Bookended by Fifty Years

Like most of you out there, I struggle to read what I should. The latest books I've managed to move off my TBR stack include one that I first read a half century ago, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and one newly published, The Golden Havana Night, which I finished this last weekend on a trip to New Mexico.

The Golden Havana Night is by Manuel Ramos, a fellow Denver mystery writer I've known for over two decades. This novel is his newest offering in Chicano Noir and the third to feature Gus Corral, an ex-con introduced as a minor character in a short story several years back. Since then Gus has morphed from a slacker sleeping in the backroom of his sister's secondhand store to a full-fledged, though crusty, PI. He's earned enough cred to warrant the services of Joaquin "Kino" Machado, a Cuban defector and now a champion ballplayer for the Colorado Rockies. Seems Kino's brother owes a sizable gambling debt to a gangster back in Cuba and Gus gets hired as a bagman to deliver the cash. No spoiler here but things are not going to proceed well for Gus or anyone else. Ramos' recent trip to Cuba gives authentic details that range from the exotic and enticing to the seedy and exhausting. The expected scenes of classic American cars kept running by island ingenuity are juxtaposed against queues of donkey carts. Marxist and revolutionist sloganeering are contrasted with physicians working as hotel porters. Ramos gives us beautiful Caribbean vistas, which you reach by bone-jarring drives over rutted dirt roads. Even an accomplished and connected Cuban police inspector lives in squalor.

Ramos' prose delivers the narrative in crisp detail:
"I was surrounded by decay and stagnation."
"The guy had disappeared into the gray world of the dispossessed, a world that none of us knew anything about, and that seemed as strange as if we'd crashed onto a lost and unforgiving alternate planet."

And when describing the office of Ben Sardo, the crooked sports agent:
"The place smelled like money and promises of even more money."

But what's keeps the pages turning is Gus sinking deeper into the treacherous murk and Ramos' expertise at wrenching the plot with one double-cross after another. The story has the delicious and satisfying bite of a good Cuban rum mixed with tequila.

***

I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, when I was in junior high school. The story was definitely outside my usual fare at the time: books by Frederick Forsyth, Leon Uris, George Orwell, and Upton Sinclair. Tree was the first book where I paid attention to its craft. What keeps the dense narrative moving is Smith's ability to mesmerize the reader with rich, captivating detail and by alternating poignant moments with suspense and humor. Now that I'm a professional writer, Smith's craft really jumped at me. The story is told in close Third-person POV and she doesn't hesitate to head-hop to draw us inside the characters. I've wondered about the current proscriptions about wandering POV, given that it's a powerful tool to immerse us in the scene. The argument is that head-hopping loses the reader but I can't recall once where I failed to follow the action. In this return to the book, what I most appreciated was its theme of perseverance and optimism. The story is anything but pollyanna as we're exposed to plenty of the gritty trials from early 20th century New York: poverty, alcoholism, the pettiness and meanness of people, plus hard crime in the form of robbery and sexual assault. The Brooklyn in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is long gone, but as rough and hard-scrabble times were then, you can't help but lament that something valuable and ennobling has been lost forever.