Crime and Crime Writing in Brazil

Why is Brazil, northern Brazil in particular, a good setting for crime fiction?

Verisimilitude, for one thing: you can believe in cops who murder people because there are cops who murder people; you can believe in people that will kill you for your cell phone because there are people that will kill you for your cell phone; you can believe in the impunity of the rich, because it's a fact that rich Brazilians seldom go to jail – no matter how grave their offense.

Add drug lords who operate with the support of government officials (and, not uncommonly, are government officials). Add Indians living in a vast rainforest who've never had contact with modern civilization. Add the eight and nine-year-old girls, working in brothels before their breasts have bud. The list goes on and on. There are hundreds, thousands of stories to be told.

You mentioned the north. It's a vast region that embraces several states and the Amazon rain forest as well. Salvador, in Bahia, was the capital long before Brasilia, long before Rio de Janeiro, and for a longer time than both of them put together. The countryside in northern Brazil has a character all its own. There's a feudal aspect to it. Some of the great landlords still hold agricultural workers in virtual bondage. Those landlords have pet judges and politicians and hired gunmen to resort to in case the judges and politicians don't see things their way. There are borders up there with five other countries. Arms smuggling and drug trafficking is rife. It's like the Wild West.

Issues of land rights and police violence loom large in Blood of the Wicked. What single event or set of events made you say, "That's it; I'm writing a novel."? How did you then proceed to build a novel from that initial idea?

Blood of the Wicked was never meant to be a stand-alone. I didn't just say to myself, "That's it; I'm writing a novel." I said, "Wow! All this s*** is happening and hardly anyone outside of this country knows anything about it. What a great opportunity for a series. I'm sitting on a writer's gold mine here!"

But I'm a big believer in character-driven fiction, so when I started laying the groundwork for the Silva novels, I started with my protagonist. He had to be a male. (A woman would wind-up spending more of her time fighting sexism than fighting crime.) He had to be someone with enough rank to get things done. He had to have a mandate that would allow him to act anywhere in the country. He had to be have a highly-developed sense of morals. And he had to have a reason to fight crime and criminals that went beyond a simple vocation. I mixed them all together with the personas of two senior law-enforcement officials I know - and I came up with Mario Silva, a chief inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police.

Then I delved into the newspapers and started collecting material for stories. Blood of the Wicked deals with land reform. Buried Strangers, due for publication in January of 2009, deals with something entirely different, but if I tell you what it is, it would be a spoiler. Readers get halfway through the book before they discover why people are being murdered. One thing I can tell you, though: it's not the sort of thing that could happen in downtown Los Angeles, or in the suburbs of New York, or anywhere else in America. But it sure as hell happens here.

Not all the crimes in Blood of the Wicked involve the landless and the landowners, yet the issue underlies everything, leading to false leads and wrong guesses. I'd like you to talk about this, if you would, preferably without too many plot spoilers.

Okay, but I can't do it without giving you some statistics. Some people think Brazil is a poor country. It isn't. Brazil is a rich country populated largely by poor people. The income distribution is only a little better than that of Bangladesh. A mere 1.6% of the population owns almost 50% of all of the arable land. The Brazilian Landless Worker's Movement, (in the book I call them the Landless Worker's League) has set out to change all of that. They now number about 1.5 million, distributed across 23 of Brazil's 27 states. Their principal technique is what they call the "peaceful occupation of untilled property". Except that it isn't always untilled, and it's hardly ever peaceful. In the majority of cases, the cops and the local politicians have a vested interest in supporting the landowners. And the landowners often have a legally-acquired title to the land that's being trespassed upon. But not always. Sometimes those titles are faked. And sometimes people get forced off land that their families have tilled for generations. So what you've got here are the elements of a true tragedy: a case in which right and wrong is blurred on both sides.

Another important element in Blood of the Wicked is liberation theology, a doctrine now condemned by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but one that a number of rural priests still covertly subscribe to. Some say that clergymen who practice liberation theology are Marxists. Liberation theologians say, "Wrong. Marxists deny the existence of God. We don't. But the poor shouldn't have to wait until after death for their reward. We want a radical re-distribution of wealth, and we want it now."

They regard anyone who doesn't agree with them, and that often includes their fellow priests, as defenders of an unjust status quo. Blood of the Wicked begins with the assassination of a bishop. Early suspicion falls on liberation theologians. But it could also have been a landowner. Or it might be someone else. But I can't tell you more without running the risk of a spoiler.

You gave your protagonist, Mario Silva, and his nephew and assistant, Hector Costa, especially dramatic back stories. In Silva's case, the background is especially shocking. Why did you make this choice?  What does it add to the book?

Brazilians don't believe in honest cops, and they particularly don't believe in honest cops who have moved-up in the hierarchy. And for good reason: Cops' salaries in Brazil are a pittance. The opportunities for earning money on the side are great. And when your boss, and your boss's boss, and all of your colleagues are on the take, the pressure to conform is enormous.

Mario Silva and Hector Costa are rare cops by Brazilian standards, rare because they've both achieved positions of influence while retaining, and often acting out of, a sense of justice. Please note that I'm not using the word honest. Silva is not honest. Costa isn't either. They're merely just. In Brazil, honest men seldom seek out careers as cops. And if they do, their likelihood of promotion is slight. Silva and Costa are realists. They know, from the very beginning, that if they want to enforce the spirit of the law, they're often going to have to break the letter of it.

But to do what they do, indeed to be able to perform at all within their enviornment, they need strong motivation, motivation that goes beyond vocational considerations. Hence the inclusion of their back stories.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has a background as a leftist and a labor activist. What difference has this made as far as police violence, land rights, and other issues that concern you in Blood of the Wicked and in future novels?

Virtually none. Unfortunately.

Parenthetically, how did Lula go from being feared as a wild man to being respected as a moderating influence so quickly? How much of this is due to even more radical South American leaders such as Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez?

To begin with, the fear of Lula was both logical and overrated. Logical, because you had this labor leader with a grade-school education. And he was threatening to take over a government owing so much money that a default could have caused a meltdown in the world's financial system. Overrated, because Lula surrounded himself with responsible financial advisors from the very beginning and declared, long before the election, that he had no intention of not meeting Brazil's obligations. He's still hated by many of Brazil's elite, but he has clearly distanced himself from the far left. He doesn't speak ill of Chavez or Morales or even of Castro, but he doesn't go out of his way to strengthen relationships either. He has successfully steered a middle course, eschewing offensive rhetoric. And he continued to do so even after Bolivia's expropriation and nationalization of the Brazilian National Petroleum Company's multi-billion dollar assets in Bolivia. Argentina has moved closer to Chavez's Venezuela. Colombia has moved further away. Brazil continues to follow its own course – right down the middle.

De Gaulle once said "Brazil is not a serious country." The statement went on to become much quoted in diplomatic circles. Lula hates it. He wants Brazil to have firm recognition for its importance in South America and the world. He wants a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations and to that end he is being careful not to offend anyone. He's even sent troops to enforce the peace in Haiti (the UN detachment is being run by a Brazilian general) and he's sending financial and material aid to a number of nations in Africa. By all intents, he seems to be getting his message across. And for Brazil's poor he can do no wrong. His approval rating, even after a recent spate of corruption scandals that would have brought down most presidents in most democracies, is holding firm at about 55%. That's pretty good for a guy who never got past the American equivalent of the sixth grade.

Police violence seems to be especially notorious in Brazil. Is it in fact any worse than in, say, Argentina?  If so, why?

During the recent dictatorships, all three countries in the Southern cone were about on a par when it came to police violence, so it isn't as if the Brazilians have a patent on it. But these days, an ordinary citizen doesn't have to worry too much about the cops in Argentina and Chile. Their governments pay them reasonably well and keep an eye out for abuses.

Brazil, unfortunately, is different. It's tough to raise a family on the salary of an average Brazilian cop. Many, if not most, look for other sources of income. Those sources can include evictions (as in the case of evicting landless workers from land they've occupied), extortion, "losing" evidence, and "cleaning up neighborhoods". It doesn't help the situation, either, that being a cop in Brazil is more dangerous than it is in Argentina or Chile and a lot more dangerous than it is in the United States or Western Europe. Cops are targets, often losing their lives just because they are cops. They respond in kind, dealing out death to people they regard as threats. All too often they're wrong in their assessments. But by that time it's often too late, and their superiors, cops themselves, turn a blind eye to the error.

You occasionally give readings in Brazil. How is your work received there? Who is your audience? Are any translation deals in the works, whether into Portuguese or into other languages?

When I give readings in Brazil, I give them mostly for foreigners, and I always give them in English. My European agent is working on foreign rights and I expect my work to come out in French, German, Italian and Spanish before all too long. But I'm doubtful about Portuguese. And, in fact, I'm very happy with that. Most Brazilians speak and read only Portuguese. When Blood finally appears in that language, if it ever does, my Brazilian friends aren't going to like it. I'm going to take a lot of flak for washing dirty laundry in public. Some of those friends are landowners, one is a cop and one is a priest. All three categories take heavy hits in Blood. I'm not worried about the landless. If they can read at all, they probably don't read books, and it's even less likely they read fiction.

How popular is crime fiction in Brazil?  Of the two Brazilian crime writers I've read, one is an academic who named his protagonist for a philosopher (Luis Alfredo Garcia-Rosa), and the other is a "serious" and respected writer by any standard (Rubem Fonseca).  What does this say about Brazilians and their attitude toward crime fiction and mysteries?

Crime pays in Brazil. Crime writing, by and large, does not. The genre isn't popular at all. I've heard a number of explanations for this, but none that convince me. One argument is that Brazilians live with crime and violence every day of their lives. So much so, that they choose to live in denial of just how dangerous their large cities really are. They want to close their eyes to crime, and they don't want to turn to it for diversion.

But if that's true, why do the scripts of so many local television series rotate around murder and other crimes? Is it possible that people who buy books don't watch those kinds of shows? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Another explanation, often given, is that publishers are so leery of the genre that good crime writing simply can't get into print. Maybe. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Does Brazil lack good crime writers, or does it lack publishers who are willing to publish good crime writers? The argument goes round and round, and its defenders claim the situation has historical antecedents. They say that a number of writers started trying to imitate the English and American greats of the 1930's and failed miserably at it. And rather than ascribe the failure to lack of talent on the part of writers, the publishing industry erroneously interpreted it as a lack of interest in the genre.

But, if that's so, how can one explain Rubem Fonseca, Patrica Melo, Marcello Rubens Paiva, Silvio Lancellotti, Rubens Costa, Augusto Boal, Ruy Castro, Dalton Trevisan and, yes, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza? (He spells it with two z's, not two s's.) They're all in print, all of them write the genre, and all of them manage to sell books. I question, however, if any of them (with the possible exceptions of Fonseca and Garcia-Roza) can live on the income thus generated.

Fonseca, although he was a cop at one time in his life, isn't regarded as a crime writer. Garcia-Roza, although he's an academic and has published other kinds of works, is. His Espinosa series has attracted more readers in the English-speaking world than it has here. Overall, Brazilians read much more non-fiction than fiction. And when it's fiction, it's likely to be one of the worldwide best-sellers (including works by the Brazilians Jorge Amado and Paulo Coelho) or one of the "serious" writers, like Clarice Lispector. (And, yes, Fonseca.)

Remember, too, that in this country lots of people can't afford to buy books. Many are still illiterate. In a country of over one-hundred-eighty million people less than eight million daily newspapers are sold. In books, a best-seller is anything over five thousand copies.

Check out Leighton Gage's page on Crimespace: http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/Leighton

And visit his web site at: http://www.leightongage.com

His book is available at your local bookstoree and on-line.