Martín Solares, The Black Minutes (2006)

In a 2012 interview, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the dean of Mexican crime fiction, explains why he has not written a novel featuring his famous private eye, Hector Belascoarán Shayne, since the current drug war began in Mexico: "The narco war has changed everything in relations between society, crime, insecurity, law and order…These deep changes in society make you as a writer to rethink the whole thing." This is an interesting comment to keep in mind when trying to make sense of Martín Solares’ complex and fascinating 2006 novel, The Black Minutes, which in some ways can be read as charting a path for the Mexican crime novel in the era of the narco cartel. The first thing to note in this regard is that there is no equivalent to a private eye figure in Solares’ work; instead, the closest we come to having a protagonist is a police officer who is less corrupt than his colleagues (which is not saying much). Even with someone as gifted as Taibo, the effectiveness of a principled individual like Shayne is one of the more speculative, fanciful, some would say unrealistic, aspects of his work, and Solares seems to have abandoned this aspect of the genre all together. Instead, Solares focuses on the multiple and contradictory roles that crime plays in the neoliberal state: at once the focus of moral panics that apparently drive both policy and action, it is simultaneously a way for local, state, and national functionaries to enrich themselves and their associates. Given this context, it should come as no surprise that although the murders that focus The Black Minutes are technically solved, justice is nowhere to be found. One of Taibo’s Shayne novels is titled No Happy Ending, and this title would be perfectly appropriate for Solares’ novel, too. But in another sense, concentrating on the incomplete resolution of this novel severely undersells its richness. Combining familiar noir elements with dashes of magical realism, frequent references to a wide range of literary texts, and even a cameo appearance by Alfred Hitchcock, this is not an easy novel to classify. And, of course, both it and crime fiction as a whole are all the better for this fact.