Puerto Rico – out there in the Caribbean, 1,000 miles off the coast of Florida and with a population of over three million people. The capital of San Juan sits on the island’s Atlantic coast. Puerto Ricans have been US citizens since 1917 and so a healthy and widespread diaspora has emerged in the USA. Unfortunately Puerto Rico has a pretty high crime rate, even by US standards – 19.2 per 100,000 inhabitants with 80% of murders being drugs-related according to the local police. Often in Crime and the City we talk about places that have a lot of crime fiction but not much actual crime (think Scandinavia particularly), but Puerto Rico is a place with a lot of crime, real and imagined…
Steve Torres’s Precinct Puerto Rico series tackles the crime scene head on. Luis Gonzalo is sheriff of Angustias, a small town nestled in Puerto Rico’s mountainous heart. It’s a mini-murder capital. In book one of the series, Precinct Puerto Rico (2007), during a visit to his wife’s family in the seaside town of Rincón, Steve is called on when bodies start washing ashore, victims of a shipwreck, victims of the illegal traffic in humans from the Dominican Republic. The ship’s captain has been murdered, his vessel scuttled.
Domestic abuse turned deadly features in book 2, Death in Precinct Puerto Rico (2007) set in 1990s Puerto Rico. Teenagers getting violent and an unsolved beating form the core of Luis Gonazlo #3, Burning Precinct Puerto Rico (2010), and a missing child in 1980s Puerto Rico in Missing in Precinct Puerto Rico (2006). The final book in the series, Blackout in Precinct Puerto Rico (2010) where a woman is beaten almost to death – but by whom? Local partygoers or out-of-towners? Gonzalo is on the case. The series gives a good spread of Puerto Rican locations across the 80s, 90s and beyond, offering a flavour of the island over time. Steve Torres was born in the Bronx and spent part of his childhood in Puerto Rico.
A few more crime novels set in Puerto Rico:
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- The Puerto Rico Pearl (2023) is the fourth book in JA Jernay’s Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series featuring the world’s premier international gemstone detective. Stranded in torrential rain, Ainsley is guided towards an old plantation house in the Puerto Rico’s tropical interior, where she meets an elderly woman who has lost a precious family heirloom. A pearl brooch that had once belonged to an actual pirate of the Caribbean, and the owner wants it back – fast!
- French L Mclean’s Denial: A Crime Mystery Novel of Puerto Rico (2016) is billed as a YA novel but is suitable for adults too. A valuable animal has gone missing in the mountains of Puerto Rico. Detective Sergeant Antonio Ponce investigates the nasty world of animal trafficking in the Caribbean while encountering professional hit-men and Puerto Rican bureaucracy.
- The third book is Matthew Fearing’s Buck Larson series of adventure and mystery novels is En Mi Viejo San Juan: Adventure in Puerto Rico (2020). Larson is a Harley riding former Army investigator from Kansas City. Now he’s in San Juan to visit an old friend but finds himself in a new intrigue that has him working with the FBI on the island.
For some great crime and noir fiction mixed with a delicious history lesson on Puerto Rico – crime, corruption, and colonialism – and its tempestuous and rocky relationship with the United States of America Robert Friedman’s Puerto Rico trilogy is essential reading. The Odyssey of Pablo Camino (2019) is the first book, inspired by a real-life incident when an American doctor, is sent to Puerto Rico and later claimed in a letter that he purposely killed eight of his patients because of his disgust with the “natives.” In Friedman’s novel, the doctor’s fictional son, a well-known, but troubled Puerto Rican artist, goes on a search for the truth of his father’s possibly murderous past.
Book two, The Defining Sea (2019) continues Friedman’s mix of literary skills and historical weaving of fact and fiction. The plot is derived from the US Navy’s decades-long live fire and bombing exercises on the inhabited offshore Puerto Rico Island of Vieques, which has caused death and serious illness. The story told concerns a 20-year-old University of Puerto Rico student who delivers drugs between the island and the states to raise money for a scholarship that will be named after his girlfriend, killed by police during a protest against the Navy’s maneuvers. And finally Ulysses in San Juan (2019) tells the story of the relationship between a Jewish concentration camp survivor and a Puerto Rican female drug addict taking the reader on a trip into the San Juan underworld, as well to other island sites to meet crooked and upright and poignant and colourful characters. The Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the Cuban Revolution, and the Vietnam War all make cameo appearances.
Friedman’s books are a little like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – short novels about big and deep subjects. The three books of Puerto Rico trilogy are all novellas but dense in terms of facts and history making up for their length. Friedman was born in New York City but has lived in Puerto Rico for over 20 years, working as a reporter, editor and columnist for the San Juan Star and reporting from the island for the New York Daily News as the tabloid’s man in and around San Juan. Hard to imagine a better guide to the history and development, the crimes and underworld of this most fascinating of Caribbean locations.
And finally, we don’t mention the great and dearly departed Elmore Leonard enough in this column. So let’s add in Leonard’s Glitz (2012). After being shot by a mugger, Lt. Vincent Mora is convalescing in Puerto Rico. There he meets Iris, a beautiful young woman who is bored and frustrated, looking for excitement and a new life. Then she is offered a job as a ‘hostess’ at a casino in Atlantic City by Tommy Donovan. But Vincent figures out there is more to this job than Iris realises and he decides to pay Donovan a visit. To complicate matters, Iris isn’t the only one interested in Vincent – he is being stalked by a man he sent down seven and a half years before, a man out to get his revenge. Why has this not been made into a major film? (yea, I know there was a 1988 television film starring Jimmy Smits, but it wasn’t that good). Puerto Rico beaches and, well, we all know the kind of dodgy individuals who get involved in Atlantic City casinos! Rereading it recently I kinda felt Leonard novels and San Juan were two of a kind – originals and places you want to come back to repeatedly.
