The Old Man and the Key

Forty years ago Thomas Sanchez was a celebrity, surfing the popularity-wave with his debut novel Rabbit Boss. But soon after the debut the wave crashed and the success story ended for Sanchez, as did his marriage, finances, and lifestyle. His home burned down, too. Talk about bad luck. Sanchez's five novels are in print, but I rarely come across readers of his work, and there has not been much critical attention. Of his previous novels I care for only two, but they are odd books and worth one's time.

Mile Zero, Sanchez's most famous novel, is a Key West tale of mayhem, a wild meandering story of burnouts and cops and cons and murders. It is a hyped-up noir and full of vibrant prose and scary goings-on in the shadows of the southernmost sun, which one witnesses via Justo, a Cuban-American cop and heart of the novel, and a madman killer, who is given his own narration in special gray-colored pages. Day of the Bees, the strangest  of Sanchez's novels and the one I like best, is a riff on The Moon and Sixpence and memory, and not the dim memory contemporary writers talk about when they say nonsense like "I wanted to write a novel about memory," but frightened memories of love and sex and Nazis and occupied France and the hellish shit that happened to innocent and not-so innocent  people in the war years. Mile Zero was praised and Day of the Bees was panned, but the reviews of the latter novel were lazy, objecting to creative license for the most part; Day of the Bees is a book with problems but it is a book worth reading and arguing about. I have not read either novel in over a decade but I think about Day of the Bees often, and wonder if the bizarre scenes I remember are actually inside the book. This is what critics hope to mean when they use the word "haunting" to describe a novel.

American Tropic, Sanchez's new novel, is fast and taut, and after twenty pages I realized I was reading a parody of Thomas Sanchez, a Director's Cut that had the wisdom to trim rather than pad. Instead of the jaunty prose of Mile Zero or the artsy tone of Day of the Bees, Sanchez in American Tropic has wrought this new Key West testament down to hard-boiled blood and guts, and it is a treat as Sanchez shows off and sneers. He reworks many top scenes from his previous novels and turns them into a fresh pulpy mess.

We meet Noah Sax, lawyer-cum-DJ on a floating pirate radio station where he broadcasts shock-jock environmental rants with the bombast of an Important Blogger, and Luz Zamora, a business-first sex-second lesbian cop. Key West is bustling with tourists and good-time drunks, but a dead male body is discovered, a spear rent through his chest, his lips sewn shut with fishing line, his ears cut off, a red X painted on his chest. More murders follow, and the madman on the loose taking credit for the killings gives himself the moniker Bizango, which may or may not have black-magic connotations. Luz makes haste through Key West and her department of idiots to track the killer down, all the while taking care of her life partner and her two daughters, the youngest of whom struggles with chemotherapy.

A bonkers cast of small-timers drift through American Tropic, including a lush loudmouth developer, a dyke turtle poacher, and a rickety paranoid who shouts warnings of an impending hurricane that will rid Key West of its sins and sinners. The story is told in the annoying third-person present tense, but it is not annoying here as Sanchez is a better writer than the sort who have adopted this risible tense-trend. Some of the angry comic dialogue is ace; Big Conch, the developer, telephones Sax during his live call in pirate radio show and starts this exchange:

"Don't give me that stink load about the environment. I create jobs. What do you create? Nada! You want the Florida Keys turned back into a mosquito-infected mangrove swamp."

"I'd rather live with mosquito bites on my ass than be imprisoned on a concrete island of condos surrounded by a dead sea."

"You're just a dipshit bobbing alone on the ocean, trying to get people to jerk off to phony environmental rage. The truth is, it's all about your wife. She left you. You're a pirate without a treasure."

Bizango, clad in a skeleton costume and mask, bills himself as the great rectifier of ecological crimes, killing those who are killing Key West. Before sewing his victims' mouths shut, he plants micro-recordings of his warped poem-proclamations. One such rant concludes with the lines:

I am a hex doctor
a magic gangster
king of cemeteries
ultimate judge.
I am your annihilator
the great corrector.
I boogie till you bounce.
I bop till you drop.
I am Bizango.

This is high camp. The environmental crimes against the Keys are laid out in bold strokes by Sanchez, be it cruise ship propellers that slice through thousand-year old reefs, or the highway drivers who plow into the small and vanishing Key deer population. But American Tropic is a violent novel, not an Al Gore documentary (thank god), and the device of planet destruction works well in the crime novel context.

American Tropic has its problems; gestures and expressions grow repetitious, and at times characters behave with B-movie immaturity, which cheaply assists the set-up of the mayhem. But with lines like, "I hope his pissy pirate boat sinks in the middle of a shit slick dumped from a thousand crappers off a cruise ship," Sanchez redeems the book from the fate of drab noir. 

American Tropic is not a great book but it is one of Thomas Sanchez's better novels, primitive, cruel, and a hoot. Not bad for an old man telling a Florida story.