My list of Argentine Crime Novels on Shepherd
https://shepherd.com/best-books/crime-novels-set-in-argentina
Argentina
Interview with Radio Qué Onda
I was interviewed by Wellington’s Spanish language radio program Qué Onda. I talked about China, including my time in Wuhan, Argentina, and my book Buenos Aires Triad.
Buenos Aires Triad Chapter 1
THE SPOTTER A phalanx of drivers waited at the front of the arrivals hall. Standing with the others, Lucas had a sign for a certain Jorge Martínez: a passenger who would never arrive. Lucas was there to make an important decision, not to drive somebody into town. He thought it would be agony to choose. …
Argentina Sketches: Story of the Eye
Lying in bed my eye felt like it was going to explode, finally, after hours, aqueous fluid and pus squirted out relieving the pressure. The pain subsided, but only for fifteen minutes. So began a rewarding experience of the public health sector in Argentina, one winter morning in 2010. After consulting my friend (who I …
Argentina Sketches: The Albino Thief
She checked in wearing dark glasses. It didn’t seem weird as she had platinum blond hair and pale skin. I put her in a six-bed dorm. There was only one other guest in there, a Russian woman of twenty-five. Dorms were officially mixed but in practice, we generally kept men and women separate. We hadn’t …
Graham Greene Reviews
As a teenager, I read ‘The Comedians’ and in my twenties ‘The Power and the Glory’, ‘The Quiet American’ and ‘The Human Factor’. I remember swapping my copy of The Quiet American for ‘Off the Rails in Phnom Penh’ when in Laos. The Human Factor I read in a hostel in Colombia. In my early …
A Review of Buenos Aires Triad
A review from Carlos Hughes, author of White Monkey: What’s an honest man to do for a living when they live in a country where inflation rises up by 20% overnight and the price of bread becomes an expensive commodity? This is the dilemma of the main protagonist ‘Lucas’ in the wonderfully written crime noir …
The Xiezhi Triad in Argentina
A few years ago, the police in Buenos Aires busted a Chinese mafia group known as the Pixiu Triad. I wrote about this group and its activities in my article published in the LA Review of Books, China Channel. Inspired by those real events, I chose the xiezhi to be the symbol of the Chinese …
A Certain Kind of Power
‘A Certain Kind of Power’ is an entertaining dissection of corruption, in which Australian author Ryan Butta recreates an Argentina of scandals and cloak and dagger moves. Our guide in the county’s capital, Buenos Aires, is Mike Costello, a jaded American corporate spy. An aging one-time army man, Mike has been in Argentina too long …
Things We Lost in the Fire
The first story grabbed me for its description of Constitución in Buenos Aires, a neighborhood that used to be prosperous but is now known for prostitution, drugs and theft. But if you know how to move, if you understand the dynamics, the schedules, it is not dangerous. Or it is less dangerous. I know that …