Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city after Bogata and known around the world, unfortunately as it’s a beautiful city, for the drug cartels. And the city has recently been starring (as a cartel city I’m afraid) in season two of The Night Manager, based partly on characters created by John le Carré in his famous novel and the hit first series with Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine (who does indeed start out as a hotel night manager) and ‘the world’s worst man’, British arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper (played sublimely by Hugh Laurie). So perhaps we should see what other crime writers have made of Medellín.
Let’s start with Colombian author Jorge Franco’s Shooting Down Heaven (2020) where Larry returns to Colombia twelve years after the disappearance of his father, an old associate of none other than cartel king Pablo Escobar. It’s the Alborada celebration, when fireworks explode all over Medellín, and the entire city loses its inhibitions. Larry’s search for the truth of his father’s disappearance takes him from Medellín luxury living in bodyguard-surrounded mansions to the dodgy and dangerous backstreets of the city. Franco is also the author of Paradise Travel (2006) which recounts the adventures of Marlon Cruz, a naïve young man from Medellín who agrees to accompany the beautiful woman he loves to New York City. On their first night in Queens, Marlon and Reina lose each other, thus initiating Marlon’s descent into the underbelly of America.
Then there’s Kathryn Lane’s Waking Up in Medellin (2020), a book in the Nikki Garcia seven-book series. Garcia is a female detective to various countries as she works on chilling and sinister crimes. Now she’s in Medellín uncovering corruption, corporate fraud and getting herself kidnapped by powerful local interests.
Medellín born and raised Fernando Vellejo’s Our Lady of the Assassins (2001) features two Medellin teenagers caught in the local cycle of violence. The novel takes a look at the culture of violence that grew up in Medellin along with the culture of the narcotics business. A writer returns to Medellin after an absence of 30 years and meets Alexis, a male prostitute and a hitman – an Angel of Death. Vellejo is looking at who in Colombian society can be blamed for the rise of the violence and Vellejo, a confirmed atheist, blames the church and the political elite for Colombia’s tragedy. The book was turned into a movie in Colombia in 2001. A writer and a filmmaker, Vellejo felt, in 1971, that he had to leave Colombia for Mexico (where he now has citizenship) due to extreme censorship of his work.
And a book from Columbia’s best-known writer – the late Gabriel García Márquez. His News of a Kidnapping (1996) examines a series of kidnappings and narco-terrorist attacks committed in the early 1990s in Colombia by the infamous Medellin Cartel and Pablo Escobar. The book primarily focuses on the kidnapping of Maruja Pachón de Villamizar and her sister-in-law, Beatriz Villamizar de Guerrero, in November 1990. The kidnappings were a brutal attempt by Escobar to pressure the government into blocking extradition, a move that created a nationwide crisis and immense, long-lasting terror. The book was adapted into a television mini-series in 2022.
We should also mention perhaps Columbia’s second best-known writer internationally, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and his book The Informers (2012). Not quite a crime novel but full of mystery and suspense all the same. When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret of Colombia and his family’s past?
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is also the author of The Sound of Things Falling (2012) where an investigation into a murder leads back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped Colombia in a living nightmare. However, the book is mainly set in Bogotá (see Crime and the City – Bogotá) And also Lovers on All Saints’ Day (2015) where a Colombian writer is witness to a murder which will mark him forever.
And finally, let’s highlight a real cult classic that reveals, and somewhat revels in, Medellin’s dark and nasty underbelly. Alonso Salazar’s Born To Die in Medellin (1992) which travels in ultra noir style through the endemic urban violence of Medellin. Salazar journeys into the jails, hospitals and shanty towns of Colombia’s drug capital to interview teenage contract killers, their families, priests and self-defence vigilantes in the 1980s when the city’s violence almost appeared to be totally out of control. Salazar is also the author of The Parable of Pablo (2023), something of a classic of Colombian literature focussing on the life of the famous drug trafficker published on the 30th anniversary of his death. Salazar himself is a major public figure in Medellin – he became mayor of the city in 2008, though ran for re-election in 2012 and lost.
Alonso Salazar’s career as a journalist, writer and local politician in Medellin, his focus on the city’s underbelly and arguably most famous former resident Escobar, shows that whatever is going on today in Medellin, drugs and the narcotics business still loom large. And, by the way, season two of The Night Manager agrees!
