Sleuthing the city with Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Paco Ignacio Taibo II is not only Latin America’s foremost detective writer; over the years he has also been a political activist, journalist, and university professor. His detective novels read like an ode to his beloved Mexico City, but he was actually born in Gijon, Spain in 1949, and emigrated here as a young boy.

Image:Illustration by David Peón.

Taibo's Mexico City, both "a monster and a lover", is the stomping ground for detective Hector Belascoarán Shayne in novels that are "tinged with the grotesque."

Paco Ignacio looks exactly as you might expect a detective writer to look. Sitting at a desk piled with books, overflowing ashtrays and half-finished bottles of Coke, he runs a hand through his mop of wild, thick hair, rubs his eyes, lights another cigarette and begins to reminisce.

“My first perception was that it was the end of the world,” he muses. “A journey of 28 days in a boat is like the end of the world for a boy of 8. It was like going to colonize Mars,” he says of the 1958 voyage that took him and his family from Bilbao to Veracruz via New York and Havana.

“The journey was full of surprises… everything was different, people even talked differently,” he recalls.  “On the other hand, my sentimental education had prepared me for it, as I was forever reading adventure books.” A passionate reader, he devoured books from an early age, nurturing his childhood dreams of becoming a writer. “I knew I wanted to be a writer from age 5… along with being a trapeze artist and a fireman!", he chuckles, twisting the ends of his bushy grey-streaked moustache.

Taibo’s fondness for revolutionary heroes was piqued during this early epic journey. He remembers going with his father to listen to the ship’s radio for reports from the revolution in Cuba. “The captain remarked that it was strange that the battle was taking place in Cuba but the man on the radio seemed to have an Argentine accent,” he recounts. Perhaps this was the moment when the seeds for his biography of Che Guevara were sown.

Paco Ignacio’s father, writer and journalist Paco Ignacio Taibo I, and other members of his family supported the Republicans during the war in Spain. They were part of a generation of intellectuals who fled Franco’s Spain and would greatly enrich the cultural life of Mexico. Drawing on their experiences, Paco Ignacio’s latest novel, De Paso, is about an exiled Spanish anarchist who finds himself in Mexico in the early 20th century.

“I work at night and sleep in the mornings, and as you can see the phone rings constantly... maybe this is why I work at night,” he speculates. “Also with so many of my books being published in so many countries I am obliged to travel a lot.” Unlike many writers, he doesn’t adhere to a routine. “I write when I want and as much as I want when I can. I write here at my desk and in hotels and in trains and planes. Basically everywhere I can.” 

Although he has produced books in several genres, he is best known for his series of novels featuring the hard-bitten detective Hector Belascoarán Shayne (so named because of the character’s Irish mother). Widely regarded as the inventor of the neo-detective genre in Latin America, his books have been published in 29 countries.  Among many awards, he is the only three-time winner of the International Dashiel Hammett prize, given by the International Association of Crime Writers.

It's hard to believe that this straight-talking man would ever have trouble expressing himself on any topic, but ones of his reasons for choosing the detective genre was to write social novels without having to pen a straightforward social commentary.  "Detective novels depict reality tinged with the grotesque, with magic and with a strong social burden, which is inevitable because in Latin America the essence of crime is the state."

His detective wanders the back streets of Mexico City much as Paco Ignacio often does, and in these books the city -- loved, hated, feared and worshipped -- is as much a protagoniste as any of the character.  "Mexico City was a great discovery for me...I have a dual perception of the city as a monster and a love," he says.  "I invent a lot in my novels, but I never invent the city; the city is real."

"I love the crowds, the hurly-burly and the chaos of the center of the city, the area around the Zócalo.  It puts me in a good mood when I get off the metro there."

As the child of immigrants, does he regard himself as Mexican or Spanish?  A "nice mixture" of the two, he decides: "Of course I am very, very Mexican, but when I am back in Spain for three months each year for [the crime fiction festival he organizes in Gijon], I also feel at home.

Many of Paco Ignacio Taibo II's novels have been published in English and can be found online at www.powells.com and www.amazon.com.