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Product Description
Joe Lansdale, the Edgar award-winning author, returns with the hard-boiled story of a no-nonsense car dealer ready to turn his life aroundEd Edwards is in the used car business. A business that is built on adjusted odometers, strategic exaggerations and the belief that the buyers better beware. Ed is tired of the he wants out. Little does Ed know that when Dave, his lazy, grease-stained boss, and the namesake of Smiling Dave's, sends him to repossess a car, he is about to get his chance.The Cadillac in question, one of the nicest on the lot, was bought by Frank Craig and his beautiful wife Nancy- the owners of a local drive-in and pet cemetery. But when Frank stops making payments and hits the road to sell encyclopedias door to door, it's Nancy who is left on the hook. She's fed up with her deadbeat husband, his drinking, and his violence, and she suggests to Ed, in the throes of their own salacious affair, that they kill Frank to claim the insurance policy. It is a tantalizing offer-the woman, the car, not one but two businesses and a way out of his miserable life at the lot. Ed could say goodbye to Smiling Dave's, and maybe even get some help for his aging, alcoholic mother. But does he have what it takes to see the plan through?Told with Joe Lansdale's trademark grit, wit, and dark humor, More Better Deals is a gripping tale of the strange characters and odd dealings that define East Texas.
Customer Reviews
It won't take any noir fan long to see that Joe Lansdale's More Better Deals is Lansdale's homage to James M. Cain; within a few pages of our used car salesman Ed Edwards meeting femme fatale Nancy Craig and learning about her abusive husband, you know things are going to escalate into violence and murder - the question is simply how bad it's going to be. And the answer, it turns out, is "very"; yes, there are bodies (plural) here, but more than that, Lansdale embraces the messiness and unpredictability of violence, bringing something of the Coens (Blood Simple & Fargo, especially) to every act of killing and intimidation. All of which may make More Better Deals sound derivative, but rest assured, for all of its influences, the book is pure Lansdale, through and through, from its crass but lived-in dialogue, its dark sense of humor, its willingness to push boundaries and refuse to be hemmed in by expectations, and its desire to create a plot that's hard to predict and yet completely gripping. It also means that the book revolves around race in a way that neither Cain nor the Coens are interested in - Edwards is a light-skinned man born of a mixed-race relationship, and the fact that he's "passing" in the 1960s isn't just colorful subtext here; it's a large part of the plotting and who Ed is as a person, as is his service in Korea. The result is pretty much classic Lansdale in every way, scratching the same itches as any of those classic hard-boiled noir novels but with its own off-kilter, utterly original sensibility, brutal (and sometimes darkly comic) violence, immersive narration, and a plot that constantly surprised me even as it delivered every beat you need for a noir novel. If you're a hard-boiled noir fan, it's a no-brainer.
