Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I would like to thank Head of Zeus for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Head of Zeus

Published – Out Now

Price – £16.99 hardcover £8.99 Kindle eBook

1970s Mexico City: while student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite seeks escape from her humdrum life in the stories of passion and danger filling the latest issue of Secret Romance.

She is deeply envious of her neighbour, a beautiful art student apparently living the life of excitement and intrigue Maite craves - so when Leonora disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman, journeying deep into Leonora's secret life of student radicals and dissidents.

But someone else is also looking for Leonora, at the behest of his boss, a shadowy figure who commands goon squads dedicated to squashing political activists. Elvis is an eccentric criminal who longs to escape his own life: he loathes violence and loves old movies and rock 'n' roll. Watching Maite from a distance, he comes to see her as a kindred spirit who shares his love of music and the unspoken loneliness of his heart.

As Maite and Elvis come closer to discovering the truth behind Leonora's disappearance, they can no longer escape the dangers threatening to consume their lives, with hitmen, government agents and Russian spies all aiming to find or protect Leonora's secrets - at gunpoint.

Noir is very much about living in the grey areas. Characters who are not people you’d want to be in a room with doing terrible things and yet we find ourselves compelled to watch or read their exploits. We may never do what these people do but just perhaps we envy their moral flexibility as much as we shake our heads in disapproval and don’t avert our eyes when things go wrong. In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s deliciously entertaining Velvet Was the Night we find ourselves watching two misfit characters slowly around a central political mystery in 1970’s Mexico City.

Maite is a young woman very conscious she is turning thirty and yet unmarried and without anything in her life to look forward to beyond her next Romance Comic Novel and finding new music to listen to. Most of her life is boring stuck as a legal secretary but a secret she doesn’t share is that in her apartment block she offers to take care of pets and likes to steal a little item from each one. Elvis ( not that one!) is a Hawk for the Mexican Government; an undercover operative/heavy/thug hired for his ability to fight and now being used to spy on left wing demonstrations and when required throw punches steal cameras and find out who is trying to betray the government. He also wants to improve his vocabulary, adores Presley and loves finding new music records to listen to.

Maite is asked to mind the cat of a glamourous young woman named Leonora for a weekend and then several more days pass without her return. People start hanging around her apartment and Leonora asks Maite to take things for a secretive meeting that she never turns up for. Maite is hoping to get paid to finally fix her car so starts investigating and finds herself in the world of left-wing artists and students looking for revolution. Elvis and several of the Hawks after a demonstration that went very wrong are sent by their mysterious boss to find a young woman who may have key evidence…a woman named Leonora.

This is a really impressively constructed novel. The central mystery of Leonora and what she has found and who she has joined sides with is the black hole that captures Elvis and Maite and brings them ever faster towards meeting. Moreno-Garcia captures a Mexico on edge with a government of secret police, spies and even KGB/CIA operatives lurking in the background. The music of the US and UK such as the Beatles or Presley is still subversive in a world where singing cafes with played, music are getting banned and women are expected to quickly get married and have children. The cultures are clashing, and the story feels with art student revolutionaries and government heavies spying on each other all ready to finally erupt into violence. A taster of which is the depiction of the Corpus Christie Massacre or El Halconazo where we see chaos and bloodshed as the government attacks demonstrators – this world feels unsafe from the start and means we don’t feel that any character is safe in this uncaring world.

In a typical political thriller then Maite would be the glamourous heroine chasing ideals and Elvis the true believer villain fighting for the State and the delight of the novel is neither character fits this pigeonhole. They’re more swept up in events rather than trying to control them. Maite is less interested in politics than paying her bills and indeed purposely avoids the newspaper headlines. For her the interesting element to this mystery is the chance to step inside an adventure that could fit the plot of her beloved Comic Romances. On the one hand we feel sympathetic with someone who everyone tells her to conform and settle down when all she wants is adventure and passion, yet we also note her enjoyment of theft and making up stories about her life that suggest she is getting involved for all the wrong reasons.

In contrast Elvis is someone who obeys orders; doesn’t find beating up students and revolutionaries a problem and yet we get to see he saw this job as a way to escape a life of crime and poverty on the streets. His hero worship of his the known as El Mago shows an insecure young man who is a bit of dreamer wanting to just listen to music and live the life of a gentleman. As he investigates, he starts to see that not everything he was told is true and while his scenes are often violent and bloody, we get to really hope he comes out of this in one piece. Moreno-Garcia crafts two really stand-out characters who mirror each other in unexpected ways that we hope when they finally meet it is not going to be a devastating encounter. It’s a beautiful bit of character and plotting that we see their two storythreads collide and don’t know what will happen until the last moment.

Regular readers of the blog know I’m a huge fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and their work in any genre is always at the top of their game. In this case we get a brilliantly plotted tale with two fascinating characters we can’t ignore and want to see how they get out of this story. On top of this readers will get to see a piece of fairly recent history that not many in the UK will have heard of before. A perfect read for thriller fans.