincible, perhaps they can’t take on the whole world, and the consequences for their friendship and sense of identity. If you loved Mojo then Mambo is a second helping with extra filling.