Review: The Last Client of Luis Montez. Manuel Ramos. Arte Publico Press, 2024.
ISBN: 979-8-89375-001-0
Michael Sedano
Luis Montez runs a one-lawyer Denver firm surviving from client to client. In a major victory, Montez frees a low-life. His reward is getting arrested for murdering the low-life, a scion of wealth. The innocent lawyer descends into a moral hell in his quest to gather evidence of his innocence of murder. Who done it?
Author Manuel Ramos gives this plot of innocence in quest of vindication his signature chicano noir treatment in The Last Client of Luis Montez: A Luis Montez Mystery from Arte Publico Press (link).
Readers who enjoyed Ramos' 2023 The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz will be happy to see Arte Publico Press' release of its fourth of the five-title series of Luis Montez mysteries. The Luis Montez series, first published in the nineties by other houses, comes together for contemporary readers in the hands of Houston's Arte Publico Press.
Book marketers note how mysteries sales go up when other adult fiction sales decline. They attribute the jump to readers needing "cozy" literature, stuff that doesn't overdo the gore and psychology of lethality. Not mentioned is the inherent expectation that mystery novels will bring vicarious excitement, tension, interesting characters and setting, and above all, atmosphere.
With a Luis Montez novel, it doesn't pay to get all psychological. Montez, for all the seriousness of serving clients, is impetuous and wild. He would be a mujeriego, a roué, but younger women don't throw themselves at him. Then again, Montez feels himself past his prime y casí ya no puede but his imagination pushes him into erotic fantasy:
It was Glory Jane, of course. She stood very close, bending and weaving from the crush of the customers and effects of the Sin Fron's ghastly version of margaritas. Her breasts squirmed beneath her loose blouse, straining to pop out in freedom, and I was tempted to hold them to secure their modesty. The point of Glory Jean's knife, pressed against my kidney, brought me back to the immediate agenda.
Montez is more likely to be the old pendejo, getting seduced by a scheming conspirator and winding up in deep caca of his own doing by falling for the hottie. She wasn't after Luis, she was in it for the money.
The situation would be funny but for the darkness Luis sinks into questing to prove himself innocent. He goes on the lam, kidnaps a con man and his sister, burgles a client's house and get busted by them then holds them hostage. There's a chicano dick who wants to chalk up a score to even old resentments from movimiento days. And Luis has been thoroughly dumped by his former lover. And maybe Montez' beloved father is dying. Ramos builds some really dire circumstances.
Lower and lower the detective-malgre-lui sinks in the lawyer's astonished mind but survival and innocence drive the character.
Denver in winter becomes a meterological hell with slushy streets, punishing wind-driven cold, treacherous traffic. The atmosphere challenges Ramos to capture the misery that cold weather visits upon denizens of frozen cities:
At 3:30 in the afternoon, cold long shadows draped across the skyline, covered the parking lots and darkened most of downtown Denver. The streets were cold; the buildings were cold; I was cold. The January air whipped through the canyons of the skyscrapers, then aimed straight for me. Gusts twirled around my legs, raising bits and pieces of ice that clung to my heaviest pair of wool socks. I inhaled coldness through clenched teeth. Frigid slivers of oxygen and pollutants knifed down my throat and into my lungs. A drop of moisture stubbornly clung to the numb tip of my nose, and I ached like an old miner. I coughed and wheezed.
For this reader, synesthetic miserable cold awakens miserable memories of being miserably wretchedly unbearably cold while serving on a Korean mountaintop missile site, the world's highest. But weather isn't the novel's most important element. The Last Client of Luis Montez is a classically outstanding murder mystery, it keeps readers turning pages to assemble clues and confoundments Ramos masterfully doles out.
Who not only killed the liberated low-life, but why cut him into gory pieces? That happens off-stage, like the coziness criterion holds. Ramos holds down the intensity, talking about sex, for example, and not writing it. Blending telling with showing keeps the action flowing, leaving readers to fill in their own blanks, like Glory Jean's blouse.
Fill in those blanks on a cold day when all you want is to sit in front of a glowing space heater or a crackling fireplace. Give yourself a day or so to devour the story of this chicano lawyer up against all sorts of odds; a broken love affair, a seriously ill father, possible disbarment and imprisonment. Heck, he could have been shot as a felon on the run. When a cop drives his car off a remote precipice into thin air, detectives search for ways to connect Montez to that.
Ramos creates not only exceptional mystery stories, he's writing Chicano Literature. The character, his intimate and familia environment and hangouts, his history as a student activist in the movimiento, hasta the food Montez likes, it's raza. And it's exemplary writing; Ramos is a writer's writer.
There used to be a common complaint that our gente can't readily find themselves in mass media. Arte Publico Press makes it easy to find Ramos' soon-to-be four resurrected masterpieces. Navigate to the publisher's website (link) and place orders. Or give the ISBN to your indie brick and mortar bookseller, the book will soon be in your hands.
The five Luis Montez novels make a worthy addition to a reader's library. Readers relatively new to cozy literature should welcome finding Luis Montez stories. Fans of the character will scoff at "cozy" because they enjoy filling in those blanks while tsk-tsking the character's pendejadas and empathizing that the character's exigencies drive him to darkness. That's what makes it good.
In The Last Client of Luis Montez, when light shines on everything, happy readers delight in already guessing the outcome, or slap their knees admiring the writer's craft.
Ramos' mysteries may be coming to streaming channels soon. I read somewhere the author's work has been optioned for broadcast development. A ver.
September Promise Realized
Early September this year, La Bloga-Tuesday celebrated the reincarnated Huizache (link), that moved from Texas to Davis, California. It was Houston's desmadre and Davis' windfall, publishing the distinguished magazine's tenth edition. La Bloga promised to share Number Eleven's appearance.
Students and aficionados of Chicano Literature need this collection of contemporary work. "The Magazine of a New America" offers a definitive snapshot of the state and nature of Chicano Literature. It's an important journal that libraries and bookstores should shelve.
1 comment:
Fast-paced, witty, insightful book review. It's so masterful, that even if you don't get around to reading Manuel Ramos' detective novel, you'll still have enjoyed it via Sedano's overview here. Spread the word.
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