Illegal immigration from Mexico has been much in the news lately, with the random murder of a woman in the “sanctuary city” of San Francisco by a several-times-deported illegal immigrant and Donald Trump’s bloviating exploitation of the issue for his “campaign” circus.
Craig McDonald, author of the Hector Lassiter series and editor of “Borderland Noir,” tackled the subject in a standalone crime novel titled “El Gavilan.” The novel was inspired by the Tom Russell/Dave Alvin border ballad “California Snow” and it’s a first-class piece of work — both as entertainment and thoughtful social commentary.
Here’s the setup:
The news is full of it: escalating tensions from illegal immigration, headless bodies hanging off bridges and bounties placed on lawmen on both sides of the border.
New Austin, Ohio is a town grappling with waves of undocumented workers exerting pressure on schools, police and city services. In the midst of the turmoil, three very different kinds of cops scramble to maintain control and impose order.
Police Chief Tell Lyon is a hurting man, a former California Border Patrol commander whose family was brutally murdered by a vengeful gang of smugglers. Tell has fled the desert and returned to the heartland to be New Austin’s chief of police. He’s come expecting a Mayberry-like experience, but soon learns “the border is now everywhere.”
Conservative hard-liner Sheriff Able Hawk takes a direct approach. Hawk stages mass arrests, posts inflammatory blog entries and bills back the Federal government his costs for jailing illegal immigrants who have nicknamed him El Gavilan.
Walt Pierce is sheriff of neighboring Vale County. Walt has a storied history and long rivalry with Able Hawk. Pierce, a vindictive, closed-minded man and a dangerous enemy, takes an immediate dislike to Tell Lyon.
The rape-murder of a Mexican-American woman triggers a brutal chain of events that threatens to leave no survivors…
I knocked the read out in a couple of days — it’s that absorbing. Tell Lyon is Frontier Partisan all the way — a classic Western lawman in a Midwest town, the kind of man who does the hard right thing, even when the right thing is not so easy to discern. And the secondary characters are remarkably vivid. Sheriff Able Hawk is finely drawn — much more than the simple tough-on-crime caricature he first appears to be.
There are no easy, facile “truths” here, no politics masquerading as story. It’s a very human tale of men and women caught up in a complicated and dangerous world. Illegal immigration is going to be a hot-button issue all the way through the 2016 presidential election. I wish all the candidates and the punditry would read this fine novel and learn something real and true.
Here’s Craig reading the first chapter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY4jbpB1r_8
California Snow — Dave Alvin:
Leave a Reply