Paco Ignacio Taibo II

• Born: January 11, 1949
• Place of Birth: Gijón, Asturias, Spain

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator; historical

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, 1976-1993

Contribution

Paco Ignacio Taibo II first captured Mexican readers’ imaginations with private detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. He then increased his popularity with series and nonseries crime novels that push the boundaries of the genre, using multiple viewpoints, bending reality, drawing mysteries around historical figures and incidents, and exposing the effects of corruption. Taibo’s first novel featuring Belascoarán, his iconoclastic investigator, was published in 1976, and he continued to produce novels in this series until 1993. Considered a companion to the series but not directly part of it, Muertos incómodos (2005; The Uncomfortable Dead: What’s Missing Is Missing, 2006) represents a true novelty in literature. Featuring Belascoarán in alternating chapters, The Uncomfortable Dead is a collaborative effort between Taibo and the masked Chiapas guerrilla known only as Subcomandante Marcos. Serialized in La Jornada, the novel prompted a 20 percent rise in the Mexico City leftist newspaper’s circulation. It cemented Taibo’s reputation as one of the world’s most inventive, articulate, and risk-taking crime writers.

Taibo, a naturalized Mexican citizen since 1980, has become one of Mexico’s most popular authors and received many literary awards for both his fiction and nonfiction. He won the 1982 Grijalbo Prize for his creative account of the 1968 massacre, Heroes convocados: Manual para la toma del poder (1982; Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power, 1990), and took the National History Prize for his narrative history Los Bolshevikis: Historia narrativa de los origenes del comunismo en México 1919-1925 (1986). Taibo also won Dashiell Hammett Awards for the Best Crime Novel in Spanish for La vida misma (1987; Life Itself, 1994), Cuatro Manos (1990; Four Hands, 1994), and La bicicleta de Leonardo (1993; Leonardo’s Bicycle, 1995); the International Planeta Prize for the Best Historical Novel in 1992; and the Bancarella Prize for his fictionalized biography of Che Guevera in 1998. A global best-selling author for over thirty years—his books are sold worldwide—Taibo has made inroads into the American mystery community because of translations of a few of his novels beginning in the early 1990s. The majority of his works, however, are difficult to find in English.

Biography

Paco Ignacio Taibo II was born Francisco Ignacio Taibo Mahojo on January 11, 1949, in Gijón, Asturias, Spain, into a family of working-class anarchists. He is the son of the late journalist, novelist, and biographer Paco Ignacio Taibo and Maricarmen Taibo. In 1958, the elder Taibo and his family fled from the fascism of Francisco Franco’s regime and settled in Mexico.

Inspired by his father, young Taibo—an avid reader who decided as a child to become a writer—studied literature, sociology, and history, immersing himself in his adopted homeland's colorful and violent past. In the late 1960s, Taibo became caught up in Mexico’s latest political upheaval. He was forever radicalized by the student protest movement of 1968, which ended abruptly just before the start of the 1968 Olympics when police and military forces fired on unarmed demonstrators in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco section, killing dozens and wounding hundreds of youths.

In 1969, Taibo started working as a journalist and wrote fiction and nonfiction—especially historical essays—in his spare time. A tireless political activist and union organizer, he served as editor of the newspaper Revista de la Semana and the magazines Bronca and Enigma. He contributed articles to such anthologies as Nacimiento de la memoria (1971). He married Paloma Saiz in 1971; they had one daughter, Marina. He began teaching in the mid-1970s at the National School of Anthropology and History at the National Independent University of Mexico in Mexico City and from 1985 to 1989 at the University of Mexico campus in Azcapotzalco.

The prolific Taibo has created a flood of prose, publishing short stories, essays, novels, biographies, and other nonfiction. He gained almost instant recognition in Latin America with his tough, slyly antigovernment Héctor Belascoarán Shayne novels. Most of the entries in the series have made Latin American bestseller lists, and the enthusiasm for his evocative style has spilled over into Taibo’s other works.

Taibo has also written, directed, and produced for Mexican television and film, adapting many of his own works—including Cosa fácil (1977; An Easy Thing, 1990) and Algunas nubes (1985; Some Clouds, 1992)—for the screen. He directed, edited, and wrote for a comic book history of Mexico (1981-1982). In the 1990s, Taibo was an official in the administration of radical reformer Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano.

Taibo has served for many years as the president of the International Association of Political Writers. In the early 1990s, he founded the noir fiction and film festival Semana Negra in Gijón, Spain. Since 2018, Taibo has been the director of Fondo de Cultura Económica, the Mexican state publishing house. In 2020, he published Sabemos cómo vamos a morir, a stand-alone book not part of the Héctor Belascoarán Shayne series. He continues to be an outspoken social and political activist, and he also continues to practice activism through writing. 

Analysis

Historian and novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II is a rare breed: a critically acclaimed mystery writer equally well respected for his staunch political and social commitment. He has embraced the culture of Mexico. Much of his fiction and nonfiction work reflects Taibo’s love-hate relationship with the sprawling, polluted, crime-ridden—yet ancient, cosmopolitan, and vibrant—megalopolis that is Mexico City. He appreciates the Mexican landscape and climate as well as the history, energy, and diversity of the inhabitants that is the country’s soul. However, he abhors the corruption in the city's heart. The corruption, according to Taibo, is the result of revolutionary turmoil that evolved into a modern civil dictatorship in the form of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), a party that, under several names, has exercised political power in Mexico for more than seventy years, sometimes resorting to violence and fraud. This has been part of Taibo’s underlying message since 1976 when he began using fiction to illustrate the causes and effects of past and present crimes involving the government.

Independent detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, introduced to Mexico in Días de combate (1976) and to the English-speaking world in the translation of the second entry of the series, An Easy Thing (1977), is Taibo’s most famous creation. Inspired by the heroes of American and Latin American hard-boiled novels, Belascoarán has the introspection of Philip Marlowe, the toughness of Mike Hammer, and the detecting skills of Sam Spade. However, this private eye has a distinctively Latino outlook and style as he walks the mean streets of exotic Mexico City. A Don Quixote in a rumpled trench coat, Belascoarán tilts at windmills, knowing it is impossible but hoping to get in a few good charges before he is knocked down for good.

Taibo himself has been a memorable character in several of his novels: He appears as Paco Ignacio in Some Clouds (1980). His alter ego, popular crime writer José Daniel Fierro, is a protagonist in Life Itself (1987) and Leonardo’s Bicycle (1994). Historical persons from the past—Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata Salazar, Leonardo da Vinci—often figure prominently in the stories of Taibo, who manages to make anachronisms plausible as he erases boundaries between supposition and truth and between fiction and fact.

Taibo’s series and nonseries mysteries offer considerably more than simple whodunits. His language is concise and economical, with linguistic pyrotechnics used sparingly. Yet, the tales are rich with allusion and full of quotable observations about the human condition from a fatalist’s point of view. His descriptions are as sharp as snapshots. His characters are flawed, like real humans. Dialogue crackles with authenticity, peppered with slangy street lingo, local references, profanity, and coarse humor. Plots are multilayered, with complications piled on complications. Things are seldom as they seem at first, and there are no tidy solutions at the end of the story. Violence is sudden and brutal, often instigated by minions of the multiple public or private police forces at the beck of the government—and is responded to in kind by protagonists who must react in deadly fashion and without hesitation to stay alive.

The notion of contradiction has informed Taibo’s crime fiction from the start and has only become more prevalent over time. Taibo plays off various aspects of contrast: union workers versus capitalists, rich versus poor, comedy versus tragedy, past versus present, gut reaction versus intelligence, tenderness versus violence, and reality versus illusion. A constant theme is waste: human waste, wasted lives, and lost opportunities.

Praised for his fresh, innovative Mexican approach to the mystery genre and his distinctive voice, the playful, impish, unabashedly antiauthoritarian Taibo is an unpredictable experimenter with style and form. His literate mysteries incorporate mythology, incidents from the past, historical personages, radical politics, extreme violence, and slapstick humor, thereby standing convention, categorization, and reality on their heads.

An Easy Thing

Private detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne in An Easy Thing deals with the death of his mother while simultaneously investigating three separate cases. In the first case, a man in a cantina asks the private eye to look into the rumor that revolutionary Emiliano Zapata Salazar did not die in 1919 but is still, at the age of ninety-seven, alive and living in a cave. The second case involves a former pornographic film star, now a television actor, who hires the detective to prevent her seventeen-year-old daughter from committing suicide. The third case revolves around a murder at a factory in which union workers are unjustly implicated.

Told from a world-weary, Chandler-like point of view, An Easy Thing provides all the elements expected in a hard-boiled mystery novel. There are regular doses of violence, sex, crime, and punishment, plus dabs of low politics and high-flown philosophy that produce a unique brand of noir style.

The Shadow of the Shadow

In Sombra de la sombra (1986; The Shadow of the Shadow, 1991), which takes place in Mexico City in the 1920s, four domino-playing friends—crime reporter Pioquinto Manterola, seedy lawyer Alberto Verdugo, aspiring poet and advertising jingle-writer Fermin Valencia, and Chinese-Mexican radical and labor organizer Tomás Wong—are ensnared in several complex mysteries that turn violent. The characters individually and collectively untangle various threads of a plot skillfully woven around an actual incident: the secret Mata Redonda Plan, whereby Mexican army officers, in collusion with American politicians and oil companies, mounted a phony insurrection in exchange for a large cash payoff. The United States responded with Marines to protect American interests, which resulted in American companies controlling the Mexican oil industry until it was nationalized in 1938.

Life Itself

José Daniel Fierro is a popular crime novelist in his fifties who lives in Mexico City, first with his wife and, after his divorce, by himself. In the first of two outings (Life Itself), the chain-smoking, cola-guzzling Fierro steps away from the typewriter to accept a job as police chief of fictional Sana Ana—where the last two chiefs were assassinated—on the theory that he is too famous to be killed. Assisted by a corps of deputies with Keystone Cops tendencies, Fierro dodges bullets while investigating two murders: a beautiful blond American found stabbed in a church and an albino felon who is shot at the circus. The cases turn increasingly bizarre as they unfold in a detective story that is by turns ironic, violent, and humorous.

Principal Series Character:

• Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a half-Basque and half-Irish man, gave up his wife, engineering job, and comfortable life to become a private investigator when he was thirty. He shares a low-rent Mexico City office with a plumber, a sewage specialist, and an upholsterer. An insomniac, existentialist, and anarchist, Belascoarán has an unhealthy curiosity that leads him into trouble. He doggedly pursues oddball cases that typically connect to shady businesspeople, thuggish law enforcement officers, and, ultimately, slimy representatives of the Mexican government. In noir-flavored, surrealistic investigations, Belascoarán sometimes guns down bad guys and seldom comes away unscathed: He loses an eye, gains scars, acquires a limp and is even apparently killed. However, popular demand brought the detective back to life to carry on in later novels. Like his creator, the antiheroic Belascoarán is a chain smoker and cola addict.

Bibliography

Braham, Persephone. Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Herrera, Lucia. “Paco Ignacio Taibo II on Myths, Essays, Politics and Borders.” Buenos Aires Herald, 27 May 2023, buenosairesherald.com/culture-ideas/paco-ignacio-taibo-ii-on-myths-essays-politics-and-borders. Accessed 24 July 2024.

Ross, John. “One Hundred Days of Solitude.” L.A. Weekly, 18 Mar. 1998.

Slivka, Andrey. “Leftist Noir.” Review of The Uncomfortable Dead, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The New York Times Book Review, 19 Nov. 2006, p. 27.

Stavans, Ilan. Conversations with Ilan Stavans. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005.

Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II. “No Happy Endings.” Interview by John F. Baker. Boston Review, Feb./Mar. 2001.

Wyels, Joyce Gregory. “Walking with Mexico City’s Private Eye.” Americas, vol. 57, no. 4, July/Aug. 2005, pp. 20-27.