Who Put the 'Neo' in Neo-Detective Fiction?
He won three Dashiell Hammett awards, co-authored a crime novel with a famous political figure and helped found a new niche in detective fiction known as neo-policial or neo-detective. Netflix produced a 2022 series based on his PI novels. Guess away but most readers won’t name Paco Ignacio Taibo II. He’s a household name in Mexico and known throughout Latin America. Not so much north of the ‘frontera.’ I’ll list below the titles in his Hector Belascoarán Shayne series that appear in English; unfortunately, many of his works don’t.
Perhaps his most newsworthy project? He co-wrote a crime novel, The Uncomfortable Dead, with Subcomandante Marcos, the former military leader and spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the conflict between indigenous farmers of the southern Mexican province of Chiapas and Mexican authorities. The masked pipe-smoking Marcos, who carries a crippled rooster as a mascot, is a former literature professor, so he wrote to Taibo suggesting they alternate writing chapters of a murder mystery. Nine chapters appeared serially from November 2004 to February 2005 in La Jornada, a Mexican newspaper, later published in book form by Akashic Books in 2006. A Chiapas investigator goes to Mexico City in search of a female murderer named Morales and runs into PI Belascoan Shayne who is looking for a male murderer named Morales.
Sounds wacky? Actually, weirdness is an attribute of the neo-policíaco genre developed by Taibo, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño and Cuban Leonardo Padura Fuentes. This niche, developing from the 1970s on, locates the hard-boiled detective template in a setting where the government and police deal in neither justice nor truth, leaving the detective in a sort of existential dilemma: he (yes, sexism is an issue) can’t restore a social order that wasn’t there to begin with. Instead, he questions and criticizes the social and political realities he encounters, a quixotic quest painted with touches of sarcasm and surrealism. (Full disclosure: I find sexist tropes and language in the crime novels off-putting, but to be fair they’re a couple decades old and US noir has had its own struggles with the same.)
Taibo is a powerhouse author of over eighty books including non-fiction and poetry. Most are not available in English, but Poisoned Pen Press published most of the Belascoaran Shayne series in the aughts and you can order them through online retailers. You might find some on library shelves.
Days of Combat is the first novel in the series where Héctor Belascoarán Shayne leaves his job and wife to become a PI in Mexico City. Then in An Easy Thing, the cola-guzzling chain-smoking detective tackles three cases: a killing in a corrupt factory, threats against a porn star's daughter and, strangely, the search for Emiliano Zapata, dead hero of the Mexican Revolution but rumored to be hiding in a cave outside Mexico City. You can see the mix of politics, marginalized groups, black humor and the surreal. In subsequent titles in the series Shayne’s investigations lead him to cartel traffickers, childhood sweethearts, secret paramilitary groups, CIA-connected gun runners and on and on. In English the titles are Some Clouds, No Happy Ending, Return to the Same City and Frontera Dreams.
In his standalone crime novel, The Shadow of the Shadow, a poet, an organizer, a lawyer and a reporter witness several murders and suspect a conspiracy involving local oil developers, corrupt army officers and American industrialists. Another off-beat set-up that leads to labyrinths of corruption.
Taibo enjoys a cult following in Mexico. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO for short) named Taibo to run a government-funded publishing house with a backlist of 10,000 titles and forty bookstores, so he’s even more of a celebrity now. For an easy snapshot of his work, watch Belascoarán on Netflix. The incredible actor who portrays the detective, Luis Gerardo Mêndez, did a bang-up job in the hilarious Netflix series Club de Cuervos
Available March 31!