Fantastic Metropolis

Whatever the story requires.

Paco on Shane’s resurrection: “His appearance in these pages is… an act of magic… irrational and disrespectful toward the occupation of writing a mystery series… the story told here belongs to the terrain of absolute fiction, although Mexico is the same and belongs to the terrain of surprising reality.”

Story is all, then. And so Paco goes on pulling real rabbits from imaginary hats.

Initially, he says, he turned to crime fiction from a desire to escape the experimentalism then rampant, to find his way back to storytelling. Like many others (Roger Simon or Stephen Greenleaf in the States, the amazing Jean-Patrick Manchette in France, somewhat later Columbia’s Santiago Gamboa), Paco realized that the crime novel gives space and opportunity to address contemporary society as does no other venue, to recreate the actual textures and presence of street life and social levels about him, the flux of assumption and disinformation that keeps the social order afloat, the rifts between reality and appearance that both individual and society must negotiate again and again.

One further spur. Someone told Paco it was impossible to write a crime novel set in Mexico because the crime novel was by its very nature an Anglo genre. Given that, what choice did he have but to write one? Or a dozen?

Again and again here, I’ve struck out such formalities as Taibo and the author in favor of, simply, Paco. In the cloisters and hallways of my soul I see him striding towards me in T-shirt and leather jacket, Marlboro in one hand, Coke in the other. Uncomfortable at the table of privilege where, attending an international literary conference, he was seated, Paco has escaped. Paco’s flown, Paco’s once again out and about where he belongs, where all writers belong, at the world’s small, crowded, unkempt tables.

Reading, he tells us, the four or five of us there (for we contain multitudes), reading is the most subversive activity in life. Open any true book and you begin to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. Nothing is more redeeming than that, or more dangerous.

He believes, too, in the right to myths, the necessity of them. Speaking about Che and other heroes, even small heroes like Hector Belascoarán Shane, helps us reclaim other rights: our right to romanticism, to adventure, to the sense that our lives are not shallow but infinitely deep, connected to history and to “all those who have no rights, those who suffer abuse their whole lives, people on the margins, the disinherited, the lepers, the poor, the least of the least.”

There’s the rabbit and the hat, then. And here’s Paco Taibo, writer, magician, small hero. The most important postman of all: the one who delivers you to yourself.

James Sallis
Phoenix
January 2002

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This essay will appear as the afterword for a reissue of Paco Taibo’s An Easy Thing by The Poisoned Pen Press .