Review of Blues for the Buffalo, Backyard Floricanto Returns to Casa Reyna, Jorge Martin qepd

 An Old Friend Through New Eyes

Review: Manuel Ramos. Blues for the Buffalo. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2025. ISBN: 979-8-89375-008-9

Michael Sedano

If you were reading detective fiction in 1994, you were excited by publication of a new Manuel Ramos novel, Blues for the Buffalo, featuring a Denver Chicano lawyer-detective malgre lui, Luis Montez. 

That was forty years ago, so it’s likely many readers are meeting Luis Montez for the first time, and today’s readers are excited by publication of the fourth in the Luis Montez series from Houston’s Arte Público Press. (link), Blues for the Buffalo. 

For gente who get a summer vacation, the four-volume Luis Montez series is perfect for summer binge reading. The series offers not simply four brown noir mysteries but more arrestingly, Ramos crafts a distinctive character in Luis Montez whose ethos occupies a central focus of Blues for the Buffalo.

Not that the novel lacks action and murder and clues and supporting characters. Ramos always fills his books with rich portions of all the above. Blues for the Buffalo, for all its insights into what makes Luis tick, has a fire-bombing murder, a gruesome hit-and-run, a shot in the dark, a bad guy getting it from Luis’ father.

Blues for the Buffalo introduces a California private detective character, Rad Valdez. Rad’s an ass-kicker and no Chicano but he’s got a semi-open mind about raza identity. Valdez is like a proxy for the modern reader who doesn’t “get” the title allusion to Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Brown Buffalo, and gives Ramos a platform to teach some history. This isn't dry stuff; it's like listening to oldies on remastered vinyl.

Oscar Acosta reads from his
Autobiography of a 
Brown Buffalo, 1973

There's no disclaimer like,“Any similarity to actual poets and Yo Soy Joaquin are strictly co-incidental,” but there could be. And there’s a sly smile behind that in the novel’s allusion to Denver poet and movimiento activist Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, who authored the movimiento anthemic ballad, Yo Soy Joaquin. That part’s not in the novel but what’s an allusion for if you have to spell out everything, que no?

Ramos isn’t raising pedo for its own sake. The book's fictive authorship is possibly a motive for murder and just desserts. The poetry subplot lets author Ramos riff on the literary life, flamboyant writers, and signing tables.

Manuel Ramos dedicates Blues for the Buffalo to Zeta, “For Zeta c/s”. Ramos is careful not to embellish or lionize the Los Angeles lawyer and writer in the novel's lengthy expositions about Chicano history and the place Oscar Acosta holds. 

The Brown Buffalo’s a kind of red herring--the book isn't really about Zeta, and the legendary activist is used as a fraud perpetrated upon a fragile woman by an evil half-brother. Evil is a word that dare not speak its name, in the story behind why the woman goes missing and the search leads to a Molotov cocktail and death of a good woman.

Readers who’ve seen Montez take too many risks and make dumb decisions that get him shot in the leg and have his legal practice come crashing down on him will find Buffalo’s Montez a breath of fresh air. Luis is earning a meagre living as a reinstated lawyer again. Slowed down by the leg, he’s introspective and sensitive. Ramos gives the character numerous ethos-fashioning soliloquies on urban change, the movimiento, conscientiousness, being a good son.

Like all the Luis Montez novels, Ramos juggles several plot threads whose characters pop in and out of chapters. As a favor to readers, halfway through Blues for the Buffalo, the author offers a thumbnail summary, “now it appeared that Rad’s presence in town had something to do with the fire that had claimed the life of Charlotte Garcia. And somewhere in all that, I had to sort out the killing of my client, Wilson López, and the unlikely linkage between the poet, Bobby Baca, and the small-time hood Chick Montero.”

All that gets sorted, raveled, and unraveled in good time, along with an untied loose thread about the missing woman and the ugly motive behind the woman’s disappearance and the chain of tragedies leading out of the search for a missing daughter, sister, family secret.

Summer is icumin in and that’s when gente who get vacation time like to kick back and read. Arte Publico’s making binge-reading the Luis Montez series an ideal way to do just that, kick back and read. You’ll enjoy the noir sensibility Manuel Ramos infuses into his novels, clever writing, plot twists you don’t see until they hit you in the gut, entertaining characters and despicable bad guys.

If you’re a working stiff who doesn’t get time off and have to sneak in a book only now and again, there’s nothing like a good mystery novel to distract from the crap and daily drudge. A Luis Montez mystery novel like Blues for the Buffalo brings just what you need to chase away your own blues and if you’re up on your movimiento history, it’ll bring smiles to your face. Y si no, here's a free lesson that anti-DEI tipos don't want you to have.

Backyard Floricanto Returns to Casa Reyna Poetry Garden

La Bloga has long championed the home-grown floricanto, a literary uprising in a living room or backyard. Festivales de Flor y Canto take place on big stages attracting whomever gets the word. Back in 2010, Michael Sedano organized a reunion floricanto of the first major floricanto at USC in 1973. Both festivals were three-day celebrations of Chicano Literature.

These were big deals but floricantos don’t have to be, and should not be, restricted to the big stage. Everyday gente can put together a guest list of poets, send out invitations, and get together in the living room or back yard to eat, drink, and share an open mic with fellow writers and invitadas invitados.

Poets and writers in the Altadena-Pasadena and neighboring communities enjoy the generosity and hospitality of Thelma Reyna, laureate emerita of Altadena, whose poetry garden makes a personal setting for an afternoon floricanto. This was the case last year, when Richard Vargas featured at Casa Reyna Poetry Garden. Link. 

This year, Reyna, with co-host Michael Sedano, welcomed the year’s first floricanto featuring Roy Kuchel and Karineh Mahdessian. 

A floricanto can be fully experienced only in public. This foto essay, however, captures moments of sublime joy wrought from sharing by the afternoon’s features and open mic readers. Iphone fotos by Michael Sedano, art directed/curated by Thelma T. Reyna.

Host, Thelma T. Reyna

It's not all poetry. Margaret García canta.

Alicia Viguer-Espert

Toti O'Brien reads then later sings a song.

John Martinez

Donald Berry

Jimmy Recinos

Mary Anee Berry moves the audience with a fire poem.
Casa Reyna is two blocks south of the Eaton Fire's reach.

G.T. Foster reads from his Vietnam-era memoir 

One of the day's feature poets, Karineh Mahdessian

Karineh Mahdessian makes her return to a poetry stage
in today's Floricanto

Leading the spotlighted readers, Roy Kuchel

Roy Kuchel made his poetry debut at one of last year's
Backyard Floricantos at Casa Reyna Poetry Garden

Remembering Jorge Martin

In 2018, Casa Sedano hosted author liz gonzalez in a book release Living Room Floricanto for her Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds (link). It was a joyous celebration with friends and familia for the San Bernardino native. Last week, liz gonzalez celebrated the life of her husband, scientist, musician, cancer patient Jorge Martin.

liz is surrounded by writer friends in the foto below. The display behind them tells Jorge's life story in a series of tee shirts. There is joy in sorrow, and the Jorge Martin Celebration of Life brought both in equal measure. Jorge's spirit lives on in memories of him held close to the hearts of Jorge's and liz' friends and familia. 

liz begins life after caregiving stops. La Bloga wishes liz the joy of finding the new life awaiting discovery.

Review: Denvercentric Chicano Literature

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.

The University of Houston-housed Arte Publico Press launched the series in 2023 with The Ballad Of Rocky Ruiz: A Luis Montez Mystery. That was followed by a pair of titles in 2024, The Ballad of Gato Guerrero: A Luis Montez Mystery, and the recent release of The Last Client of Luis Montez. Not yet published is Blues For the Buffalo. The press'  silence on the fifth title, Brown On Brown, adds mystery to when the series will be complete. 

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.

Number 11 is here. Link. 

Rocky Ruiz Endures: The Second Time Around

Review: Manuel Ramos. The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. Houston: Arte Publico, 2023.(link to publisher)

 Michael Sedano

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.

 

The more you hang out together your friendship gains dimensions formed out of newer friendships-- many of these subsequent titles by the same author. 

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/=

Gus Corral Reaches His Stride

Review: Manuel Ramos. Angels In The Wind: A Mile High Noir. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2021. ISBN:  978-1-55885-920-3 Publication Date:  April 30, 2021

Michael Sedano

 

There is no frigate like a book, and there is no anchor like an e-book. 

 

I’ve been struggling for a couple months with books on my computer screen. Maybe it’s age, or impatience with technology, but my eyes cannot abide the rasterized page. I lose my place on the screen page, then can’t find my way back again and have to start reading from the top again like a teevee re-run until I find my place.

 

I like the screen page of my iPhone, curiously. I read Moby Dick and the Odyssey waiting for medical procedures last year on my phone. The big computer screen doesn’t serve except locational.

 

I plug my computer next to a heater vent so my spavined limbs get a bit of comfort when it’s cold all day despite the brilliant California sunshine. If I have a fire going I can’t go sit next to it without uncoupling the device to weigh anchor. If I want to sit near a sunny window in a different room and read, the anchor fixes me in that warm chair, scrolling the page and getting lost.

 

Today, I thank the Post Office and Arte Público Press for the manuscript I hold in my hands. I sit in the bright sunlight in the warming day, angle the book just right out of the glare that would totally defeat a laptop screen. Making my reading experience more complete, the manuscript is Manuel Ramos’ upcoming Gus Corral mystery, Angels In The Wind: A Mile High Noir (link), and it’s a genuine page-turner. 

 

Ramos hits his stride with his Gus Corral character in this novel of teenage runaways, small town culture, ugly bad guys, and if you pretend it’s not a murder mystery, the reveal near the end of the novel works delightfully. Readers of the earlier Gus Corral novels will be happy to meet this introspective, no-nonsense problem-solver who doesn't get himself into deep caca by rushing into stuff.

 

Corral’s introspection comes with a sentimental, nostalgic ring to it. As an authorial nostalgia, Ramos delivers a farewell to his Luis Montez character. At the same time, Ramos bids authorial farewell to Rudy Anaya, ¡Presente!, when Corral says he’s no Sonny Baca.

 

Ramos drives the plot with Gus’ observations as he thinks out loud, connecting dots. A lot of dots: The habitual runaway; Desperate familia; The hometown love affair; Teenage angst; Anti-raza racism; Mysterious outsider; Human trafficking; Good, decent cops who for once don’t want to kick Gus’ ass for him; Our badly damaged hero.

 

Recuperating from a beating with a baseball bat, the novel begins with Gus working at keeping his mind organized. Ramos presents a great lesson for writers in not wasting any details. When Gus meets the missing boy’s family, he doesn’t object when he notices the grandmother’s dismissive relationship in her home. Gus also notes a rifle and ammunition within reach of one another. Out in the country, Gus reasons, people have different standards. 

 

In a world of contrasts, the story of a missing teen gets its deus ex machina from the oldest character, a nice plot twist. More, featuring elders in prime roles comes straight out of a Sonny Baca novel, whose elderly sidekicks play key roles.

 

Privacy looms as a highly valued standard in this small Colorado town. Gus the investigator raises hackles by invading even his primo prima’s private thoughts. Yet, everyone in town knows Gus, his purpose, his truck, his questions. And they want him to go away.

 

Privacy, of course, comes as the controlling trope of mystery novels. Criminals don’t want to get caught. Gus peels away the veneer of privacy to expose not just the murder readers expect all along, but petty small town corruption motivated by redemption. One is redeemed, another is discovered to be a rapist.

 

Even though murder mysteries revolve around taking lives, detective novels should have happy endings at their center. Here we have several: the boy located; the real crime discovered; evil men killed; uppity Anglos get a come-uppence; familia whole; a broken father's justice.

Much of Angels In The Wind: A Mile High Noir takes place in the underworld of teenage runaways and exploitative adults. This is not the stuff of happy endings, even with dead bad guys. For homeless kids, there are no happy endings, and in this story, no happy ending-- not for the runaway primo, not Jeannie, the waif whose story evaporates in the denoument, not even an afterthought.That's a homeless girl's end. So it goes.

 

Is that noir, setting an underworld where there’s no hope? It’s reality. Gus can’t solve anyone’s problem on the streets. Ramos uses the setting to underline the intractable problem. The author minimizes tear-jerking narrative, offering the ethos of the passionate shelter director who refuses to divulge any morsel of what she knows. Runaway kids are an urban fact, deserving, lovely people like the girl called Jeannie, live out there on their own, no one’s solving anything. That’s noir, que no?

 

And in the end, this boy of such potential who was too bright a light for his small town, he was murdered over the most tawdry of motives. Puro noir.

 

 

 

 

 

Review: Blackout. An Inspector Espinosa Mystery.

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7960-9
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7960-2

Michael Sedano

Blackout is as good a title as any for this mystery set in Rio de Janeiro’s fabled Copacabana and Ipanema neighborhoods. Sadly, the blackout of the title is more a gimmick than a psychological condition experienced by the suspect. In a typical fictional blackout, a character commits a series of acts then loses memory of having performed the actions. The detectives and the character’s loved ones then must unravel clues then assign responsibility.

But in Blackout, the central character does not suffer blackouts. His problem, really, is not a damaged memory nor situational blindness but a profoundly haunting event that so terrifies him that his memory superimposes visions from that long ago upon events at hand. He acts on what he thinks he sees, then lies and covers up when he later discovers the actuality that confronted him. None of this is a blackout, so why that title?

Maybe it’s translation from some Brazilian Portugese word whose closest English equivalent is “blackout”? (I write this without the book in hand and must depend on memory. I do not remember the translator's name, nor is it listed in the publisher's website). At any rate, “blackout” is not what happens to the Aldo, a successful interior decorator married to a beautiful psychologist.

When Aldo was a boy, a neighborhood bully bloodied the boy’s face. Aldo offered no resistance, no defensive posture, only meek submission to the beating. But the beating has a haunting effect on Aldo. He develops a lifelong fear of meeting up again with that bully. Garcia-Roza fails to develop the background of this terror. Instead, the author shows us one event that foreshadows the novel’s central event.

Some time after the beating, Aldo thinks he spots the bully headed in Aldo’s direction. Terrified at the thought of another meeting, another beating, Aldo cowers behind stacks of merchandise in a small shop until the shopkeeper asks if the boy needs help. Shaking with fear, the boy abandons his hiding place to hesitantly peek out the storefront. No bully. One moment he was on the street, the next, an empty street. Who knows what set off the panic, but the reader understands Aldo has been terrorized by a figment of his imagination.

Years later, Aldo is moving his car during a thunderous rainstorm. Suddenly out of the darkness, an apparition appears to Aldo’s eyes. It is the bully. Isn’t it?

The next morning, a one-legged man is discovered dead, shot in the chest at the top of a hill. Now the mystery begins. How, or why, does a one-legged man make the strenuous trek from flatlands to the cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill? Who killed him? Why? Aldo and others were at the scene around the time of the murder, but they have no obvious connection to the nameless corpse.

Meanwhile, back at the office, Aldo’s assistant is a hot young beauty named Mercedes. She sets her sights on Aldo and it’s only a matter of crooking her little finger and Aldo is in her bed. The triumphant Mercedes begins scheming to take Aldo from his wife and two kids. To this point, Aldo was a semi-likeable character. Now, seeing how easily he falls into adultery, the reader loses any loyalty to Aldo and is willing to sit back and let bad stuff happen to Aldo.

Aldo’s wife is murdered. But not before the reader sees her in therapy sessions with attractive women, and seemingly crossing the boundary between counselor and lover. How sad to witness three people—Aldo, his wife, and Mercedes the assistant--with such comfortable lives discarding all for a fast fling with a good-looking target.

With a cast of such unattractive, even repellent, characters, the reader cares ever more about Espinosa’s sleuthing. With the wife dead, Espinosa discovers the affair between Mercedes and Aldo. Then a clue here, a clue there, and, almost haphazardly, with only a few pages remaining, Espinosa pins their respective crimes on them.

Blackout is an engaging story but I want to know more about the characters. We see Aldo pushed around as a kid, but have no idea why the boy doesn’t fight back, nor what leads him to be such a ninny that Mercedes finds him easy pickings. We don’t get to see connections between Mercedes’ history and her predatory nature, nor what motivates her to such drastic acts.

There may be a method behind this. Although Blackout has much undeveloped territory, the lacunae help the reader understand the milieu that Inspector Espinosa and his staff work in. Since the reader knows only as much as the detectives, as the case unfolds the reader is forced to set aside logic and causality and simply watch the cops do their job. In the process, the reader will enjoy the delight of discovery and the surprises that Garcia-Roza dishes out. Not a bad trade-off, and one worth picking up the novel for.

That's the view from Lincoln Nebraska this week, the third Tuesday of March. Looking forward to being home next week, but reading some good stuff while on this trip to the great plains. Les wachamos.

mvs

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La Vida en las Sombras

Murder, memory, loss, anguish--all the stuff of crime fiction and tragedy. It is the subject matter of novelist James Ellroy, whose literary career has garnered him praise from the national press, and whose novel, L.A. Confidential, became a critically acclaimed film. But in My Dark Places, Ellroy throws the reader an unexpected twist.

This book is about the killing of his own mother, whom Ellroy lost when he was 10. It was the single incident that propelled Ellroy through a life as an introverted child, a teen criminal, a con, a drug addict, and finally a writer. But even as Ellroy dredges his tortured life from the ashes, his mother's ghost is never far behind. He longs for her, dreams about her, and she insinuated herself into every waking moment of his life.

My Dark Places is memoir, crime story, love song and a cry in the dark. Jean Ellroy was very much like a character in a noir novel. A woman of duplicity, torn between two lives, she was subdued and distant with her son, and acted more as a disciplinarian., rather than loving mother. In her other life she was a secret alcoholic, habitually drawn to anonymous sex with violent men. One of those men killed her on June 22, 1958. It was the single experience that rent the fabric of James Ellroy's life. He spent the next 36 years both running from her ghost, and recreating her life.

As soon as he was able Ellroy disappeared into the underworld. He was his mother's son, after all. She drank, he grew up and did eight balls and speed. She hung with criminals, he became one. She picked up men in bars and had one-night stands, he met women, screwed them, dumped them and moved along. When the drugs and the sex and the crime failed, Ellroy even reconstituted himself as a sober, successful writer. Nothing healed that wound that was his mother. He desired her, despised her, finally decided to investigate the case himself, hoping in this way, to reclaim her. What happened was an odyssey of obsession, redemption, but not peace.

Despite a kind of resolution, James Ellroy will never be a peaceable being. He ends My Dark Places with these words: I can hear your voice. I can smell you and taste your breath. You're brushing against me. You're gone and I want more of you. Then he lists the name and number of the detective who is still looking for leads, still looking for the killer.

Why is this so compelling for me? I was drawn to read this book after hearing an interview with Ellroy, feeling shocked to hear him talk about the tragedy in words that were my own. My own writing about mother-loss echoes Ellroy's: I am looking for you mother, looking for you everywhere. In the corridors of dreams, windowless, empty. I look for the door that will lead me to you. I look, but I never find it.

I ran from my own childhood holocaust, escaped anyway I could. I, too, reworked, re-envisioned, and reshaped my life by writing. That wound has never completely healed. Maybe it never will, if my own intuition and Ellroy's cautionary words mean anything. But we write, we keep digging up the past, we keep afloat.

On a purely stylistic note: this is riveting writing. The book is crafted with a staccato rhythm, the use of simple, clean phrasing, and icy-hot imagery. I hope I can use it to shape a trilogy of performance I'm working on about personal and pop culture violence, Bury the Bones. Maybe Ellroy would enjoy the title.

ISBN-10: 0679762051

Lisa Alvarado