Hi there, guys:
Glad to be in touch.
To answer Ramos's questions in order. I finished a new novel,
Havana Best Friends, in June 2001. Like Outcast, I wrote it
in English. My agent will try to sell it in the US soon.
HarperCollins UK will publish it next fall. I also penned two
other books in Spanish, which later I translated into
English. World Series is set in 1958 Havana and deals with
the Mafia-controlled American gaming industry here. The Fool
depicts corrupt Cuban Intelligence officials that in 1988
recruit an unsuspecting expert in sugar futures. He is sent
to Merida, Mexico, to launder drug money through the New York
Exchange. This book will soon be released in Italy and Japan.
I hope both will get published in the US.
Many years ago I quit worrying over sub-classifications
within the genre. We live immersed in cliches and surrounded
by artificial boundaries, many of them the result or market
forces. Crime literature, which is a broader concept than
crime fiction, is as old as literature itself. Crime probably
preceded language. Some people argue that "The Odyssey" could
be construed as crime literature. Debatable? Yes. "Don
Quixote" has many chapters dealing with crime. What about
"Crime and Punishment" and
"Hamlet," "Othello" and "Macbeth"? Almost everybody I know
agrees that Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder" and his
novel "The Long Goodbye" are first-class contemporary
literature.
All this leads me to believe that good crime literature
becomes just literature and good crime fiction becomes
fiction. Perhaps if the generic concept "literature of
adventure" is admittted, what is now considered crime
fiction, science fiction, children's fiction, war fiction,
etc., could be unified under it. But the market has been
segmented to better target readers. Among works of crime
fiction we have whodunits, thrillers, police procedurals, spy
novels, and so on. And what about the term fiction itself?
Many fictional titles are firmly rooted in reality.
In my opinion, hard-boiled has somewhat different
connotations in the American and Canadian cultures and in
Latin American cultures. Crime novels and short stories in
Latin America have stronger political and social overtones.
This stems, I suppose, from our revolutions and frequent
coups d' etat, from the fact that many criminals are also
ministers, senators, congressmen, chiefs of police and
intelligence services, even presidents. Not that such
criminals don't exist in the US and Canada, but it appears to
me their number is considerably less than in my neck of the
woods. I don't know whether or not my novels are hard-boiled.
Most readers say they are. I am certain they are not soft.
Perhaps they are medium-boiled.
I got carried away. Sorry. I'll leave the other questions for
tomorrow.
José atour
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