Re-reading a mystery novel is the same as reunion with a friend you've not seen in ages. From page one into the heart of the story, it's like all those years never separated us. But then, after a while, into chapter 4 or maybe it strikes around chapter 8, you notice how that old friend has a few wrinkles you didn't see before, and new twists you had not considered as a younger reader.
Right before your reading eyes, your old friend divides into two personae: the friend you remember from first-reading, a version frozen in time, it remains unchanged; the friend you're seeing now with new, older, eyes. Now you see stuff you hadn't noticed and maybe some stuff you didn't like so much but you're glad to see it. Most of all, it's grand to be back together again.
Meet my old friend, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. I met the vato in 1993, from St. Martin's Press. Then Rocky gets a new life in 2004 from Northwestern University Press. Clearly, my old carnal has a strong life force because now, Arte Publico Press has republished The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, Manuel Ramos' first detective book, the book that gives Ramos the honorific title, "the godfather of Chicano noir." (Readers interested in the father and mother of the genre will seek out Rudolfo Anaya and Lucha Corpi).
The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz introduces a burned-out lawyer whose movimiento activism comes to haunt him 30 years later. Old friends Montez sees from time to time come into his life and as we go from chapter to chapter, Luis Montez begins seeing wrinkles on those old carnales and pretty soon everything turns to puro chaos. When the dust settles, the bodies buried, the suspects fingered, Montez is the one left standing. The once-broken lawyer has shed his disillusionment and emerges renewed, and rededicated to the world of work and his next four plots.
Ramos got himself a good character in Luis Montez. He's a big pendejo in a lot of ways and here's what strikes me reading as a 78 year old widower: That young Chicana lawyer was too young for you, Luis. She played you and that's how you came this close to losing it all. Like a total pendejo, Montez smiles at the memories of the alluring Teresa, and doesn't look back, even as he realizes he knew the woman as a baby when Montez the activist has a desperate adulterous afternoon with the baby's mother.
Montez' world offers a mélange of murder, sex, intrigue, betrayal, a narc, brown beret phonies, corrupt real estate tipos, opportunists, and one of the funniest courtroom scenes in literature. Laugh, pendejo. The comedy nearly costs Montez his license in a tour de force by the writer Ramos, who weaves a seemingly extraneous bit of local color into the hero's most serious threat and the novel's highest bit of suspense: will the Bar yank his license?
Readers know it's a yarn and Montez will work his way out of the murder and crime morass. But in noir fiction, there's the possibility of pyrrhic wins when forces outside the central plot wreak havoc. Like Teresa, febrile sexiness becomes a mujeriego's special memory: Teresa hatched that diabolical plot, did she shoot Tino? That time she points the pistol at Montez' heart, does horniness save the dirty old man?
Questions of dirty old men aside, Luis is one and that makes him easy pickings for the crusading Teresa. First time I read the novel, I missed this in my identifying with Montez. Teresa's a gem Manuel Ramos needs to polish. The woman, whom Luis knew as a little girl, beds Luis as a tactic in her campaign to uncover her father's murderer. While Teresa develops a soft spot for the old guy, that could be a fluke. Let's find out: Teresa needs a series of novels that set her loose upon the world.
Fans of detective fiction and Chicano Literature will want to order copies of the Ramos oeuvre as AP reprints the titles. There's time if you order from the link below, right now, to get copies of The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz for this holiday season.
https://artepublicopress.com/product/the-ballad-of-rocky-ruiz/=
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