Happy Hours, Black Minutes

I'm not much of a reader of mysteries. To enjoy mysteries, it seems to me that you've got to spend an inordinate amount of your reading energy guessing the identity of the killer. It's not the way I read. I soak up the setting, revel in the dialogue, look for the quirks in the characters and most of all immerse myself in the writing. The plot is a device to keep the novel moving, but it is often the least important aspect of a book for me.

Martin Solares' debut novel The Black Minutes satisfied all of my demands as a reader and still managed to maintain a suspenseful mystery. I think the Junot Diaz quote on the cover sums up this Mexican crime novel perfectly.

"A breathless, marvelous first novel... This is Latin American fiction at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest... a literary masterpiece masquerading as a police procedural," Diaz proclaims. That's high praise from one of my favorite writers. I was skeptical about whether the novel could possibly live up to that hype.

The Black Minutes begins on a bus ride. Two strangers, a young journalist and a crusty old policeman are sitting next to each other. The reporter is hauled off the bus and questioned at a checkpoint by the head of the judicial police. When the cops start getting rough, the detective rumbles over to them and puts an end to the shenanigans by declaring that the journalist is riding with him. In a way, the two spend the novel together. Detective Ramon Cabrera investigates the murder of Bernardo Blanco. It turns out Blanco was writing a book about a serial killer, the Jackal, from over 20 years ago. As Cabrera investigates Blanco's killing, he reopens the long dormant case.

What separates Solares novel from most other crime fiction is simply the writing and the pacing. Solares creates the murky world of a corrupt Mexican Gulf Coast town. Setting is often a hallmark of crime writing. Dennis Lehane has Boston, Lisa Scottoline has Philadelphia, heck Stephen White has Boulder, but Solares truly inhabits the town of Paracuan, Tamaulipas in a way that is completely unlike what those writers do. He brings to life our times, but also the late 1970s. It's not about real places serving as a backdrop for his characters actions. The town is in the foreground and while what happens in the story isn't exactly in the background, Solares seems more comfortable with atmosphere than plot pyrotechnics.

"They were looking out over the lagoon in Paracuan. At the far end of the immense sheet of water, they could see the horizon and the hills of Nagual. From there, they could make out El Palmar, the area where they found the first girl, but they weren't talking about that," Solares writes during an important moment in the investigation.

Solares doesn't force his action. The story unfolds languorously in fits and starts. There is a love interest, but she isn't the most beautiful woman that the detective has ever seen. There are surprises but they don't change the entire feel of the novel. The twist and turns of the plot can't alter the story because the incredible setting, mood and bottomless corruption that infects the politicians, cops and drug dealers is the novel's DNA.

The Black Minutes is told from multiple perspectives. Cabrera or El Maceton, as he is known, is the main focal point of the contemporary story while Vincente Rangel, the cop who investigated the Jackal is the heart of the nearly 300-page flashback to the 1970s. Within these sections other voices are heard including a Jesuit priest and several other officers. Some of the voices tell surreal stories or recount their bizarre dreams that seem only tangentially related to the crimes. They offer an outside or second view of some intense scenes and allow us to see the protagonists in a different light. The story hums and every angle that Solares illuminates makes Paracuan even more fascinating.

Cabrera and Rangel are both flawed detectives with true integrity. Rangel, a former rock musician, got into the force through is uncle. He makes the mistake of following the clues to the killings where they lead -- someone powerful. Cabrera, an overweight cop with few friends, makes a similar mistake in following the clues of the journalist's case a bit too far. Both men are willing to risk their lives to solve their cases even though they couldn't articulate why. They operate in the swamp of lies and betrayals where there isn't a single person that can be trusted. Their fellow policemen physically threaten and assault them when they dig up clues that contradict the official version of events. The palpable tension in the police headquarters when the cops are protecting their territory and ill gotten gains inevitably leads to violence.

In the end, I must admit I was a bit confused about how everything went down. Days later, I'm still thinking about some of those shifts of points of view and who knew what when. However, it just doesn't really matter much. The experience of reading Solares taut, tense and descriptive prose, translated by Aura Estrada and John Pluecker, is thrilling. I spent many happy hours in that morass of a Mexican town on the Gulf Coast.