Bad Chili by Joe R. Lansdale Gollancz 292pp, £9.99 in UK
Roadkill by Kinky Friedman Faber & Faber 252pp, £8.99 in UK
`There's nothing funny about the blues," an angry Stephen Stills once told a heckling crowd at a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in the 1970s. The crowd could probably have been forgiven for laughing as "Pills" Stills tried to sing the blues, but the singer had a point. Some things just aren't funny.
The East Texas-based crime writer Joe R. Lansdale hasn't learned that lesson. Knocking homosexuals' teeth out with bricks, raping them, castrating them, assaulting them with barbed wire and generally making their lives as painful and miserable as possibly are actions which sit uneasily in an ostensibly semi-comic detective novel. Bad Chili is the fourth of Lansdale's novels to feature the Texan layabouts Hap Collins and his homosexual friend Leonard Pine, and is about as funny as a fire in an orphanage. Collins and Pine investigate the death of Pine's lover and find themselves drawn into a world of pornographic videos, chili-making and "grease smuggling", a concept which is never fully explained but seems to involve stealing grease from restaurants and illegally selling it back to other restaurants.
After a good start, involving an attack by a rabid squirrel, Bad Chili heads south faster than its culinary namesake. Lansdale writes as if Pine's homosexuality excuses the homophobic elements in his novels, which it doesn't, although they probably make Pine the only homosexual hero with whom rednecks can feel reasonably comfortable. Lansdale hit a peak with Mucho Mojo, the second of the Pine/Collins novels, but that book now seems like a lucky fluke. Bad Chili is the most aptly-named detective novel of the year: throw it away or throw up.
In contrast, Roadkill is the tenth novel from another Texan crime writer, Kinky Friedman. Fried man is one of the few writers currently operating who can write a humorous crime novel which manages not to descend into the cutesiness of Janet Evanovitch, the cynicism of Robert Crais or the offensiveness of Lansdale.
In Roadkill, the Kinkster's detective alter-ego comes to the rescue when country & western legend Willie Nelson's tour bus kills an old Native American and apparently brings a curse down on the hapless, pot-smoking singer. Inspired by a Rolling Stone assignment, the plot gives Friedman - himself a former country and western singer with the Texas Jewboys - a theme upon which to riff anecdotally about the history of C&W. (Did you know that Kris Kristofferson allegedly once slept with the young Farrah Fawcett? What he thought of the experience is unprintable in a family newspaper but can be found on page 93 of Roadkill.)
As usual with Friedman the dialogue is snappy ("Trevor's an actor in Hollywood," said Lana. "Really," said Sammy. "Which restaurant?") and the humour is suitably ribald, but there is a real humanity to his writing which gives it a perhaps unanticipated emotional impact. Friedman's earlier novels frequently read like punchlines in search of a plot, but since his seventh novel, Armadil- los and Old Lace, he has emerged as a witty, mature and distinctive voice in the genre. Quite simply, Roadkill is very good indeed.
John Connolly is a freelance journalist.