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WORK TITLE: The Acid Test
WORK NOTES: trans by Mark Fried
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/6/1949
WEBSITE:
CITY: Culiacan, Sinaloa
STATE:
COUNTRY: Mexico
NATIONALITY: Mexican
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lmer_Mendoza
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 6, 1949, in Mexico.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Short story and narco-literature writer; literature professor.
AWARDS:José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature, 2002, for Janis Joplin’s Lover; Tusquets Prize, for Silver Bullets.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born December 6, 1949 in Mexico, Elmer Mendoza is a writer of narco-literature. Many of his crime fiction books feature detective Edgar El Zurdo “Lefty” Mendieta. At the beginning of his writing career, he wrote five book collections of short stories between 1978 and 1995. His debut novel in 1999, A Lone Murderer, featuring Mendieta, was praised for its realistic portrayal of Mexico’s narco culture and the ways it has influenced Mexican law enforcement and politics.
Silver Bullets
In 2015, Mendoza published Silver Bullets, translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried. Featuring Lefty Mendieta of the Federal Preventative Police, the story starts with his girlfriend walking out on him and his depression from the moral decay of his city of Culiacán, Mexico, the country’s drug crime capital. After high powered lawyer Bruno Canizales is killed by a single silver bullet, Mendieta decides to throw himself into his work. Does the silver bullet have significance? As the son of a government minister and boyfriend to a drug lord’s daughter, Canizales had dangerous friends in high places. He also had both male and female lovers, which widens the suspect pool. Joined by spunky female cop, Zelda Toledo, Mendieta pursues the case, which takes him to glitzy mansions and gathering information from reporters and transsexuals. With the region’s extensive drug crime smothering the detectives, “The picture the novel presents of Mexico is not at all a pretty one,” said Radmila May on the Promoting Crime Fiction by Lizzie Hayes website.
Despite the book’s accolades and receipt of the Tusquets Prize for best Spanish-language crime novel, “American readers may find Lefty’s by-the-book investigations overly familiar,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly Online, who added that dialogue mingles with exposition without quotation marks adding confusion to the story. Chris Roberts declared online at Crime Review: “The permeation of the drug business into normal life is well depicted in this book, and conveyed with delicacy through the thoughts of the characters. Mendieta is a sympathetic protagonist too.” Commenting on the Irish Examiner Online, Declan Burke noted: “It’s a superb novel, a blackly comic tale akin to the bracing realism of Dashiell Hammett’s early work that leaves the reader feeling claustrophobic, grimy and entirely hopeless about Mexico’s immediate future.”
The Acid Test
Another in the Mendieta series, the 2017 book The Acid Test finds the detective investigating the brutal murder of well-known stripper Mayra Cabral de Melo, a woman he had a past with. To Lefty, the case is personal, even as it brings him into the dangerous world of the narcos, filled with corrupt politicians, failed boxers, and unscrupulous arms dealers. At first, Lefty investigates the nightclub where Mayra worked, but when the father of the U.S. president is attacked while vacationing in Mexico, Mendieta must confront the FBI. He begins to suspect the cases are connected.
A Publishers Weekly Online contributor said: “Mendoza conveys a clear sense of life in Culiacán through the violence of the competing cartels,” however, also noting that the story is uneven and lack of quotation marks on dialogue is confusing. With a huge cast and five-page character list for reference, Chris Roberts commented online at Crime Review: “Paragraphs sometimes exceeding two pages do not help. The translation is fine, but there are occasional passages where one suspects that the vitality of the original Spanish could not be fully conveyed.” Nevertheless, Washington Post Book World Online reviewer San Quinones said: “Like any pop-lit genre, pulp is fantasy, even more so when the protagonist is a police detective in Culiacan, a grim profession distinctly impervious to the romance of noir sensibilities. Indeed, we see Mendieta arguing with his bosses and, contrary to their orders, going after powerful state politicians. That’s fantasy, but is there any other way a novelist can grapple with the holocaust around him?
BIOCRIT
ONLINE
Crime Review, http://crimereview.co.uk/ (July 18, 2015), Chris Roberts, review of Silver Bullets; (April 1, 2017), Chris Roberts, review of The Acid Test.
Irish Examiner Online, http://www.irishexaminer.com/ (July 11,2015), Declan Burke, review of Silver Bullets.
Promoting Crime Fiction by Lizzie Hayes, http://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/ (August 26, 2015), Radmila May, review of Silver Bullets.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 1, 2016), review of Silver Bullets; (November 7, 2016), review of The Acid Test.
Washington Post Book World Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (December 29, 2016), Sam Quinones, review of The Acid Test.*
Series
Lefty Mendieta
1. Silver Bullets (2015)
2. The Acid Test (2016)
3. The Name of the Dog (2018)
Élmer Mendoza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Élmer Mendoza (born 6 December 1949) is a Mexican author. He is one of the key figures in the genre known as narcoliterature.[1] A dramatist and short story writer, he is known above all for his novels, several of which feature the detective Edgar El Zurdo Mendieta.
Élmer Mendoza appeared on the Mexican literary scene in 1978, publishing his first short story collection. He followed his literary debut with a prolific career. Between 1978 and 1995 he published five volumes of short stories. Then, in 1999, came his first novel, entitled Un asesino solitario (A Lone Murderer). The book won rave reviews, and the Mexican critic Federico Campbell described Mendoza as “the first narrator reflects correctly the effect drug culture in our country.”[2]
Élmer Mendoza
Beside being a best-selling author, Mendoza is also a professor of literature at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. He is one of the incumbent members of the Mexican Academy of Language and the National System of Art Creators.[2]
Awards and honors
2002 José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature for El amante de Janis Joplin[3]
Book review: Silver Bullets
0
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Review: Declan Burke
DETECTIVE Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta, the main player in Elmer Mendoza’s English-language debut, likes ‘an impossible case’.
Elmer Mendoza
MacLehose, €22.50
Not because Lefty is any kind of cerebral sleuth, a Poirot or Holmes seeking out the most difficult crimes in order to stimulate his little grey cells, but because Lefty is a Mexican policeman operating in the city of Culiacán with the Federal Preventative Police, and his experience is that murder cases tend to be ignored, covered up, deliberately botched or otherwise swept under the carpet.
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It’s for the best, Lefty believes, if his superiors declare a murder ‘an impossible case’ as soon as possible, and preferably before Lefty gets to the crime scene, so as not to wastefully expend the already pitiful resources of the FPP.
Unfortunately for Lefty, the murder of Bruno Canizales can’t be easily filed under ‘impossible’, especially as the murderer rather flamboyantly used silver bullets when assassinating the high-profile bisexual attorney.
Was the killer Canizales’ tempestuous lover Paolo Rodriguez, who subsequently committed suicide? His other tempestuous lover, the dancer Francisco Aldana?
Or was the murder orchestrated by the all-powerful ‘Narcos’ who control Mexico’s drug trade, and who control virtually every politician, judge and policeman in the country?
Lefty Mendieta is a terrific creation, a gloomy, intellectual introspective who is resolutely cynical about the world and his place in it. “What did he know about modernism, or postmodernism for that matter, or intangible cultural heritage?”
Lefty asks of himself on the very first page, establishing the parameters of Elmer Medoza’s investigation into contemporary Mexico but also, courtesy of the high-falutin’ pondering, tipping us the wink that Mendoza’s own exploration of the culture will very likely shed no more light on the truth than one of Lefty’s ‘impossible cases’.
And so it proves, as Lefty doggedly pursues the clues and the killer with the penchant for silver bullets, his efforts leading him down numerous blind alleys as he wonders about the significance of the bullets themselves and whether they are being employed for mythical purposes in order to kill a modern vampire or a werewolf.
Lefty is happy to reference James Bond and Gary Cooper, but he’s no hero or tarnished knight, willing to acquiesce when his boss tells him to drop the case and equally happy to accept bribes in the form of cash in a brown envelope.
That said, he’s no coward either, and he goes where the investigation leads him, even when it takes him right to the gates of the region’s most feared Narco, Marcelo Valdés.
Not that Lefty, living his life according to the surreal logic of contemporary Mexico, is a slave to procedure: “He reminded himself that no expert follows the evidence, since in this business the truth always resides precisely where it should not.” For all of Mendoza’s comic asides, however, Silver Bullets is a serious novel about an entire culture in thrall to the ‘Narcos’.
In Mendoza’s poverty-stricken Mexico, the cops are corrupt and the bad guys are the people’s champions, benefactors of communities and heirs to the romantic ideal of the outlaws who destroyed the status quo of the landed gentry.
Mendoza’s style is as dense in its own way as James Ellroy at his best (or worst), with dialogue condensed into paragraphs with little by way of punctuation to tell the reader who is speaking.
The effect is that you pay very close attention to who is speaking or you quickly find yourself lost, an effect that suggests Mendoza is criticising those who only glance at Mexico’s tragedy and then avert their eyes.
It’s a superb novel, a blackly comic tale akin to the bracing realism of Dashiell Hammett’s early work that leaves the reader feeling claustrophobic, grimy and entirely hopeless about Mexico’s immediate future – a country where, as Lefty Mendieta grimly observes, “Nothing is true, nothing is false.”
In a sea of corpses, a lone detective struggles to solve one murder at a time
By Sam Quinones December 29, 2016
In his classic book “Killings,” Calvin Trillin said that writing about violence is best when it allows us to delve more into how people lived than into how they died.
(MacLehose)
This claim has been tested over the last dozen years, though, given the unrelentingly gruesome news out of Mexico, a country where I lived for 10 years ending in 2004: mounds of headless bodies, corpses hanging from overpasses, a man known as “The Soupmaker” who dissolved cartel victims in acid baths, etc.
As a crime reporter, I’ve wondered how Mexican artists are to digest and use the pornographic violence that has been part of their daily news. Amid such barbarism, is there any respite to allow us to ponder what the violence means and says about how we live? Are there any heroes anymore, even the tainted, befuddled kind? In the old corridos, heroes are doomed men up against impossible odds yet going into battle anyway. But even the corrido is corrupted in Mexico today, providing only unabashed propaganda and applause for the best-armed and most-moneyed sadists as they grind up other human beings.
Mexican crime novelist Elmer Mendoza’s response is to turn to Edgar “Lefty” Mendieta. Mendieta is a classic pulp detective: hapless, tough and driven, kind of corrupt but the only cop around not on the cartel’s payroll. He’s unsentimental yet attracted to the possibility of love and all the while consumed with self-doubt. When we meet Mendieta in “The Acid Test” — Mendoza’s third novel involving the detective — he’s contemplating suicide, wondering why he continues to occupy space in the world.
Mendieta’s misfortune is to be working in contemporary Culiacan, a city in northwestern Mexico, as a drug war breaks out, pitting cartels against each other and the government against them all. In a country where few homicides are ever solved, a detective with a sense of justice can go mad. As the bodies pile up around him, Mendieta holds on to his sanity by concentrating on solving one murder. The victim was a dazzling Brazilian stripper, Mayra Cabral de Melo, with whom he had a one-night encounter that left him imagining the possibility of love.
(MacLehose)
Then she wound up dead on a lonely road with a severed nipple.
“Why do I kid myself?” Mendieta wonders. “Good things never last.”
Mendoza is an important Mexican writer not least because he is among a group of border authors who emerged in the late 1990s as the country’s centralized one-party state crumbled. Up till then, any novelist with aspirations had to visit Mexico City often, if not live there full time. But the border writers held that what happened in Mexico’s north — a region long disparaged by the country’s intellectual and political elites as too close to the Yankees and thus less fully Mexican — was at least as worthwhile. So they dug into their haunts in Juarez, Tijuana, Chihuahua City or, in Mendoza’s case, his home town of Culiacan, the bleeding heart of Mexico’s drug world and hot as an oven.
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Author Elmer Mendoza (Javier Narváez Estrada )
Mendoza uses Mendieta’s investigation as a chance to take us through Culiacan, visiting a strip club, the home of a car dealer with a homicidal daughter, and Humaya Gardens cemetery, where dozens of narcos are buried in gaudy mausoleums. All that’s missing is a visit to the chapel of Jesús Malverde, the narco-saint. (The five-page listing of characters at the front of the book is essential to understanding the narrative.)
As Mendoza eschews quotation marks, the book at times feels like stream of consciousness. The prose can sound stilted, perhaps because pulp, with the underworld’s cultural specificity, can be as difficult to translate as poetry. But like any pop-lit genre, pulp is fantasy, even more so when the protagonist is a police detective in Culiacan, a grim profession distinctly impervious to the romance of noir sensibilities. Indeed, we see Mendieta arguing with his bosses and, contrary to their orders, going after powerful state politicians. That’s fantasy, but is there any other way a novelist can grapple with the holocaust around him?
It’s not giving too much away to say that the book ends with Mendieta returning to the morgue to reunite Mayra’s nipple with her corpse. More fantasy, it’s true. But in a land from which so much has been severed in the last dozen years, maybe that’s all a hero can do.
Sam Quinones’s most recent book is “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”
The Acid Test
By Elmer Mendoza
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried
MacLehose. 284 pp. $24.99
Silver Bullets
by Élmer Mendoza (translated by Mark Fried)
Mexican detective Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta investigates a murder – there are plenty of suspects, but the use of a silver bullet is something new.
Review
By 2006, the trafficking of narcotics had transformed Culiacan, Mexico, into one of the world’s most violent cities, shootings plentiful and every morning the discovery of ‘gangsta-wraps’ - dumped blanket-shrouded bodies. Such deaths are passed to the police narcotics division with no hope of resolution, given the resources at the command of the drug lords.
Detective Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta steps gingerly within this environment to investigate the murder of Canizales, the lawyer son of a man lobbying for high political office, who had an adventurous social life with both sexes, including the daughter of a drug baron. Lefty is constrained from the start given the power of the parties involved, and is soon told that the investigation is officially over. But further deaths follow, and he can’t let it go.
Lefty in fact enjoys a fair degree of autonomy in his work, and although only a lowly detective, he enjoys a reputation for integrity which gains him a foot in the door, and the help of old friends in key positions within the police. Typically, when his partner Zelda Toledo is transferred to Traffic, he storms in to secure her return. Inside, Mendieta is in turmoil over an affair with Goga, who blows hot and cold, but he comes across as a very decent man.
The most prominent stylistic feature of the book is the lack of quotation marks for speech, with a change of speaker not even signified by a new line. Lefty gets constant phone calls and often several exchanges follow before the speaker can be identified. The result is frequent confusion and the need to go back to ensure full understanding. Coupled with the tendency for paragraphs to often exceed a page in length, and the multiplicity of names, it has to be said this is not the easiest book to read.
One interesting facet is Lefty’s occasional reference to music, frequently music that is familiar, such as Elton John and Marmalade. At one point he muses on Like a Rolling Stone (Dylan), To Love Somebody (Bee Gees) and Proud Mary (John Fogerty), claiming they are all Jagger/Richards compositions. It is unclear as to whether this a joke about the protagonist or on the reader. While the translation is excellent, it is difficult to avoid the feeling on occasion that some of the observational subtleties on life in Mexico are lost to foreign readers.
Élmer Mendoza is widely regarded as the founder of ‘narco-lit’ exploring drug trafficking and corruption in Latin America. The permeation of the drug business into normal life is well depicted in this book, and conveyed with delicacy through the thoughts of the characters. Mendieta is a sympathetic protagonist too. It is only literary style that is likely to hinder the book enjoying a wide readership.
Reviewed 18 July 2015 by Chris Roberts
Chris Roberts is a retired manager of shopping centres in Hong Kong, and now lives in Bristol, primarily reading.
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
‘Silver Bullets’ by Elmer Mendoza
Published by Maclehose Press (Quercus Publishing), 16 April 2015.
ISBN: 978 0 85705 259 9(pb)
In the city of Culiacan, Mexico’s capital of narco-crime, murder is as commonplace as to be barely remarkable and police investigations are perfunctory to say the least. But the murder of lawyer Bruno Camizales is in a different category. Bruno was the son of a former government minister and worked as a legal adviser at Social Security. Detectives Edgar Mendieta and Zelda Toledo are assigned to the case. Those who knew Bruno spoke of his kindness and his concern for others but also of his wild promiscuity with both men and women, one of whom, Paola Rodriguez, whom he had jilted some months previously and who had vowed vengeance, kills herself on hearing of his death. One oddity about Bruno’s death is that the bullet that killed him was silver. Why silver? Where had it come from? Does it have some significance? In the search for the identity of Bruno’s killer and the connection, if any, with either his tangled love life or the omnipresent narco-crime or the all-pervasive corruption, Mendieta and Zelda, separately or together, follow numerous leads and are led up countless blind alleys while simultaneously finding that various possible avenues of investigation are closed off for political reasons by their superiors who are in their turn pressurised by outside interests. Not until the end do Mendieta and Zelda work out the truth and achieve a sort of justice. Thus the picture the novel presents of Mexico is not at all a pretty one particularly if one’s previous literary experience of Mexico is limited to Dora Explorer! But no doubt it is more truthful.
The author has been described as ‘one of the biggest names in Mexican literature ‘ and ‘the literary representative of modern-day Mexico in its narco-incarnation’. The translation (by Mark Fried) is excellent.
------
Reviewer: Radmila May
The Acid Test review: In a sea of corpses, a lone detective struggles to solve one murder at a time
By Special to The Washington Post |
January 5, 2017 at 4:49 pm
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By Sam Quinones, Washington Post Writers Group
acid-testIn his classic book “Killings,” Calvin Trillin said that writing about violence is best when it allows us to delve more into how people lived than into how they died.
This claim has been tested over the last dozen years, though, given the unrelentingly gruesome news out of Mexico, a country where I lived for 10 years ending in 2004: mounds of headless bodies, corpses hanging from overpasses, a man known as “The Soupmaker” who dissolved cartel victims in acid baths, etc.
As a crime reporter, I’ve wondered how Mexican artists are to digest and use the pornographic violence that has been part of their daily news. Amid such barbarism, is there any respite to allow us to ponder what the violence means and says about how we live? Are there any heroes anymore, even the tainted, befuddled kind?
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In the old corridos, heroes are doomed men up against impossible odds yet going into battle anyway. But even the corrido is corrupted in Mexico today, providing only unabashed propaganda and applause for the best-armed and most-moneyed sadists as they grind up other human beings.
Mexican crime novelist Elmer Mendoza’s response is to turn to Edgar “Lefty” Mendieta. Mendieta is a classic pulp detective: hapless, tough and driven, kind of corrupt but the only cop around not on the cartel’s payroll. He’s unsentimental yet attracted to the possibility of love and all the while consumed with self-doubt. When we meet Mendieta in “The Acid Test” — Mendoza’s third novel involving the detective — he’s contemplating suicide, wondering why he continues to occupy space in the world.
Mendieta’s misfortune is to be working in contemporary Culiacan, a city in northwestern Mexico, as a drug war breaks out, pitting cartels against each other and the government against them all. In a country where few homicides are ever solved, a detective with a sense of justice can go mad. As the bodies pile up around him, Mendieta holds on to his sanity by concentrating on solving one murder. The victim was a dazzling Brazilian stripper, Mayra Cabral de Melo, with whom he had a one-night encounter that left him imagining the possibility of love.
Then she wound up dead on a lonely road with a severed nipple.
“Why do I kid myself?” Mendieta wonders. “Good things never last.”
Mendoza is an important Mexican writer not least because he is among a group of border authors who emerged in the late 1990s as the country’s centralized one-party state crumbled. Up till then, any novelist with aspirations had to visit Mexico City often, if not live there full time. But the border writers held that what happened in Mexico’s north — a region long disparaged by the country’s intellectual and political elites as too close to the Yankees and thus less fully Mexican — was at least as worthwhile. So they dug into their haunts in Juarez, Tijuana, Chihuahua City or, in Mendoza’s case, his home town of Culiacan, the bleeding heart of Mexico’s drug world and hot as an oven.
Mendoza uses Mendieta’s investigation as a chance to take us through Culiacan, visiting a strip club, the home of a car dealer with a homicidal daughter, and Humaya Gardens cemetery, where dozens of narcos are buried in gaudy mausoleums. All that’s missing is a visit to the chapel of Jesus Malverde, the narco-saint. (The five-page listing of characters at the front of the book is essential to understanding the narrative.)
As Mendoza eschews quotation marks, the book at times feels like stream of consciousness. The prose can sound stilted, perhaps because pulp, with the underworld’s cultural specificity, can be as difficult to translate as poetry. But like any pop-lit genre, pulp is fantasy, even more so when the protagonist is a police detective in Culiacan, a grim profession distinctly impervious to the romance of noir sensibilities. Indeed, we see Mendieta arguing with his bosses and, contrary to their orders, going after powerful state politicians. That’s fantasy, but is there any other way a novelist can grapple with the holocaust around him?
It’s not giving too much away to say that the book ends with Mendieta returning to the morgue to reunite Mayra’s nipple with her corpse. More fantasy, it’s true. But in a land from which so much has been severed in the last dozen years, maybe that’s all a hero can do.
THE ACID TEST
By Elmer Mendoza.
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried.
MacLehose.
Sam Quinones’ most recent book is “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”
The Acid Test
by Elmer Mendoza (translated by Mark Fried)
Detective ‘Lefty’ Mendieta is determined to find the killer of an exotic dancer, while around him the conflict of two rival gangs of narcotics traffickers comes to a head.
Review
At the end of his first outing, Silver Bullets, Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta met the very beautiful Mayra Cabral de Melo, a dancer who spread her favours around the well-heeled of Culiacan. Although his admiration was purely platonic, her murder at the beginning of this book provokes his rage and intense focus. Lefty interviews in turn aspiring politicians, senior members in the local narco aristocracy, visiting gringos and others who vied for the hire of Mayra’s body.
This exclusive attention does not satisfy Lefty’s bosses, and he is specifically warned off some of the suspects who have pull. Certainly there is plenty else which might merit his activity. Two rival drug gangs are tooling up for a showdown with the assistance of hardware from a visiting salesman. The father of the US president is visiting a local estate for a duck shoot, and opponents of the president’s policy of building a wall are on the warpath. And the ‘gangsta wraps’ steadily pile up.
Set in 2007, the book provides a picture of life in a city where the economy is dominated by the trafficking of marijuana, cocaine and heroin. The Mexican president has just launched a war on the trade, but nobody has any illusions. The huge amounts of cash generated percolate into all areas of life, casual murder has become commonplace, and no amount of pious pleading is going to change things.
Lefty’s survival in this environment becomes a delicate balancing act: acceptance of the obscenities of the narcotics trade, indeed having some kind of respect from the gangs as an honest joe, while rigorously pursuing the criminals that he can actually do something about. Recognition of his character gives him a certain licence with the gangs and his superiors, and the appreciation of his staff, including the feisty Zelda Toledo. This is a very macho culture and Zelda comes as a welcome counterbalance.
As observed with Mendoza’s first book, however, there are a few barriers to complete enjoyment for the reader. The lack of inverted commas make reported speech a problem: the frequent telephone calls are difficult to follow, especially when the speakers are not immediately identified. The cast is huge, and frequent referral to the five-page cast list supplied is difficult to avoid. Paragraphs sometimes exceeding two pages do not help. The translation is fine, but there are occasional passages where one suspects that the vitality of the original Spanish could not be fully conveyed.
One thing which does come across is Mexican cuisine; those who think Mexican food is limited to tortillas will be informed by the guide to the range of dishes and drinks enjoyed by the characters in the book. It all looks delicious, although training may be necessary to survive the chillies.
Reviewed 01 April 2017 by Chris Roberts
The Acid Test
Élmer Mendoza, trans. from the Spanish by Mark Fried. MacLehose, $24.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-68144-289-1
The murder of exotic dancer Mayra Cabral de Melo, found executed in a field outside the Mexican city of Culiacán, propels Mendoza’s uneven sequel to 2016’s Silver Bullets. When homicide detective Edgar “Lefty” Mendieta arrives to investigate the crime scene, he recognizes the victim. The two had met in Mazatlán, and their chemistry was unmistakable. When police arrive at Mayra’s home to search for clues, they discover her roommate, dancer Yolanda Estrada, similarly murdered. The search for the perpetrator unfolds against a backdrop of the nightclub where Mayra worked, the city’s drug wars, and a list of suspects that includes the rich, the influential, and the criminal. Mendoza conveys a clear sense of life in Culiacán through the violence of the competing cartels and a simmering expectation and acceptance of corruption. Lefty’s honesty is the exception, not the rule. Most of the convoluted story unfolds through dialogue, but because the conversations lack quotation marks and attribution, they can be confusing. (Jan.)
Reviewed on: 11/07/2016
Release date: 01/03/2017
Open Ebook - 240 pages - 978-1-68144-287-7
Paperback - 978-1-68144-288-4
Open Ebook - 240 pages - 978-0-85705-366-4
Silver Bullets
Elmer Mendoza, trans. from the Spanish by Mark Fried. Quercus/MacLehose, $24.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-68144-616-5
Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa—where "gangsta-wraps" (slain narco soldiers swathed in blankets) are found next to the roadside almost daily—provides the deadly backdrop for Mendoza's English-language debut, a straightforward crime novel set in 2006. The authorities call in Det. Edgar "Lefty" Mendieta on a possible homicide and a suicide, but since there are connections to drugs, they instruct him to hand the cases over to Narcotics—even though killings are occurring using silver bullets. Assisted by a spunky female sidekick, Lefty carries on, haunted by memories of having been molested as a child and the return of a femme fatale from his past. This mystery won the Tusquets Prize for best Spanish-language crime novel in 2007, but American readers may find Lefty's by-the-book investigations overly familiar. In addition, the dialogue mingles with the exposition, without quotation marks, so otherwise simple passages often prove more opaque than need be. (Jan.)
Reviewed on: 02/01/2016
Release date: 01/01/2016
Paperback - 254 pages - 978-84-8383-308-7
Open Ebook - 240 pages - 978-1-68144-612-7
Paperback - 240 pages - 978-1-68144-613-4