Mulholland
Published August 19, 2025
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
Hap and Leonard are still the best and unlikeliest of friends, but they’ve come a long way since they got into and out of trouble in the first of Joe R. Leonard’s series of quick-witted, violent, and aggressively entertaining novels that have occasionally been described as “redneck noir.” In the early days, Leonard Pine – a gay, Black, conservative, country-music loving combat veteran, and Hap Collins – a white man who did time in Leavenworth for refusing to serve in Vietnam – were a couple of day laborers, barely scratching out a living in Laborde, a small town on the Sabine River in East Texas. A few decades and more than a dozen books later, the mismatched pair are still expressing their loyalty and affection by way of any number of profane, scatological and wildly inventive insults, and are doing pretty well for themselves.