Panama City, capital of the Republic of Panama. Nine hundred thousand people with rather a lot of banks and lawyers as well as being, of course, on the transcontinental canal bisecting the narrow isthmus between the Caribbean and the Pacific. The city has been sacked several times since its foundation in the early 1500s – Spaniard vs Genoese; privateer vs mercenary, General Noriega vs the US military. First railroads, and then canals, brought American and French influence, as well as migrants from the Caribbean and across Latin America, into the city, turning it into a vibrant and lively, though segregated and often socially enflamed, city. And that canal – mired in corruption, disease and death, while World War Two saw the emergence of the Panama Canal “Zone” and a virtual apartheid between its inhabitants and ordinary Panamanians. A geo-political hotspot, accused of being an international money-laundering centre (and not forgetting those infamous ‘Panama Papers’ of course), unsurprisingly there’s a lot of crime writing about Panama.
Eric Zencey’s Panama (1995) is set between late-nineteenth-century Paris and a roiling emerging Panama as American historian Henry Adams searches for a young American woman whose disappearance is linked to French interests in the Panama Canal and a morass of political intrigue.
Moving to contemporary Panama – banking, espionage, and geo-political intrigue abound – it’s no surprise to find John le Carré attracted to the city. The Tailor of Panama (1996) introduces Harry Pendel, a British expatriate with a somewhat secretive (and undountedly shady) past living in Panama City running a successful bespoke tailoring business where he hears all the gossip while measuring the inside legs of the men who control the city. Recruited by a corrupt Mi6 agent, Harry concocts a fictitious network of revolutionaries. Shades of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), though le Carré, who did visit Panama on five occasions (which he talks about in his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, 2016) called it ‘Casablanca without any heroes’. The book moves between the elite of the “Zone” and the back streets and alleys of Panama City as Harry Pendel negotiates both worlds. And, of course, the novel became a pretty decent movie with Pierce Bronsan and Geoffrey Rush.
A bunch more novels that are set in contemporary Panama City:
- Melissa Darney’s The Panama Affair (2019) features Brianna Morgan, a globetrotting journalist on vacation in Panama at a five-star oceanfront resort. She meets a seemingly perfect international jet-setter and is instantly smitten. But then he ends up dead, dumped in a cave. Brianna then goes on the run moving from five-star resorts and white sand beaches to deep jungle and the seedy by-the-hour hotels of Panama City.
- In the thriller genre David Terrenoire’s Beneath a Panamanian Moon (2004) we meet John Harper, employed by a Panamanian resort hotel for his military surveillance, firearms, and piano skills (yes, he shoots automatic weapons and plays the ivories), gets into trouble with American mercenaries and angry Colombians on New Year’s Eve.
- Robert Reynolds Panama Nights (2022) looks at the dirty political underbelly of Panama City. Flying into Panama, Walter Sloane meets pretty Panamanian Lili Cruz. As Walter gets to know Lily and romance blossoms, so he encounters the reality of Panama City life – a corrupt political candidate and the danger within Lili’s barrio where life is lived outside of the privileged “Zone”.
- Robert W. Hatting’s first book in the Jimmy Hart trilogy series, Murder in Panama (2012), features ex-intelligence officers on private islands of the Panamanian coast. The second book in the series, Revolution of Fools (2012), is back in Panama with a potential Chinese takeover of the canal (reflecting real fears of Chinese investment in Panama a decade or so ago). The last in the trilogy, Hart’s Rules (2013), find Jimmy in the middle of American-inspired political shenanigans and scrambled fighter jets in Panama City.
- Noel Hynd’s Cuban Trilogy starts out, naturally enough, in Havana, and features U.S. Treasury Agent Alexandra LaDuca. Alex moves through Cuba and then Miami and then, in the third and final book of the trilogy, Payback in Panama (2013), Alex is angry at her nemesis, the Dosi Cartel, and not too happy either with her employers in Washington D.C. This time her hunt for the cartel’s boss takes her across Honduras and El Salvador, and finally to Panama City for a last confrontation.
And finally, I think it’s worth mentioning two novels that are not strictly crime novels but have elements of the underbelly of Panama and offer interesting outsider perspectives on the city. Both are well worth reading.
Jane Bowles was the stylish and sophisticated wife of the folk music historian, novelist, and long-time Tangier resident Paul Bowles. They married in 1938 and honeymooned partly in Panama which, later in 1943, became the location for Jane’s novel (her only published novel) Two Serious Ladies. It follows two upper-class women, New York heiress Christina Goering and dutiful married woman Frieda Copperfield, as they descend into debauchery. While admittedly no actual crimes are committed, they do descend into the demi-monde of Panama City – barrios and brothels, with the formerly strait-laced Mrs Copperfield abandoning her husband for love of a local prostitute and Mrs Goering moving to a squalid little house for various encounters with strangers. Tennessee Williams declared it his favourite novel and Truman Capote also sung its praises. Of course those who know Jane Bowles’s backstory will realise there’s a lot of her own story in the book. Paul Bowles’s Morocco-set The Sheltering Sky (1949) is a semi-autobiographical account of their experiences.
And very finally, another novel that’s not strictly a crime novel but has plenty of elements and is well worth reading – Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana (2011). It’s essentially a fiction of literary theft, set in Panama. Before achieving great fame Joseph Conrad wrote his novel Nostromo (1904), about a South American republic, based on Colombia, he named Costaguana. On the day of Joseph Conrad’s death in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop telling the story of how he told the story of Costaguana to Conrad and then Conrad stole it all. And so in pursuit of this imaginary literary theft, of an unknown writer and a universally known writer, from London to Panama and back. A quite extraordinary novel and plenty of descriptions of Panama.
A hundred and fifty years ago Panama was the centre of repeated scandals associated with the canal – fiscal malfeasance, brutal working conditions, people trafficking. Then the republic has rolled through Noriega and the American invasion and most recently the mass of banking scandals. Panama may be far from South America’s largest country; Panama City is a long way from being the most populous city in the region, but Panama does not lack material for the aspiring crime writer.
