It’s out: the e-book of my first novel, Poor Player, which I’ve published with a lovely, flashy new cover. The book is a noirish literary thriller set in Mexico. Human rights, drug trafficking and foreigners: the action occurs at a heady nexus. 

Jack Hall is an actor who comes to Mexico, quitting his hot career in L.A. to work for the human rights group headed by his sister, Peggy. The group’s work is based in Central America, and Peggy sends her brother to Mexico City first to learn Spanish. She asks for help from journalist Hugh Bruce, a long-time Latin America hand and the narrator of the novel. But when Jack arrives, both he and Hugh get far more than they bargained for—and far less than they want.

I lived in Mexico City with my family for three years, and started writing the novel there shortly before I moved to Brazil, where I finished it. I remained obsessed with Mexico even after moving, having first gone there when I was 19. That made it the first truly foreign country I had visited, depending on how you look at the United States. A friend and I flew down on a cheap open-ended charter and we spent three weeks in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. I wrote about part of that trip in my travel book, Foreign Correspondences. 

What drew me then and later was Mexico’s culture, which is so deep and rich and old, the European colonial conquest never managing to plough under the Indigenous civilizations. I grew up in North Vancouver, which is the traditional territory of the Musqueam people. I lived near a Musqueam reserve and went to high school with Indigenous kids from up and down the coast. That meant I knew a little about the equally rich culture of the Northwest Coast civilizations. But going to unfamiliar, beautiful and dangerous Mexico that first time made me understand much more about living in the Americas, and the continuity of injustice that implies–an understanding that grew deeper when I moved there a decade later. 

There’s this:

At the end of the street where we lived in Mexico City was a No Right Turn sign at the intersection with a major traffic artery. One morning, I saw a policeman standing on a small stepladder unscrewing the sign from the post. I think I must have been doing errands, going in and out of the house, maybe taking our son to daycare and picking him up. On a couple of occasions, I saw the policeman giving tickets to people he’d stopped at the intersection as they started making a right turn. Cash changed hands. At least once I saw him hiding in the shrubbery near the corner waiting for someone to ticket.

I had been in Mexico for long enough to know how to play up my status as a stupid foreigner. I walked over and greeted the policeman politely and incompetently, trying to find out what was going on. 

“Oye, I live over there,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me. “So are they going to allow right turns now? I should probably know.” 

“No, señora,” he said cheerfully. “But I got promoted, so I have to buy a new uniform and a new gun, and I need a little…” Rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in the universal signifier of cash. “I’ll put the sign back up when I’ve got enough.” 

Other things that happened while we lived in Mexico weren’t so funny. Some of the incidents I’ve written about in Poor Player actually occurred: policemen taking buddy shots with a murdered corpse, the stock market crash, which wiped out a lot of middle class people’s savings, a knife fight I saw late one night in the touristy Zona Rosa. 

Featured in the book is a horrific plane crash, and that happened, too. A DC-3 crash-landed on a secondary highway moments after it flew directly over our house. Hearing a hot racket, I ran into the garden and craned my neck to watch it pass overhead. The plane was very low, as if I was standing outside an airport fence. Soon came the explosion. My journalist husband was travelling and didn’t cover the crash, nor did I go there to rubberneck the tragedy. But other journalist friends worked it and talked about it later, and the media in Mexico was immediately saturated with photos and stories, at least until the crash was knocked off the front pages by the next tragedy.

One of these involved small farmers being murdered by drug traffickers who wanted their land, and this conflict lies at the centre of the novel. Drug trafficking was starting its exponential growth while we lived in Mexico. We also saw the rise of military aggression–the army fighting its own people–although the country was still largely safe, unlike now. In fact, Mexico City was so safe that I would often hop the subway and get off at random destinations to explore different neighbourhoods. Only a couple of times did someone warn me away, in both cases an older woman who took my arm saying something like, “You shouldn’t be here. I’m taking you to the subway and you’re getting on.”

A decade later, when my husband Paul was back in Mexico on assignment, he flagged a cab at night the way we used to. He’d been warned this had become dangerous, but flagging cabs was second nature and he didn’t go to a nearby hotel to call a radio taxi. The cab that picked him up was an old two-door Volkswagen beetle. As they often did, the driver had taken out the front passenger seat so people could easily climb into the back and get some leg room.

Before long, when the driver stopped at a stop sign, two men crowded into the car and told my husband to keep his head down. One of them showed him a gun. They seemed to be working with the taxi driver, although he acted like a subordinate. The armed man demanded my husband’s cash and credit card, and while he gave them the cash—about $40—he managed to persuade them that the credit card didn’t work at ATMs, which was true of many cards at the time, although not, in fact, of his.

They dumped him in a far suburb. He thinks it was called Colonia Industriale, since the streets were named things like Carpintero and Plombero. Carpenter Street and Plumber Street. He found himself on a street called Vulcanizadore, which is the name of people who fix car and truck tires. Although it was very late at night, he managed to flag down another taxi, this time more escapable, having four doors. The honest and sympathetic driver took him back to his hotel, waiting outside for the money for the fare. Paul always said that the thieves should have taken his leather jacket, which they could have sold for more than the cash he had on hand, but on the whole they seemed pretty incompetent.

Poor Player was first published in 1993, but it’s a tragic fact that the violence and human rights abuses it centres on could have happened yesterday. Something like them probably did. Heroic people fight the abuses and can be murdered with impunity, including many Mexican human rights workers and journalists.

In its 2021 report on Mexico, Human Rights Watch notes, “Human rights violations—including torture, enforced disappearances, abuses against migrants, extrajudicial killings, and attacks on independent journalists and human rights defenders—have continued under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December 2018. Impunity remains the norm. Reforms enacted in 2017 and 2018 have been slow and until now ineffective in addressing torture and impunity…

“Since 2006, enforced disappearances by security forces have been a widespread problem. Criminal organizations have also been responsible for many disappearances. The government reported more than 75,000 people disappeared as of November 2020—the vast majority from 2006 onwards…

“Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, on par with war zones like Syria and Afghanistan in terms of number of journalists killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders say. The CNDH reports 24 journalists killed since President López Obrador took office. In 2019, journalists registered 609 threats, attacks, or other forms of aggression—reportedly the highest year on record.”

I’m sure my narrator Hugh Bruce worked out his career in Mexico and retired there. He’d be in his seventies now, at least if he existed. I hope he remains safe somewhere in the ether, and that his one-time assistant, Maru Campagna, continues to thrive. 

You can get Poor Player here.