Gringa

Crime Fiction from South America has been slow to reach our shores, though Joe Thomas has found fertile ground setting his work in Sao Paulo (Brazil) firstly with Paradise City, and now he gives us a sequel, Gringa.

A ‘gringa’ is a foreign female; in this case, Ellie, a young English journalist who has come to the city to work as a journalist on a local English-language ex-pat magazine: she is supposed to be supplying the light stuff, but she wants to be an investigative reporter and soon is following up leads from her new Paulista (or should that be Paulisto?) boyfriend.

It is 2013 and land is soon going to be in high demand. Nominally that is because the World Cup is coming and there will be a need for stadiums and hotels and parking lots so anything that provides an excuse for a land grab is fine with some of the more dubious land / property companies. Several people who know police detective Mario Leme, are employees of such a company. What becomes clear is that many of the residents of the shanty town [Favela] known as Cracktown have little legal right to the land on which they have erected their huts.

When Mario Leme is supposedly accompanying Ellie to an interview in the Falvela, she vanishes. Mario goes in and finds the body of a murdered man, Ellie’s mobile rings but she is gone. Mario Leme is low down in the police food chain, and handicapped by honesty (which in this society is not a good situation). Fortunately he has supportive superiors.

Joe Thomas’s work has been compared to James Ellroy, as it is abrupt, elliptical, and heavily loaded with slang in both English and Portuguese. That comparison is true, but it tends to ignore another group of writers; the new generation from Africa. Descriptions of shanty towns, collapse of social order, over-stretched police services have been featured in authors such as Deon Meyer, M D Villiers and Nick Brownlee.  I was reminded strongly of Villiers’ City of Blood (2014), which is an unblinking record of crime and misery in Johannesburg rather than Nick Brownlee who uses a dark comedy in the style of the late James McClure writing about Mombasa.

What the African authors have not done, is play with narrative time. I found Gringa difficult going at times. Although I was discouraged by the frequency of the Portuguese slang (as was Michael Jecks when he reviewed Paradise City), Gringa now has an appendix of terms); the greater difficulty was the granular style: short sections, changing view points, and time shifts. The time shifts are indicated by the chapter or section headings, but some readers (including me) paid little attention to the headings as the plot drives the story onward; though it makes the reading process hard going at times – but perseverance becomes rewarded with Gringa.

Read Joe Thomas' feature on Gringa.