The Shadow of the Shadow [Mass Market Paperback]

This is a terrific book. It is a very different mystery set in Mexico in 1922, during the Obregon regime, after ten years of chaos and revolution.

The protagonists are four friends who meet nightly at a bar in the Majestic Hotel in Mexico City to play dominoes. When I saw that on the dust jacket, I immediately put the book in my buy pile, since in the past I was part of a dominoes-playing foursome. Perhaps part of why I was so taken with the book is the recollections it evoked.

At the outset, two of the friends are separately witnesses to murders.

The first witness was the poet, Fermin Valencia, who was "just over thirty and just under five feet tall", and who rode as a cavalryman with General Villa in the charge at Zacatecas. He was idly watching a free concert given by a military band in a park, when a man climbed up from the back onto the bandstand, put a pistol to the temple of the trombonist, fired, then escaped.

The second witness was Pioquinto Manterola, ace crime reporter for the daily newspaper, El Democrata. He looked down from a third floor office window of the paper and saw a beautiful woman getting out of a car. He eye-balled her as she crossed the street. Not long after, he was startled when a window shattered on the third floor of the building directly across the street, and a screaming man plummeted to the sidewalk. Manterola was perhaps even more startled to see the woman he had been admiring looking at him out of the broken window.

After that, bad things started happening to the friends.

A device Taibo uses to further the story, provide a thread of continuity and a basis for giving analysis to the reader, is the nightly dominoes games at which the friends compare notes; and as they become enmeshed in seemingly unconnected and random violence aimed at them, try to make sense out of what has been going on.

The "shadow of the shadow" is the description the poet gave of the friends as they began to track the unknown forces attacking them.

The book is divided into numerous short chapters, each with a title. Recurring are chapters entitled "Workingman's Blues", which recount incidents in the working lives of the friends. Also recurring are chapters entitled "The Way Things Used To Be: [insert friend and past event]" . Both of these devices illuminate the characters of the friends. The other chapters carry interesting titles such as, "Tacos For Dinner, Gunplay For Dessert".

As noted, Valencia is a poet. However, he makes his living writing newspaper ads for companies that make everything from patent medicine to mattresses ("Even your wife will look good... etc."). Manterola is a crime reporter who has a highly romantic view of women, and at one time attempted suicide over a lost love. Arturo Verdugo is a lawyer and the scion of an aristocratic family, who has "rejected all that his family wanted him to be and to have." He has a niche practice representing prostitutes and miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells. Tomas Gomez is of Chinese descent, an anarchist union organizer, and accomplished fist and knife fighter. Although born in Sinaloa, he purposely speaks with a Chinese accent.

I very much liked Taibo's description of one of the games:

"Tonight [Manterola] was partners with Verdugo. They all knew how the game would turn out: it was the aggressive play of the Chinaman and the poet against the lawyer's and the reporter's no-holds-barred wily malice. In a normal night the lawyer and reporter would win six out of ten. Tonight however was anything but normal..."

The friends displayed the same qualities when the firefights started.

I also liked his handling of the decision of the friends to go on the offensive. The reporter asked, after they had all reviewed what had been going on:

"Do you all believe in fate?"
"....
"At this point I'm ready to believe in anything," said the poet. "I believe the Archangel Gabriel wants us to get involved in something and he's been sending us messages."
"Why the Archangel Gabriel?"
"Well, I don't believe in God, so I had to pick somebody up there."

This book is more than a mystery. It is also a meditation on the hijacking of the Mexican revolution, governmental corruption, oil politics, and international intrigue, all fueled by good old-fashioned greed.

I recommend it highly. It is far out of the ordinary, with different, interesting characters, a fascinating historical setting, and thoughtful, trenchant commentaries as well-blended parts of the story.

The only nit I would pick with the book is probably the translator's fault: one of the characters was caused to use the expression, "the whole nine yards", which did not exist in 1922, having developed during WWII from the fact that the cartridge belts which fed the machine guns on U.S. aircraft were twenty-seven feet long. When a plane returned with empty belts, it became known as having shot the whole nine yards.

Taibo has supplied a several page end note which differentiates between the fictional and historical characters and events, and recounts the changes since 1922: the loss of El Democrata and some of the restaurants and dives patronized by the friends, the nationalization of the Mexican oil fields, etc.

At the end he summarized:

"Times pass and things change. The authoritarianism of the Obregon regime at the start of Mexico's stolen revolution gradually turned itself into the shamelessness and corrupt arrogance of the PRI, the political party that controls the country to this day (1990).
"....
"Fortunately, dominoes continues to be the great national pastime, and somehow, miraculously, it has yet to fall into the claws of the mass media."

Taibo is, I believe, a writer to be reckoned with.