Excellent, real and unreal in fascinating and uncomfortable ways. One of the places that stay in my mind. ( )

review of
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's No Happy Ending
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 15, 2017

I'd already read Taibo's Return to the Same City in June of last year as my 1st bk by him. It picks up where this one ends, the detective hero has been murdered. SO, I knew to expect that this really wdn't have a happy ending. If I hadn't read that 1st I might've been hoping & expecting for the hero to somehow survive all the odds against him. Such foreknowledge put a weird spin on my reading experience. As I wrote in my review of Return:

"The detective hero had been killed off in the last bk featuring him. "A Note from the Author" 'explains':

"Don't ask me when and how Héctor Belascoarán Shayne came back to life. I don't have an answer. I remember that on the last page of No Happy Ending rain was falling over his perforated body.

"His appearance in these pages is therefore an act of magic. White magic perhaps, but magic that is irrational and disrespectful toward the occupation of writing a mystery series."

The character, apparently resurrected, is not exactly in a hurry to jump back into risking his life again" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/456816-return-to-the-same-old-shit

Anyway, this resurrection created a happy ending for the book w/o one. Good. I like happy endings. This one's happy for me for various reasons: it's short, it's easy to review. I've recently written 2 long reviews & need a break. See? Everything's happy. The beginning murder has a theatrical aspect to it:

"A Roman foot soldier sat on the toilet, staring at the tile floor, his throat slashed.

"Blood oozed slowly down the brass breastplate, over the short, pleated skirt, the hairy legs, and into one sandal. A helmet with a faded plume rested on his head. A long wooden spear leaned against the wall.

""They've gone too far this time," Héctor muttered, cautiously lifting the Roman's chin. A four-inch gash cut across his throat.

""Who?"

""The sons of bitches who killed this guy."" - p 4

That got me to thinking: Are there no other types of "Roman soldiers" other than this ancient stereotype? EG: Is there a contemporary Roman solider wearing body armor against bullets & a helmet with a face-plate & that sort of thing? Or wd that be an Italian soldier? Having the 1st victim be an atavistic one created an unexpected spin that had to be resolved. the corpses increase w/ no obvious explanation:

"And now this: two dead men and a plane ticket to New York to keep him from sticking his nose in where somebody thought it didn't belong. But if they didn't want him to get involved, then why the hell had they gone and dumped a dead Roman in his bathroom, and then sent him a photograph of this other guy?" - p 8

Detectives are like obsessive-compulsives seeking closure. They must know. That's the way they work - or, at least that's the way they work in novels. In real life they probably fake evidence just to get pd or are perfectly happy to stop investigating something if they get pd to stop, etc.. It's hard for me to believe that (m)any of these novelistic heros have ever existed. I have a friend who worked for a detective agency. His boss wd send him out to test people's phones to see if they were tapped. My friend didn't know the slightest thing about that. He'd pretend & the detective wd give the client a report that their phone wasn't tapped. Maybe that's more common. These days what do detectives do? Background checks thru some online service that they pay for?

This is one of those 'exotic character' novels where the people are unusual & that helps keep the story interesting:

"The Filipino enjoyed passing on his art, and you were a good disciple. After the course in gymnastics, you went on to karate, and from there (once again the hand of fate) to the esoteric secrets of the escape artist, magician, and daredevil. The Filipino had once worked as an assistant to an Indian contortionist, touring bars and clubs in California, and he knew some unusual and wonderful tricks. So unusual and so wonderful, in fact, that you would spend entire sleepless nights contemplating the subtleties of escape from a sealed coffin, from a straightjacket, of the dangerous motorcycle jump through a ring of fire.

"A year and a half passed in strenuous training, and then one day the Filipino disappeared." - pp 38-39

I reckon that Taibo knew he had a winner when he thought of having the novel revolve around his hero avoiding getting killed & then finally failing to do so. There're plenty of plot twists in this but that No-Happy-Ending business must've been enuf of an Ace-Up-The-Sleeve to keep this novel short & breezy. I love it when I read something that I know was inspired:

"The first shot hit the stack of papers. Thousands of words flew in all directions, leaving the smell of fresh ink in the air." - p 88

Beautiful. Instead of immediate blood & guts the reader gets "thousands of words" flying in all directions. SO, our hero investigates more & more:

"This shadowy, violent organization had shown evidence of its existence before. The first time was during the Ayotla Textile strike, when a paramilitary group appeared out of nowhere, shooting and beating the picketers before the laughing gaze of the police." - p 103

"The official explanation wrote the whole thing off as an unfortunate clash between antagonistic student groups. But then there were the photographs of the army-issue M1 rifles, and the riot police allowing the armed men to pass unopposed, and the tape recordings from the police radio frequency, over which police officers directed the Halcones' attack." - p 107

Taibo is always on the side of the strikers & protesters & against the side of the death squads & paramilitary groups. I'm w/ him there. Even tho this is fiction it does get those juices flowing in the direction of imagining the real-life counterparts.

But, WAIT!, maybe this isn't so fictional after all:

"The Corpus Christi Massacre, Corpus Christi Thursday Massacre, or El Halconazo (The hawk strike, so called because of the participation of a group of elite Mexican army soldiers known as Los Halcones) was a massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City on June 10, 1971, the day of the Corpus Christi festival."

[..]

"Los Halcones (The hawks) was a black operations army group that was trained in the United States. The group was created in the late 1960s to repress demonstrations and prevent other large popular movements such as the student movement of 1968 from rising again. Their first attack against the students took place on October 2, 1969, a year after the Tlatelolco Massacre. Their initial duty, as told by the government to the public, which was not aware of their name nor their real purpose, was that there was going to be a police group that ensured the security of the recently inaugurated Metro. The members of Los Halcones were identified with nicknames and its members were of various backgrounds, including sports clubs, the police, and thugs for hire "porros" who were provocateurs created to counter and watch universities. After the Halconazo, the number of Los Halcones members increased exponentially in the UNAM and IPN); militaries, which were referred to with the nicknames "maestros" (teachers) or "paisanos" (countrymen). These militaries had at their command dozens of halcones, the vast majority of whom had participated in the Tlatelolco massacre, as well as gang members and criminals. The latter were released from jail under the condition that they form part of the new shock group with payment." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Christi_massacre

Waddya know.

Yep, that's the way Taibo & his Spanish counterpart, Montalban, rolls. For me, then, these novels become political education about Mexican politics. Note that "Los Halcones (The hawks) was a black operations army group that was trained in the United States" - cd that be at Fort Benning? Our hero speaks to a friend:

""I might not be back for a few days . . . If I don't come back, I want you to have my books on the Spanish Civil War. They're on the bookshelf in the hallway. I inherited them from my father."" - p 117

That's the sort of detail I like. The author knows that these bks are important. W/o making such provisions they might just get thrown away. Knowledge lost. Other people might just cut the pages up for collages. Knowledge lost.

"Héctor, who had never exactly thought of himself as a man on a collision course with authority, saw the State as something akin to the witch's castle in Snow White, from which emerged not only the Halcones, but other things too, like his own engineering degree, or the crap you saw on television. There were no gray areas there. It was all one big infernal machine that it was best to keep as far away from as possible." - p 139

Ah, yes, the state. Trump & his billionaire cronies wd like to do away w/ aspects of it, the aspects that provide checks & balances for their greed & White Supremacism. Then again, they'd like to keep the state b/c it enables them unprecedented access to power. Funny how that works.

Usually, I try to avoid spoilers. No Happy Ending gives me an excuse to not do that for a change:

"He'd almost reached the cover of a newspaper kiosk on the corner when a shotgun blast caught him in mid-torso and lifted his torn, broken body into the air." - p 175

No Happy Ending was published in 1981. Return to the Same City was published in 1989. It only took Taibo 8 yrs to reverse the No Happy Ending. if only real life were like that. ( )

No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Héctor Belascoarán Shayne tells us that he decided to become a detective because he didn’t like the color his wife picked for the new carpet. He had been an engineer. He got his license by mail. He had never read a British mystery novel. He didn’t know a fingerprint from a finger sandwich. He could only shoot something if it didn’t move very much.

Héctor is a usually a taciturn, enigmatic man who is an unrepentant teetotaler with a penchant for Pepsis. He shares an office with three characters, a plumber, an upholsterer and a sewer engineer

One day a murdered man dressed as a roman soldier is found at his office and then he gets a mysterious message to ignore was he saw and along with the message there was a plane ticket to New York City. All Héctor really knew at this point was that he loved his home, Mexico City with a passion and if he waited the killer would show his face.

In this case the detective is correct and it appears that there is more than one killer and that they are from the police. Since this is Mexico, the question is whether they were from the secret police, the auxiliary police, the judicial police, the special, the bank, the preventative, the traffic, the federal?

Héctor uncovers links from these men to a very unsavory incident in Mexico City’s recent past. What it has to do with him appears to be serendipity but he is caught in a web he cannot escape. His life is on the line and he is very like a gunslinger of the old West shooting first and asking questions later.

This is a very intriguing character and the people in his life are also worth knowing. The prose is somewhat Hemingwayesque and I look forward to reading more of this writer.
( )