In black and white

I kept focusing on Nancy and the drive-in and that little pet cemetery. My American dream, drenched in blood and greed, but I didn't care. I wanted what I wanted.

Joe R. Lansdale, More Better Deals

Reading Joe R. Lansdale's More Better Deals (2020) is like watching classic film noir from the 1940s or 1950s. You might even imagine Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck playing the key characters.

Appropriately enough, Lansdale's story takes place in the 1950s. Ed Edwards sells used cars for a shady Texas dealer. He doesn't like cheating people, but it's a living. When he goes to repossess a Cadillac from the owner of a drive-in theater, the man is away, but his beautiful wife is home and quickly seduces Ed. Before long Nancy convinces him to help her kill her abusive husband. His reward: Nancy, the drive-in, a pet cemetery sideline business and a hefty life insurance payment.

Things don't go as planned, of course, and soon enough Nancy has talked Ed into another brainless scheme.

Ed isn't doing all this just for himself and Nancy. He and his beloved younger sister had a black father but are passing as white. He wants to use some of the money to get her a fake birth certificate and a college education. His life may be a mess, but hers doesn't have to be.

Lansdale keeps things moving, and as dark and grisly as the story becomes the reader nevertheless finds something in Ed, if not Nancy, to like. But in this kind of story, justice finds a way.