Blue-Collar Writer

At the Renaissance Hotel in Austin, Tex., Joe R. Lansdale sits behind a table piled high with his books in the dealers' room of the 31st annual World Fantasy Convention. Lansdale, 55, stands, stretches and smiles as a potential customer contemplates a copy of The Bottoms (2000), his Edgar Award—winning novel.

Picking up Bad Chili (1997), one of Lansdale's rip-snorting Hap and Leonard series about a working-class white guy and a gay black man who solve crimes, the man asks, "How much?"

"What'll you give me?" Lansdale says in his deep East Texas twang, leaning in for the kill.

"Ten bucks?"

"Sold, and don't go whining later that I charged you too much."

Lansdale laughs. His steel-gray eyes flash with the infectious humor that often takes a satirical form in his fiction, which ranges from westerns/historicals (The Magic Wagon, The Big Blow) and suspense (A Fine Dark Line, the Hap and Leonard crime series) to SF/fantasy (The Drive-In) and a wild mix of genres, as in his novella "Bubba Ho- Tep," where an elderly Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy fight an Egyptian mummy stealing souls in a convalescent home.

Recently returned from Lago D'Orta, Italy, where Lansdale accepted the Grinzane Cavour Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement, he's often asked why he's so popular in Italy, where his new novel, Lost Echoes (Vintage), was published in October and is already a bestseller. In Italy, "Texas is as alien as Mars," Lansdale says, and obviously just as fascinating. Italy saw first publication because, according to Lansdale, "Vintage bumped it forward when proofreading took longer than we thought, and I didn't want to change the Italian pub date. Italy has been very good to me, and I wanted to give them the opportunity to print it first."

Established in 1982, the Grinzane Cavour Literature Prize (with 5,000 euros attached) promotes literature in schools and among young people. The Italians cited Lansdale's ability to put important social issues into his genre fiction.

Lansdale, who lives in Nacogdoches, Tex., with his wife of 33 years, Karen, is also in Austin for the U.S. publication of Lost Echoes (Reviews, Dec. 4), a "super science" thriller about a young man whose childhood illness leaves him with the ability to hear past violent events, enabling him to solve crimes. "I like the idea of a character who has to deal with this kind of adversity, and I thought sound was a metaphor for all the racket and violence we hear in this society."

The self-styled "champion mojo storyteller" published his first crime novel, Act of Love, in 1980. In the quarter century since, Lansdale has produced more than 60 books, primarily in crime and dark suspense. These include story collections (Mad Dog Summer), graphic novels (notably DC's Jonah Hex) and 11 anthologies that span various genre lines. His most recent anthology is Cross Plains Universe, co-edited with Scott A. Cupp. It was published just in time for World Fantasy and inspired by legendary Texas pulp writer Robert E. Howard (1906—1936).

A martial arts enthusiast with his own martial arts studio, Lansdale Self-Defense Systems, Lansdale uses the tenets of martial arts in writing. "One of the five key elements is deception—if you make the reader believe one thing and surprise them with something else, there's deception, correct? And you have to watch yourself at all times!" Lansdale laughs. "Let me rephrase this—watch yourself—but don't pay any attention to what anybody else is thinking, or doing."

His genre-bending, often hard-edged work never flinches in its depiction of the people he knows so well, "real Texans" found in his beloved East Texas. "All the things I know are there. The roots I have are there," he says. "I come from a poor family. Some people see writing as a white-collar career, but I've always approached it as a blue-collar writer.

"Racism has been a big thing with me," he says, as shown perhaps most disturbingly in The Bottoms, about a string of murders of black prostitutes in 1930s Texas. Lansdale feels passionately about "basic human rights, how we respect and disrespect each other, cultural differences, prejudice and just 'bring it on' plain old stupidity."

Back at the World Fantasy Convention, Lansdale's fans always find him, whether to shake his hand, buy a book or just swap stories. He loves his readers and is thankful for a writing career that began at age 21. "I figure I can be artistic, but I work like a blue-collar person, too, and I'm serious about that." And he sells books, lots of them. Another customer hands him an old copy of The Magic Wagon: "Will you sign it for me, Joe?"

"You bet," he says, flashing his 100-watt grin as he whips out a pen.