The followers of the crime genre had, among the novelties of this 31st edition of the International Book Fair, one of the novels by the Spanish-Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II
The adventures of the private detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne once once more captivate the followers of the detective literature of the Spanish-Mexican Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It is a short story vanished departed (2022), published for the first time in 1991, and one of the novelties of the Editorial Arte y Literatura, of the Cuban Book Institute, presented during the 31st edition of the International Book Fair.
The crazy protagonist of the current saga, an Aztec emulator of the famous Sherlock Holmes, has been hired to decipher a crime, where the presumed perpetrator is a social fighter, who due to his activities and political position has begun to hinder the prevailing administration in an imaginary Mexican region.
Through irony, black humor, puns, and double meanings, the author questions and criticizes impunity, corruption, and violence by state institutions in Mexico and their officials.
This satire on the political and social structure of that country becomes a pretext for Taibo II to denounce how certain official tricks are cooked up and revealed on behalf of discredited authorities and without an iota of force or moral commitment to fellow citizens.
“[…] Uprooted, escaped from the middle class, curious to the point of madness, obsessively stubborn; full of a sense of humor to the Mexican, black, something sad ”the author has described the paradoxical police investigator of the series of his novels, among which are Combat daysfrom 1976; easy thingfrom 1977, one of the most praised; Some cloudsfrom 1985; loving ghostsfrom 1989; border dreamsfrom 1990; Goodbye Madridfrom 1993.
Like most film, theater and literary detectives, Belascoarán Shayne enjoys the freedom that his bachelorhood gives him; however, his creator has given the character some more “dressings” that make him a rare specimen, prone to apathy and social apathy.
In vanished departed the conventions of the police genre are somewhat dissipated by the absurd and implausible plot. However, without so much mystery or much to hide, the story seduces the reader until the final page by presenting, as a backdrop, the intricacies of a fraudulent judicial system; while, with fine humor, he narrates the unbridled race to find an alleged “living dead” who goes from party to party.
From the stylistic point of view, the work exhibits various transtextual elements, especially intertexts that connect the reader with the narrations of the famous character from Arthur Conan Doyle; but also architexts and metatexts, through which Taibo II, through the mediation of Belascoarán Shayne, ridicules the well-known behavior of Holmes, given to reaching quick conclusions and solving cases in absolute solitude.
The expressions of speech and localisms typical of popular Mexican slang are diverse throughout the story, even some phrases and phrases carry an intentionally coarse, grotesque and even cheesy sense, characteristic of crime novels, which works, to the time, to highlight the author’s contempt and disapproval of a certain state of affairs or circumstances.
Living in Mexico for several decades, Francisco Ignacio Taibo Mahojo (1949) –popularly known as Paco Ignacio Taibo II– is a native of Gijón, Spain. For almost half a century he has alternated between literature and his work as an indefatigable left-wing politician and social activist. He is a historian and his biographies of Pancho Villa, Antonio Guiteras and Ernesto Guevara have been highly celebrated.
His curriculum includes more than 70 works of various genres, published in nearly thirty nations around the world. He has received multiple awards and international awards for his literary work and, at present, he is recognized as a forerunner of the new black novel in Spanish, precisely because of the series by Héctor Belascoarán Shayne.
Con vanished departed Cuban readers have the opportunity to enjoy a crime thriller full of touches of humor and consistent in showing a decadent, corrupt and valueless society, in which political and economic interests weigh more than the life of a human being.
