”Crossing frontiers is my profession. These strips of no man’s land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibili”Crossing frontiers is my profession. These strips of no man’s land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibilities of new lives, new scents and affections. At the same time they set off a reflex of unease that I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories.”
I was thinking of Paul Bowles when I read this opening to Cocaine Nights. Bowles could have written that paragraph, but then I’m reminded of many of the writers I’ve enjoyed the most in my reading career whenever I read a J. G. Ballard. He makes a reference a few pages later to Graham Greene. ”You used to say that your only interests in life were opium and brothels. Pure Graham Greene, but there was always something heroic there. Do you smoke a few pipes?”
Certainly, Joseph Conrad also lurks around the edges of any Ballard novel, sailing his ghost ship from one chapter to the next.
Charles Prentice is a travel writer who has come to Estrella de Mar not to write about the place but to see his younger brother who is in jail for incinerating five people. He finds it hard to believe that his brother, Frank, is capable of such an act, but he is even more baffled by the fact that his brother has...confessed. He decides to launch his own amateur investigation because the police, with a confession in pocket, are not really interested in muddying the crystal clear waters of a slam dunk conviction.
As Charles talks to Frank’s associates, acquaintances, friends, and lovers, he is struck by the fact that everyone believes Frank to be innocent, but they don’t offer any alternative guilty parties. A bit odd, that, but then Estrella de Mar is proving to be a rather odd place. There is a placid calmness to the setting, with menacing overtones of impending chaos. The site is an enclave of bored, rich people who have need of some impetus to do...something.
Bobby Crawford, the tennis pro at the club, nearly stupefied with boredom may be the spark who shatters the peaceful tranquility. “You’ll bring them back to life--with amateur porn-films, burglary and cocaine?” As Charles becomes more and more enamored with the charismatic Crawford, he actually starts to believe that Bobby might be onto something. It reminds me of the Matrix movie when a perfect society was built and people killed themselves in alarming numbers, so the designers added strife back into their lives, and everyone was happier. Do we need strife? Something to fear to feel alive?
We see Charles becoming more enmeshed in the life of this community. It’s as if he seamlessly steps into the life of his brother, fulfilling a role that would be missed once Frank goes to jail. He even takes up with Frank’s girlfriend, Dr. Paula Hamilton, who seems to know more about the night of the fire than what she is willing to share. As Charles becomes more tangled with Bobby’s seemingly demented plans, his thoughts about his brother become a secondary concern. Even his plans for assembling a book on the architecture of the world’s brothels becomes a hazy and distant fancy. One of those ideas for a book that G.G. would cock his eyebrow at, but would shake his head in doubting wonderment as he poured himself another few fingers of bourbon.
Did Frank do it?
”Guilt is so flexible, it’s a currency that changes hands...each time losing a little value.”
If not Frank, who? And does Charles even care anymore?
Everytime I read another book by Ballard I move him up the list of my favorite authors. He deftly explores the concepts of man against man, man against nature, man against himself. His books are sultry, sexy, and humming with elegant intelligence. His themes continue to be relevant today, whether they were written early in his career in the 1960s or in his twilight years. If you like some of the writers I mentioned in this review, give Ballard a try. He might prove to be a favorite of yours as well.
”I’m sex-mad, she thought. I’m a thrill girl with her brains between her legs.”
Meg Rector is in Mexico for a quickie divorce and can’t wait to explore”I’m sex-mad, she thought. I’m a thrill girl with her brains between her legs.”
Meg Rector is in Mexico for a quickie divorce and can’t wait to explore all the possibilities of her new found freedom. Juarez, Mexico, is the perfect place to indulge any nefarious predilections she can think of and even some she didn’t know existed. Meg meets Martin Granger, a professional gambler who is coming off a night of winning big. He wants to celebrate, and the horny, long legged, pretty, brunette with an itch that needs scratching is the right companion for a night of debauchery.
There is Lily Daniels, who is a 19 year old hitchhiker who is lured into a live sex show. She has the face of a cherub, but the body of a sex goddess. Men and women are lining up for a chance to boink or doink or shag or diddle away some of her precious essence. Lily is an entrepreneur, and she is smart enough to know that someone somewhere will pay a lot more for her physical allure than what she is earning in tricks in Juarez.
Weaver is a man on the run, and Mexico looks to be his only chance to keep turning his razorblade red. He is an ugly, little man, angry at the world, and determined that everyone will know his name before the cops can take him down. ”It was better to be loathed as a fiend than to be thoroughly ignored, better to be hated than not be known at all. One act of horror had given direction to his life, had elevated him from nobody to somebody.”
All of these people are going to float around each other like inebriated bees until finally one fatal night they all end up at the same latitude and longitude at the same moment, and their futures will take a sharp turn for the worse.
There are a plethora of graphic sexual situations. This story, originally published in 1962, is billed as an erotic crime novel. Well, there is certainly crime, and there is certainly plenty of erotica. Hardcase Crime includes three hardboiled short stories that are also entertaining, gritty reads.
If you are prudish, you better just keep away from Juarez in 1962 and find yourself a good cozy to curl up with, but if you like your novels to have some grit with a side order of brazen, seductive, uninhibited, zip and zing, then Borderline will be the right splash of spirits to warm up your coffee.
The hot stink of this decaying part of the city clawed at my nose as he leaned and put his darkened face closer to me,”’Do you want to see my papers?’
The hot stink of this decaying part of the city clawed at my nose as he leaned and put his darkened face closer to me, shouting, ‘Do you know what I can do to you? I can take you over there’--he flapped his hand in the direction of the dark end of the alleyway where the slum dwellers had fled. ‘I can take your car. I can do what I want.’
‘Sabes que te puedo hacer?’ Do you know what I can do to you? Spoken by an enraged policeman in Mexico, that statement seizes your attention, and so does ‘Puedo hacer lo que quiera’--I can do what I want. After all, this is a country where police have been responislbe for arbitrary killing, kidnapping, suffocation, and torture, including electrocution and medieval strappado.”
To be honest, Paul Theroux would have been disappointed with his trip if he hadn’t gotten hassled by a Mexican police officer. I’ve been following Theroux’s career pretty much from the moment I started reading. I’ve travelled with him by train, by bus, by boat, and now I’ve taken a car trip with him into Mexico. I’ve half expected over the years to see a news report of the unexpected demise of the writer Paul Theroux in some far flung jungle or scorching desert. It certainly wouldn’t be as glamorous to read the headline Travel Writer Paul Theroux found dead in a back alley in Buena Vista, Mexico.
He has been told over and over that the police are as dangerous as the cartels.
Despite his shakedown by this enraged cop, most of his trip, as he has snaked back and forth across the border, has been down right pleasurable. The food is great, and the people are friendly, helpful, and actually glad to see an American travelling for pleasure through their country. When I lived in Tucson and had daily contact with Hispanics, I always found them to be courteous and stoic about everything. They were a pleasure to know and be around, and, man,...could they throw a good party.
Theroux has just turned 76 and lives in a country where youthful exuberance is worshiped over the wisdom of old age. Despite his level of success, he is starting to feel irrelevant, and what better balm for all those insecurities than to go to a country where his age is venerated, rather than seen as a curse. ”I had begun my trip to Mexico in a mood of dejection and self-pity, feeling shunned, overlooked, ignored, rejected--easily identifying with migrants and Mexicans, who knew that same feeling of being despised. I’d hoped the trip would be salutary, a cure for my sour mood, and so it proved.”
As always, I come away from yet another Paul Theroux book with a long list of books he recommends. He sprinkles them through the text because the books he has read blend with and enhance the life he is living. He sees something, and it reminds him of this passage he read twenty years ago. Everything has more life and color when you’ve read thousands of books to add nuance to every new experience.
He takes this class to brush up on his Spanish, and they ask him that dreaded question that all voracious readers don’t like to be asked. ”And at once I became conscious of being elderly and conspicuous, because my hesitation seemed like the doddering of an old buffer. But it wasn’t that at all; I was fully alert, my head surveying shelves of books, authors and titles on their spines. Choose one is the diabolical demand.” I understood his bafflement at the question. It is a question I’ve been asked over and over again, and yet I struggle to answer each time I’m asked. This is a much easier question for the person who reads 5-10 books a year, but with reading 125+ books a year, I have a plethora of choices. Even asking which is my favorite book of the year takes arduous pondering and much indecision before selecting one just to end the torture of weighing the value of my newest friends. I’m twenty plus years younger than Theroux, so imagine how much more frustrating that question will be to answer when I’m his age.
I skimmed a few one star reviews of this book which lambasted Theroux for being so critical of our current president. I was expecting an ongoing roast of he who shall not be named, but it was nothing of the sort. Of course, he was a topic of conversation. You can’t call a whole race of people murderers and rapists without inspiring their ire. I thought Theroux was equally critical, and in many ways more damning, of Clinton’s NAFTA policy, which certainly did not benefit manufacturing jobs in the US and hasn’t proved to be a big boon for Mexico either. ”I’d also traveled the length of the border, looking closely at both sides: the fields on the US side where Mexican migrants worked for low wages, the factories on the Mexican side where Mexicans from the poorer parts of Mexico were employed, also poorly paid. This was the blighting effect of NAFTA, which boasted of raising people’s standard of living while at the same time exploiting them.”
The Zapatistas have launched an ongoing rebellion in Mexico and have managed to establish 38 strongholds all over Chiapas. They realize that the only way they are going to resist the corruption of the government, the violence of the cartels, and stay out of the hands of the crooked police is to establish self-governing strongholds. They have, for all intents and purposes, seceded from Mexico. Theroux spent some time among them and certainly came away with a feeling of hope that these people were determined to develop communities based on the fundamental rights of universal health care and well paying jobs. What they are attempting to do in these communities has a strange allure for those of us who are feeling more and more strangled by the corruption, greed, and disconnection we are seeing from our government.
As always, I enjoy spending time with Theroux. He is more melancholy than normal and certainly more nostalgic. Fortunately for him, he has a lot of great experiences to be nostalgic about. He found solace in spending time with people with real problems who are struggling to find a path forward, not to be rich but to be happy and content.
”Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how”Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how long they’d been lost. One of them wandered back up a peak. One of them was barefoot. They were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking, what paltry drool still available to them spuming from their mouths in a salty foam as they walked. Their eyes were cloudy with dust, almost too dry to blink up a tear. Their hair was hard and stiffened by old sweat, standing in crowns from their scalps, old because their bodies were no longer sweating. They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and Devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine, the poisons clogging their systems.”
In May 2001, twenty-six men crossed the border illegally and entered the corridor of unforgiving desert called The Devil’s Highway. Like with most catastrophic events, it required a series of things to go wrong for something as horrific as this to occur.
Twenty-six men entered. Twelve men emerged.
Luis Alberto Urrea is going to tell you how it all happened, but he is also going to educate you beyond just the facts of this story because the story is larger than just one tragic event. The story is about desperation, heroic efforts, and a lack of understanding by most people who live beyond five miles of the border.
“Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, a tireless crusader for border reforms and more humane treatment of the undocumented: ‘There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.’”
It begins with why a person from Mexico or Central America or any number of economically depressed countries wants to come to the United States. Usually we can begin with failed economic policies by the country of origin. If there are opportunities where they live, even the shining beacon of America would not tempt most of these people to leave the ones they love to seek a better life elsewhere. They are desperate enough to risk their lives in the hands of coyotes, many of whom are inexperienced boys controlled by criminals.
We, too, have had our share of economic downturns in America. I think about the jobs in Detroit and Cleveland that were shipped overseas, leaving devastated families and communities in their wake. We allow those companies to do that. Those companies find cheaper labor, make more profits, park money offshore to avoid taxes, and still are allowed to sell their products to the very American communities they abandoned. It’s called capitalism and a free market economy, but unfortunately, those heady words associated with freedom only benefit a very small percentage of people. Regrettably, American corporations forget or never knew something that Henry Ford discovered over a hundred years ago: If you give workers security and a living wage, they have more money to buy your product. It becomes a beautiful cycle, involving less profit for the corporation but keeping America’s economy strong from the ground up. So I could lecture Mexico and others of our southern neighbors about many failed policies involving greed, mismanagement, and corruption that have contributed to the immigration issues, but we have plenty of that right here in the good old U. S. of A.
What was most impressive to me about this book is the evenhanded way in which Urrea tells this story. He isn’t here to paint a story of abuse and disrespect perpetrated upon immigrants by border security. He does discuss those incidents, but he also talks about the many people who do their best to save lives and treat people with compassion. One story that really resonated with me was that railroad crews have learned to carry cases of bottled water with them so they can drop water at the feet of those human beings who stagger from the wasteland closer to death than life. The quick responses by the Border Patrol are also very impressive. They aren’t there just to enforce the law, but to save lives. There are abuses. Unfortunately, not all the people attracted to law enforcement jobs are there for the right reasons. Those types of officers call illegal aliens tonks.
Tonk...tonk...tonk. It's the sound that a flashlight makes on the back of a person’s skull.
Urrea also shares some math that might be of interest to most people. My conservative friends and family are always railing about all the social services that illegal aliens are using while they are in the United States. They are, according to these FOX informed people, taking advantage of our system and costing taxpayers millions or, depending on the hyperbolic capabilities of the person,...billions. Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management, conducted a study. ”Mexican immigrants paid nearly $600 million in federal taxes and sales taxes in 2002...Mexican immigrants used about $250 million in social services such as Medicaid and food stamps...Another $31 million in uncompensated health care… That leaves a profit of $319 million.”
Holy shit! Open the frilling border! Obscene profits are the life blood of capitalism, and that is a profit margin that would make even a one percenter’s eyes widen. Talk about a bonanza to be made off of our southern brethren. Not to mention all the goods and services they purchase that contribute to our economy as well. These figures would tell me that stifling illegal aliens is actually stifling our economy.
Of course, nothing is as simple as all that, but still the story is larger and more complicated than what most Americans are being brainwashed into believing.
My father, who is now 80 years old, watches nothing, but FOX NEWS, and he asked me one day...so whatever happened to that caravan? *sigh*
This is the beginning of my reading quest that is in response to the controversy surrounding the seven figure advance given to a white woman for her immigration novel. For the real scoop on that book please read David Bowles’s review. Click to go to the American Dirt Review At the end of David’s review, he provides a list of alternative reading choices that will give you a much more realistic view of the border situation than what was presented in American Dirt.
”The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the ”The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body and marveled that childhood should turn into this--into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.”
Travis McGee and his friend Meyer are asked to look into the final days of a girl’s life by her crippled father. Harlan Bowie has been struck hard by a series of recent events. His wife dies of a brain tumor. He is left paralyzed by an automobile accident. Then right on the heels of all of this, he learns his daughter, Bix, has died. If this was all a test from a higher power, someone upstairs needs to find better ways to be entertained.
This is an unusual case. Usually Travis is taxed with bringing back a young girl or finding a missing person or retrieving something valuable for the rightful owner. Sometimes things get rough, and that is how he has acquired some of those ”weals and pits and white tracks of scars.” This is more of a research trip into a story that led to such a tragic end.
Most of the book is set in Oaxaca, Mexico, and if John D. MacDonald didn’t spend a lot of time in Mexico before or maybe even during the time he spent writing this book, then he has completely fooled me with some great research. The descriptions of the terrain, the people, and the bars all ring as true as a solid gold coin. Bite down to see if it is really gold, and you will taste Mexico.
This is written and set in the 1960s, and American hippies have fled to Mexico for what they hope will be an easier life, or at least to experience some things they could never find back in the US. Drug use and abuse are rampant. These hippie kids are in various states of decrepitude, ranging from those who are just dirty, to those who are dirty and strung out, to those who will become casualties of the predators who are preying on those who have reached such desperate straits that they have become willing victims to get their next fix or even just a hot meal. Tuning out and dropping out has exacted some terrible costs for many of them.
As McGee investigates the last known movements of Bix Bowie, he starts to find holes in the story that was related to the father. The pieces will fall into place, but not without some real gumshoe work, some lucky breaks, and some pondering over the pieces that no longer fit the puzzle.
John D. MacDonald wants to show the various ways that people are predators. A gay man and a horny expatriate British woman who are plucking the most beautiful young boys from the newest arrivals. It sort of reminds me of the conversations I used to overhear on the pickup basketball courts from frat boys talking about the latest crop of freshmen girls to arrive at the university. Becky, the horny British woman, who is so proud of her astounding abilities in the sack, sets eyes on Travis McGee and decides she needs to break herself off a piece of Florida hardtack. He is a challenge. A man of experience who will test her skills to convince a man who has lapped the race track many times that she is the best lap of the course he will ever have the pleasure to drive/ride. McGee is not a man to be intimidated by a confident woman and soon finds himself in a gymnastic marathon that leaves him satisfied, but also strangely dissatisfied. When he makes love to a sweet Mexican woman named Elena, the difference between what he experienced with Becky and Elena is starkly contrasted.
”Elena had, with a splendid earthiness spiced with innocent wonder, so emphatically superimposed herself on the memories of Becky. I would have to carry those memories into a bright light to see who the hell they were about. After those dedicated decades striving to become the very best, thinking she had attained it, it would have crushed her to find out a sweet Latin amateur was, in the light of memory, by far the better of the two, more stirring, more fulfilling, and far more sensuous.”
This is what women talk about all the time, not wanting to be just a notch on a man’s bedpost. Women want to be seen as attractive for more attributes than just the base elements of curves and length of leg. From my own experience, it is much more sensual and satisfying to make love to a person whom I find to have an attractive mind, rather than having sex with a set of tits, or a round ass, or an adorable Italian accent.
Well, maybe the Italian accent.
So in this case, the tables are turned, and McGee is a notch on Becky’s bedpost, and it isn’t that McGee feels like a victim; it is just that there is an element that is missing. He is not chosen for the right reasons. He is a man among men, and women will always turn their heads for another look. He wants women to want him because of who he is, not just for what he represents. How surprised would Becky be to find out that on his deathbed it isn’t scenes from their encounter he will be flickering through the playhouse of his memories, but the sweet, tender love he had with the Mexican girl who made love to him and not just to his body?
So we have a plethora of male predators, circling like vultures over the nearly dead, looking with their beady eyes for what innocence they can still pluck from their docile victims. One cringe moment is when one of McGee’s friends slaps his secretary on the ass, making her giggle, to shoo her from the room. There is a woman who uses her skills to turn young men to jello. There is a gay man who dangles opportunities, maybe with the help of some pharmaceuticals, in front of young men to tempt them into his bed. I don’t remember gay people showing up much in the previous ten McGee adventures, so this is interesting. It is too bad he is a rather evil person, but then if the theme is the various shapes that predators take, that is unfortunately the role that is needed. As we know from the pages of our newspaper, maybe a Catholic priest would have been a much better example. Not to be left out, there is also a French widow of means who is using her money, fine tastes, and beautiful suite at the hotel to attract beautiful, impressionable girls into her web of lust.
Even Travis McGee feels a little out of his element among so much deceit.
It has been almost ten years since I’ve read a Travis McGee novel. George Pelecanos mentions him in his new novel The Man Who Came Uptown, and I felt a splash of nostalgia for a writer who had given me such pleasure in my youth. The McGee novels made John D. MacDonald rich and comfortable, but his other books, in many ways, are more compelling than the famous Fort Lauderdale series and should be explored by fans of this series. If you are curious about McGee, there is no better place to start than with the first book, The Deep Blue Good-Bye.
”As the great novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote, ‘When we exclude, we lose. When we include, we win, and we shall never recognize our own humanity without”As the great novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote, ‘When we exclude, we lose. When we include, we win, and we shall never recognize our own humanity without recognizing that of others.’”
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will take office as President of Mexico in December 2018. I can not be more excited for our neighbors to the South. While in college at the University of Arizona, I took a class on Mexican history as a summer course. It was an intense, comprehensive class that left me exhausted and with a swimming head in the desert heat as I walked home to my house just off campus. I was particularly taken with the series of revolutions that happened. The peasants would rise up and throw out a corrupt dictator, and then their leader, for whom they shed blood, sweat, and tears, would become as corrupt as the dictator they had overthrown. Reset: new revolution, more peasant blood, sweat, and tears, and another dictator replaced by yet another corrupt dictator.
It was depressing.
I had heard good things about Lopez Obrador, so when Alex Doherty from OR Books/Counterpoint contacted me about reviewing his book, I said, “FRILLING A!”
Lopez Obrador gave a series of speeches while campaigning for the presidency titled Oye! Trump! He was running against the corrupted neoliberalism that had gripped his country for too long, but he was also running against the whole idea of what Trump stood for and the harsh rhetoric about immigrants that Trump used to bring his base to a frothing, Build a Wall chanting, Fake News believing, children separated at the border supporting mob.
Trump called immigrants rapists. All of them. How many immigrants would have to be convicted rapists before you could call them all rapists? 60%, 30%, 10%, 2%?
When I lived in Arizona, I worked for a bookstore chain, and we opened a store in Mesa. I was in charge of the project, and even though the labor was subcontracted to renovate an old grocery store into a bookstore, I spent a lot of time with the mostly Mexican workforce. They called me jefe and were always respectful, even though I was a young, brash, just out of college, white guy in way over his head and stressed to the max. I’ve never seen people work harder. Their work ethic is still the bar I use for myself.
Lopez Obrador does not want that labor leaving Mexico. He wants them staying and helping to rebuild their country. He has a plan on how to do that. He wants to bring agriculture back to the level it was several decades ago. There is no reason for Mexico to be importing food when they have so much rich and fertile land. If he can do this, he will not only save the pueblos but keep young people in their communities instead of fleeing to the overcrowded cities, or worse immigrating to America.
He also wants to replant thousands of acres of rainforest. I am a big lover of trees, and I also understand the importance of the rainforests of the world in maintaining our beautiful climates. Make it so Obrador!
Corruption is the biggest issue that Mexico faces. Overpaid government officials are a disgrace to Mexico. Corruption in government has allowed the rampant crime rate to spiral out of control. To stop violent crime, Lopez Obrador has determined that the best place to start is ending the corruption at the top. Crime can not be fought at the bottom of a social pyramid if the top of the pyramid is corrupt.
“The rise of neoliberalism over the last thirty years (which has entailed privatization, abandonment of our rural areas, economic stagnation, unemployment, neglect of our youth, inequality, and corruption) ushered in the crisis of violence and instability that plagues us today.
This corruption and looting of the Mexican economy by the rich has left the Mexican people with three choices: attempt to survive in the informal economy; migrate to the United States; or survive through criminal activity.”
Carlos Salinas was elected President of Mexico in 1988. At the start of his reign, there was one billionaire in his country, and by the end of his reign in 1994 there were 24 billionaires in Mexico. This was all due to the banks, companies, and mines, that were at one time owned by the government, being allowed to be privatized. The wealth that was taken from Mexico and given to a handful of people is staggering. Lopez Obrador does not want Mexico to be more like the United States. He wants it to be better, and one way to do that is to reclaim what belongs to all of Mexico.
Redistribution of wealth is one of those terms that make Republican-- you know what-- pucker. If the few end up owning everything worth owning, we will be a feudal society. Under Presidents W. Bush and Obama, the gap between the 1%ers and the rest of the country widened astronomically and has continued under President Trump. We are ruled by an oligarchy of rich, white guys. The free market economy, that we all grow up believing we can be a part of, is a myth. Trickle down economics, which has failed every time it has been attempted, including most recently in the state of Kansas where I live, is a term that makes my-- you know what-- pucker. As Lopez Obrador says, money is not water. It does not trickle down. It does seem to be very good at fluttering back up to the top.
If Lopez Obrador can do what he says he will do in this book, Mexico could very well become a shining beacon. His plan is bold. He will have to rebuild Mexico’s policies along with the infrastructure that will lead them back to economic prosperity. The resources are there; all they have to do is be managed by someone who is wanting to make the lives of millions better, instead of allowing 24 billionaires to continue to get richer at the expense of the people. 24 billionaires only have 24 votes though their money may buy more.
I will keep an eye on President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He is going to make a lot of enemies, but if the people stick with him, he could make it so any wall on the border is more to keep Americans out of Mexico than Mexicans out of America.
***Special thanks to Alex Doherty and OR Books/Counterpoint for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.***
”It was far better, after all, than to be forever chasing the dollar, a new car, the needle-dick life, middle-class security, tickets to the sympho”It was far better, after all, than to be forever chasing the dollar, a new car, the needle-dick life, middle-class security, tickets to the symphony, neckties, cardboard relationships, cardboard sex in a cardboard bed, the wife, the kids, upward mobility, a salary, a career; the rat race he had fled from suddenly one day six months ago to go hunt down a strangler. A killer who in the end he found mirrored inside himself.”
Hector Belascoaran Shayne was a promising engineer ready to claim his rung on the upper mobility ladder. The concept of exchanging his time, creativity, and perspiration for social position and monetary gain was sold to him as if this rickety structure ascending into the clouds was a golden stairway to heaven.
He hopped off.
The air down at the street level might be tinged a different color, and it might be tainted with the mingled cocktail stench of exhaust, excrement, and sweat, but it doesn’t smell of disinfectant, greed, and selfishness. He finds a comfort in being among the type of people he grew up with. He doesn’t require a lot of money to exist and doesn’t feel like anyone should need a lot of money to live.
He does something really crazy. He becomes a private detective.
”If you were to ask me why he’s a private detective, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Obviously there are times when he would rather not be, just like I have moments in which I would rather be anything but a writer.” —Raymond Chandler
He isn’t really a very good detective. ”He held the lighter a moment longer and fired up a cigarette. Every city gets the detective it deserves, he thought.” He is a well meaning detective and doesn’t go into the business to sort out the sordid affairs of adulterous couples or find dirt on a business rival or in anyway help the powerful to impose their will on the helpless. As far as pay, well, one could almost pay him in soda pop.
When his mother dies, he meets with his brother and sister to discuss the estate. They are inheriting enough money to make them uncomfortable. I couldn’t help thinking about all the nasty estate issues that I’ve seen my family or friends of the family go through, and those issues were never about someone feeling like they were inheriting too much money but were more along the lines of someone feeling like they deserved more. Fighting over money that you didn’t even earn is unsavory and, frankly, demeaning to your ancestors. I, personally, would rather let karma sort it out. I would hope our lives are worth more than the number of zeros we leave behind in our bank accounts.
I’m becoming very fond of the Belascoaran family.
Hector, who is usually overwhelmed with handling one case at a time, suddenly finds himself handling three cases at once. One involves a dead homosexual engineer. The company hires him to find out the truth, but as he circles closer to the truth, it may not be what the company wants him to discover. The second one involves the attempted suicide of a teenage girl, the daughter of a movie star who oozes pheromones all over poor Hector.
”The phrase “fits like a glove” came to Héctor’s mind. As she moved, Héctor thought he could hear the melody of a far off rumba, like a movie soundtrack. Héctor imagined himself with a butter knife, slowly spreading the black material over the woman’s skin. And she, either guessing his thoughts, intuiting them, or perhaps out of a sense of professional gallantry, paused silently for the detective to look her over.”
He does love a woman who doesn’t mind a man looking her over.
The third case is the most strange. A man believes that Emiliano Zapata was not riddled with bullets at the Hacienda de San Juan. He believes the man killed was a double and that Zapata survived. If this is true and he is still alive, he would have to be 97 years old. Did the wily, handsome, gallant Zapata really escape his assassins?
If he does find Zapata, will he still be Zapata? How could the living man ever live up to the dead legend?
He shares his office with three other men which makes the lettering on their door rather busy. It doesn’t make sense that these services would be housed together, but it is simply a matter of economics.
HÉCTOR BELASCOARÁN SHAYNE: DETECTIVE GILBERTO GÓMEZ LETRAS: PLUMBER “GALLO” VILLAREAL: SEWER AND DRAINAGE SPECIALIST CARLOS VARGAS: UPHOLSTERER
The plot is a convoluted mess, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was too caught up in Belascoaran’s mind games with himself. He feels shame that he ever went away to school because he feels like he went for the wrong reasons. It was so refreshing to spend time with someone marching resolutely downhill, passing by all the rest of us trying to march up the hill that becomes steeper as we ascend. Belascoaran isn’t the standard alcoholic, drug addict, depressed detective, but a man doing the job for a set of ideals he is still trying to sort out. As a word of warning, he might be developing an addiction to soda.
I do believe this is my first Mexico based mystery. This is the second book in the series and the first that was translated into English. The first book is more political, which makes it more intriguing to me, but Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s English publishers must have felt it wouldn’t be relevant to an American audience. *sigh* Needless to say, I’m intrigued with this attempt by Belascoaran to find more meaning in life at the bottom than at the top.
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