Although actually the fourth (or fifth) book in the detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne series, since not all titles have been translated into English, this is a good place to start. The Nihilist detective is truly one of my favorite all time characters.I would call this a must read for any fan of detective fiction. ( )

review of
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Return to the Same City
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 28, 2016

Yeah, my full review was too long for here so go to "Return to the Same Old Shit" for its full glory: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/456816-return-to-the-same-old-shit

I was looking for work by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at the library for a friend of mine to get out. The library worker who was helping us recommended Taibo. I got the impression that Taibo was 'old', maybe early 20th century - but, then, the library guy was young so somebody who wrote before he was born might've seemed 'old' to him - or maybe I just misunderstood.

Anyway, the library worker got me interested. I love Montalbán's writing b/c it's very politically informed & I was told that Taibo was much the same. SO, I started looking for Taibo in used bookstores & I cdn't find anything by him anywhere. I started thinking they might be old hardbacks, out-of-print, not likely to be reprinted. THEN I found this: a mass market paperback, originally copyrighted 1989, translated English edition published in 1997, really not that 'old' at all. As it turns out, the guy's only 4 & 1/2 yrs older than me. The librarian was dead on, tho, Taibo's about as close to Montalbán as I cd hope for, a truly excellent political mystery writer.

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:

"The phone rang again.

""Could we meet?" asked the woman with the Peruvian? Bolivian? Chilean? Mexican? accent.

""Do we know each other?"

""I do, yes, I know you a little."

""What kind of bra do you wear?"

""Why?"

""No, nothing. It was to see if we knew each other." Héctor said, playing with the knife. "I now see that we don't."

"He hung up again". - p 8

He avoids the job over & over again. He also thinks of Cortázar, thusly endearing himself to me. This is a philosophical detective.. &/or writer.

"Elisa had once read aloud something Cortázar wrote about the train station in New Delhi and the sensation he'd been filled with—that you cannot cohabitate with certain dark regions of this world without becoming a little cynical, turning into a real son of a bitch" - p 10

Sometimes it's easy to tell wch generation a person has grown up in. My parents, born in the mid-1920s were 'conservative' in almost every way. A generation born in the mid 1940s might have been more exposed to consciousness-expansion drugs, might be more comfortable w/ rock'r'roll morés. A generation born in the 1960s might take graffiti a bit more for granted as socially acceptable:

""I paint on top of their paintings. I go out at night with my spray can and paint over theirs. It's war."

""But what do you paint?"

"Punks are Strawberries, Long Live Enver Hoxha, or Che Guevara Lives, He's a Living Ghost, Be Careful Assholes, He Lives in the Neighborhood, or Sex Punks Were Born With a Silver Spoon in Their Mouths, or If a Dog Falls in the Water, Kick Him Until He Dies. Some come out too long, they're not effective" - p 13

The messages here strike me as mostly ambiguous, They're probably full of references I don't get. I assume that "Punks" refers to the same subculture in Mexico as it wd in the US. I assume that "Strawberries" is a derogatory term so I look it up:

"Fresa (Spanish for strawberry) is a slang social term used in Mexico and some parts of Latin America to describe a cultural stereotype of white spanish superficial youngsters who, by the traditional definition of the word, came from a high class and educated family and nobility. The word was originally used by teenagers and young adults alike. Nowadays, its use has spread to all age groups. Lower class meztisas are often called "NACAS" who are heavily mixed with Natives of the area.

"The term fresa may be considered synonymous with the term "preppy" which originated in the United States in the 1960s to define teenagers with a conservative mentality, who did not drink and proudly displayed their social status. In Mexico, during the 1970s, the meaning changed and became a term to describe the lifestyles of the youth who were wealthy and well-known.

"However, the current usage of the term in Mexico has its origins in the late 1980s. During the rapid change in society as a result of globalization, which brought new forms of fashion, food and entertainment into the culture, a number of Mexican people began to adopt the "preppy" American lifestyle by mimicking American styles of dress, mannerisms and etiquette. Some examples include wearing polo shirts, boat shoes and chinos. The colloquialisms used by fresas is often referred to as "fresa talk"."

Now, "Punks" may still refer to the same subculture that it does in the US & the palimpsest graffitist might be saying that the punks are really preppies. That certainly wdn't've been the case in the punk culture I was around in BalTimOre in the late 1970s & early 1980s where most of the people were working class or lower middle class.

As for "If a Dog Falls in the Water, Kick Him Until He Dies": taken literally, it's pretty mean, taken metaphorically, it's also pretty mean. I don't think I understand the cultural reference.

"he walked over to the record player and put on Silvio Rodríguez's latest. Side A, track three." - p 20

Ok, I'm sure that I have a Rodríguez CD so I was proud of myself but I just went looking for it twice & didn't find it so now I'm disappointed in myself. Anyway, if this bk is supposedly taking place around 1987 the record in question might be "Árboles" made w/ Roy Brown & Afrocuba & the song might be "Mujer poetisa" (wch might mean "woman poet" or "poetess woman").

Héctor holds off on taking the job until given the right incentive:

"The elevator creaked up to the office as Héctor was trying uselessly to recover the last year of his life. The elevator door opened before it should have. Alicia gave hima lavish smile and entered without his being able to stop her. She pushed the 6th floor button.

""Alicia, remember?" she said.

""No, I'm not Alicia. I'm a retiree going to the third floor. More than two floors of stoppage against my will can technically be considered an abduction," he said and looked down at the elevator floor.

""Damn it," the woman said.

"Héctor looked at her.

"Alicia was wearing a sweater and black wool pants. She grabbed her sweater at the waist and slowly lifted it to expose here breasts to the open air. She wasn't wearing a bra. They were bigger than they suggested when covered. Pointed, with pink nipples.

""It's true, one is bigger than the other . . . In addition to the abduction, rape . . ."

"She put her sweater back where it belonged. Héctor felt dejected. It was like wearing a muzzle. Didn't they say the mouth was faster than the brain? The door opened onto the sixth floor. Defeated, Alicia pressed the third floor.

""It's okay, I give up," Héctor said. "I'm listening."" - p 24

The case is ostensibly about a husband who drives a wife to suicide:

"That guy would get high and turn red from all the shit he put up his nose, injected into his veins, and then he'd think himself a man and his dick wouldn't work for shit. How could foolish Elena go and marry a wretch like that? My sister was naive, she was an absolute idiot. Because the guy was handsome. Luke Estrella, the handsome rumba dancer, the charmer." - p 28

Seems realistic to me. So the ostensible sister of the ostensible wife wants revenge:

"You've got to fuck him up, for me. He's coming to Mexico next week. I'm sure, he's arriving on Pan Am's Thursday night flight. Pan Am from New York. I work for an airline and I asked all my friends to tell me if his name came up on the computer. He's got a reservation to come to Mexico on Thursday and no doubt he's going to pull some kind of shit, because that's the only thing he knows how to do. Up there in Miami, he was always involved in strange things, in drugs, I think, and that shit, with the Cuban mafia in Miami, the gusanos, the guys who owned the neighborhood." - p 29

Again, seems realistic to me. I remember a coke head bragging to me that he'd deliberately spill coke on the floor to watch the "coke whores" crawl around w/ their asses in the air to snort it. As for the Cuban mafia? The Cuban revolution was sensible enuf to evict them from the country, the US was idiotic enuf to import them as 'assets'.

"He had read in a novel that a paranoid could be defined as a Mexico City citizen with an acute perception of reality and an abundance of common sense." - p 43

I remember William S. Burroughs referring to "practical paranoia", a paranoia that recognizes that the most incredibly fucked-up things can, & do, happen.

Taibo has referenced Cortázar & Hammett already & now:

"In his decalogue on mystery novels, Chandler forgot to prohibit detectives from getting metaphysical" - p 45

3 of my favorite novelists. He never does reference Montalbán tho so I have to wonder about that. Taibo doesn't prohibit his detective from being foolish:

"Héctor thought about the distance. He needed to back off. He'd approached Estrella twice. A one-eyed man is exceedingly visible, like a brand of cola on a television ad, you always get the feeling you've seen him before. The only thing he was missing was a fluorescent T-shirt and a couple of rumba dancers hanging off his arm. He would have to get the glass eye out of the dresser drawer, he would have to put on a no-man's face, he'd have to dress like a lamppost, anonymous, like an ad for something out of style, he would have to follow Estrella from a distance if he wanted to fuck him." - p 46

"Luke Estrella moved through Mexico City without much hesitancy, including knowing a few codes that are usually reserved for natives and denied to tourists, like not hailing the taxi in front of the hotel, but walking a couple of blocks and stopping one as it passed, which would certainly be cheaper; like wrapping your big bills inside smaller ones; like you don't need coins for the public phones because even though the instructions order you to insert one, after the earthquake the phone company disconnected the payment system due to the emergency system and it's still that way." - pp 49-50

What a remarkably effective passage. Taibo explains so much w/ such concision.

"On this day" [ September 19] "in 1985, a powerful earthquake strikes Mexico City and leaves 10,000 people dead, 30,000 injured and thousands more homeless." - http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/earthquake-shakes-mexico-city

The detective crosses paths w/ an investigative reporter. Like Montalbán, Taibo's writing is peppered w/ political references that must seem pretty opaque to underinformed readers:

"There's still a third rule. The interesting one is the one whose name is not mentioned, the one they tell you isn't important, the one your usual sources seem to ignore.

"Gary Betancourt fit the three rules, one after another. He appeared casually as a second reference while I was investigating the assassination of Olaf Palme. No big deal, a very secondary mention in a newsletter of the Swedish groups in solidarity with Central America, mentioning that the Cuban had tried to infiltrate them. They used that name, Gary Betancourt. I didn't give a shit about the story, I was trying to establish connections between the assassins of Orlando Letelier and those of Palme." - pp 59-60

Orlando Letelier is someone I've heard of, I wasn't familiar w/ Olaf Palme so I decided to check online to see if he's a fictional character inserted into a context of real politically-motivated murders:

"Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated on 28 February 1986 in Stockholm, Sweden, at 23:21 hours Central European Time (22:21 UTC). Palme was fatally wounded by a single gunshot while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet Palme on the central Stockholm street Sveavägen. Mrs Palme was slightly wounded by a second shot. The couple did not have bodyguards at the time.

"Although more than 130 people have confessed to the murder, the case remains unsolved" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme

About Letelier a bk entitled The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer & published by Odonian Preess has this to say:

""Are you the wife of Orlando Letelier?" asked the anonymous caller, "Yes," she answered. "No," the caller said, "you are his widow."

"A week later, on September 21, 1976, the exiled Chilean diplomat and prominent critic of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime" [..] "was torn to pieces by a car bomb on the streets of Washington DC. Also killed was Letelier's American aide, Ronni Moffit. Her husband, blown clear of the car, immediately began shouting that Chilean fascists were responsible for the atrocity.

"He was right, but those fascists had powerful allies in Washington. An FBI informant knew of the plot to assassinate Litelier before the fact but the FBI did nothing to protect him. After the combing, CIA Director George Bush told the FBI that there'd been no Chilean involvement whatsoever." - pp 56-57

There's even a bk entitled Assassination on Embassy Row by John Dinges & Saul Landau (Pantheon Books, 1980). Landau has been somewhat well-known to me as a primary exposer of CIA dirty tricks in Latin America. One of many people mentioned in Assassination on Embassy Row is Orlando Bosch, a terrorist mass-murderer apparently so highly favored by Bush Senior's administration that one of his parting acts from the presidency was to pardon Bosch who was released from a US prison & allowed to live in Florida to the ripe old age of 84:

"Orlando Bosch Ávila (18 August 1926 – 27 April 2011) was a Cuban exile, former Central Intelligence Agency-backed operative, and head of Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, which the FBI has described as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization". Former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an "unrepentant terrorist". He was accused of taking part in Operation Condor and several terrorist attacks, including the 6 October 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in which all 73 people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team and five North Koreans. The bombing is alleged to have been plotted at a 1976 meeting in Washington, D.C. attended by Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and DINA agent Michael Townley. At the same meeting, the assassination of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier is alleged to have been plotted. Bosch was given safe haven within the US in 1990 by President George H. W. Bush, who in 1976 as head of the CIA had declined an offer by Costa Rica to extradite Bosch." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Bosch

"An even more dubious case than Hammer’s also reached Bush’s desk during the first year of his presidency. In 1989, prominent Cuban-Americans in Florida began agitating for the release of Orlando Bosch, a notorious anti-Castro terrorist then serving a prison term for entering the United States illegally. American intelligence and law enforcement authorities firmly believed that Bosch was responsible for far worse actions, including the 1976 explosion that brought down a Cuban airliner, killing all 76 civilians aboard, although Venezuelan prosecutors had failed to convict him of that terrible crime. There was certainly no question that Bosch was an advocate of terror and had been involved in numerous bombings.

"The Justice Department wanted to deport Bosch because, according to the FBI, he had “repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.” Freeing Bosch at a time when Washington was condemning terrorism abroad would obviously be hard to explain — had someone asked.

"But Miami’s leading Republican contributors and politicians persistently lobbied Bush to free Bosch, insisting that the former pediatrician was really a noble freedom fighter. And in 1990, when Bosch was eventually released and permitted to reside in Florida under an extraordinary deal with the Bush Justice Department, much of the credit went to the alleged mass murderer’s best-connected White House lobbyist — a budding local politician named Jeb Bush. The Bush son who would be elected governor of Florida eight years later had, by 1990, already become wealthy in real estate and other deals with the same Cuban exile businessmen who wanted Bosch to be freed. Among Jeb’s business partners active in the Cuban-American National Foundation, the institutional advocate for Bosch, was one Armando Codina, also a regular GOP donor and activist. (Codina, however, tells Salon that he neither supported the release of Bosch, nor ever lobbied his business partner, Bush, on the issue.) According to the administration’s spokesmen, however, all those personal and financial ties were just a set of happy coincidences. Anyway, nobody in the mainstream media or on Capitol Hill got upset because the president’s son had opened prison doors for an unrepentant terrorist." - http://www.salon.com/2001/02/27/pardons_3/ ( )

Héctor Belascoarán Shayne -uno de los detectives mexicanos más famosos de las últimas décadas- retorna en esta novela vertiginosa, alucinante, sorprendente, en la que la magia del D.F., los miedos del protagonista y los recientes conflictos sociales, se mezclan con la extraña historia de un agente de la CIA que trae en la maleta (metafóricamente hablando) las manos ensangrentadas del Che Guevara. Sin ningún tipo de concesiones, de una forma de ver y entender a la ciudad más grande del mundo y probablemente una de las más corruptas: México D.F.