More Better Deals

April 6, 2020
Used car salesman Ed Edwards, the narrator of this highly enjoyable hardboiled tale set in 1960s Texas from Edgar winner Lansdale (Jane Goes North), has no qualms about perpetrating serious crimes in his pursuit of the American Dream. When sent to repossess a Cadillac purchased by Frank Craig, a rough, hard-drinking brute who is “big enough to hunt tigers with nothing but a bad attitude,” Ed falls for Frank’s gorgeous if conniving wife, Nancy. After acquiring the Cadillac for himself, Ed and Nancy begin an affair, and Ed soon sets his sights on attaining part-ownership of Nancy’s drive-in movie theater and pet cemetery. To achieve this, he devises a crude plan to beat her husband to death and stage his murder to look like an accident so that Nancy can claim Frank’s life insurance policy. Unsurprisingly, nothing goes as planned, and Ed’s hopes of a more prosperous future prove as shoddy and pretentious as the clunkers he sells. Populated with an admirable array of laughable miscreants, this droll, savage novel is vintage Lansdale. The author’s storytelling powers remain as strong as ever. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International.

Starred review from May 1, 2020
The postman rings again in this grisly homage to the classic noir of James M. Cain. Like Laura Lippman in Sunburn (2018), Lansdale updates the roles of the two principal players, the overconfident man and the femme fatale who entraps him. Here the setting is weather-beaten East Texas in the early '60s. Ed Edwards, a mixed-race man passing as white, is a used-car salesman looking for his big chance. He thinks he finds it when he meets Nancy Craig while repossessing her Cadillac. Sparks fly, and soon the lovers are plotting to kill Nancy's husband, claim the life insurance, and take over the Craigs' two businesses: a drive-in movie theater and an adjacent pet cemetery. When a fast-talking used-car salesman meets a dishy drive-in owner, you just know trouble's coming. And so it does, as the original murder goes horribly wrong, but not as wrong as subsequent attempts to right the ship (we've not seen the last of that pet cemetery). Lansdale takes the familiar formula and adds a triple helping of gore (served with a soup�on of absurdist humor), a femme fatale who's mastered the long game, and a blustery man with an identity crisis. It's still the same old story in the end ("the American dream, drenched in blood and greed"), but Lansdale really makes this used car purr.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)