You could easily move from the tired-but-tough detectives of the 1940s to this turn-of-the-millennium practitioner and still recognize the Tarnished P.I. Knight-Errant figure.
Frontera Dreams is Paco Ignacio Taibo II's seventh story featuring Mexico City private eye Hector Belascoaran Shayne. Unfortunately for non-Spanish-speaking English readers, not all of them have been translated. But each that is available to English readers is a reading delight.
Taibo's beleaguered detective, like Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, can't resist a mystery. People and their secrets must be unraveled, even when doing so means a great deal of bodily harm for Hector. In fact, Frontera Dreams includes an essay, "Hector's Body," that describes the dectective's many scars from injuries that have resulted from his several cases.
While Hector's cases don't always drill into the Freudian depths that Archer's cases pursue, neither does the style of his narratives follow the spare prose of that detective-fiction master, Dashiell Hammett. Hector's stories feature plenty of hard-boiled elements that Hammett would recognize, but Taibo's writing style more closely follows that of Raymond Chandler -- the detective's manner of determining the solution to his mystery may not be obvious, but the writing that describes how he gets there is beguiling. And Taibo's stories include plenty of the sort of humor that Chandler's world-weary Marlowe would appreciate, as well.
In Frontera Dreams, the sweetheart of Hector's teenage years -- Natalia -- has grown to become a famous actress. Now she is missing, and her daughter hires Hector to find her.
His search takes him to various towns along the Mexico-U.S. border. When he finds Natalia, she evades his questions with a smile and a sexy rejoinder, then slips away during the night. Hector chases from town to town, encountering other interested seekers on the way: Camacho, who claims to be a policeman, but leaves a business card that describes him as a kitchen appliance salesman; Lisardo Torres, a telenovela producer; Reynoso, a police chief; Quayle, a drug smuggler and murderer; and various eccentrics and dangerous folks.
In Hector, Taibo updates the weary-but-wary figure of the pulp-based private eye for a new century and a different country. The corruption and secrets he encounters aren't so different from the sort faced by Lew Archer, by Marlowe, by Sam Spade -- just the particular details and the time period differ. For instance, the following excerpt from an actual news story at The New York Times reads just like an episode lifted from Frontera Dreams (you can read the entire story at this URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/23/national/23BORD.html?pagewanted=all&position=top):
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RED ROCK, Ariz., Oct. 22 [2002] — The police are investigating whether armed vigilantes, self-appointed guardians of the border with Mexico, fatally shot at least two illegal immigrants in the desert last week.
A 32-year-old man who was part of a group of a dozen migrants waiting to be picked up by smugglers at a pond just west of here last Wednesday told investigators that he escaped through the brush after two men wearing camouflage fatigues descended on the group, firing an automatic rifle and a pistol.
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For the reader encountering Hector for the first time, Frontera Dreams is a nice appetizer that will send you looking for the other books in this series.
You can find Frontera Dreams at Amazon. Click here to see what other readers have to say about Hector and his strange cases.
Posted by ds at October 7, 2002 05:22 PM
What was the first Hector Belascoaran Shayne book?
Posted by: Pam Gragg at June 10, 2004 01:57 PM
According to the Paco Ignacio Taibo II page at the Mostly Fiction web site at http://mostlyfiction.com/humor/taibo.htm#biblio, the following novels are part of the Hector saga. These may be only the books that have been translated; there may be others in the series that have yet to appear in English.
Hector Balascoran Shayne Detective series:
No Happy Ending (1993) (out-of-print)
Life Itself (1995) (out-of-print)
Return to the Same City (1996) (out-of-print)
Frontera Dreams (July 2002)
Posted by: Duane at June 11, 2004 12:25 PM
