Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, famous for its Pueblo-style adobe architecture, rich history, and vibrant art scene. The cultural capital of the Southwestern United States but still with Native American and Spanish touches. Something I did not know! Santa Fe is the oldest and highest capital city in the U.S., at 7,200 feet and founded in 1610, which (for the USA) is seriously old. Gotta be some good crime writing going on….
As ever I like to start with an older and a goodie set in the area. The great Dorothy B Hughes (In a Lonely Place, Ride the Pink Horse) wrote the lesser known The Blackbirder in 1943. Lesser known but certainly not lesser good.
Julie Guilles is in trouble. She’s fled her home in Occupied France for a seedy neighborhood in New York and has been laying low—but not low enough. Because now she has the Gestapo, the FBI and her shady Uncle, the Duc de Guille, all on her tail, and her options are running out.
Whispers of the Blackbirder reach her—a sinister figure who, for the right price, can promise safe passage across the border to New Mexico. Finding the Blackbirder is her only chance of escape—but what if the Blackbirder doesn’t want to be found? It’s atmospheric, very New Mexico and as dark as all Hughes’s other work. She really is, as the New York Review of Books has said, the equal of Chandler and Highsmith, and deserves more recognition.
Up to date and on the local scene James C Wilson’s Fernando Lopez Santa Fe Mysteries is an eleven-book series features Detective Fernando Lopez, a member of an old Santa Fe family. The series often delves into the city’s cultural and ethnic complexities and starts with Peyote Wolf (2020) with a man in a wolf mask bursts into a teepee in the middle of a sacred ritual, a peyote ceremony, and kills Michael Soto, the owner of Sabado Indian Arts on the Santa Fe Plaza.
The series continues with murders at the annual Santa Fe Fiesta, out at the old Taos art colony nearby, dead local artists, sex trafficking and finally, in book eleven Witchcraft Murders (2024) the bodies of two women are found naked and wrapped in white sheets like mummies outside the Cerrillos Hills State Park Visitor Center. Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Journalism at the University of Cincinnati and lived in Santa Fe during the turbulent 1970s writing for the Santa Fe newspapers. He has lived in Albuquerque since 2012.
Stuart Woods’s Ed Eagle four-book series features six-foot-seven, take-no-prisoners Santa Fe criminal attorney Ed Eagle. In Santa Fe Rules (2009) successful movie producer Wolf Willett is stunned when he sees his own death reported in the newspaper. It says he was a victim in a triple homicide during a sordid tryst with his wife and a friend.
But who is the unidentified corpse? Why can’t Wolf remember anything about the night in question? And who wants him dead? Of course he’s arrested and needs Ed Eagle’s help.
In Short Straw (2007) Eagle gets cleaned out—emotionally and financially – by the woman he thought was the love of his life and he’s got a new client: Joe Big Bear, a part-time mechanic charged with a triple homicide. In Santa Fe Dead (2008) Ed’s got a new client, Don Wells, who may or may not have murdered his own wife and son.
And finally Santa Fe Edge (2011) deep dives Santa Fe’s dark side of murder, corruption, or organized crime to maybe discover something equally dark in Ed Eagle’s own past.
Another series set in and around Santa Fe is Michael Mcgarrity’s Kevin Kerney novels. In Tularosa (1996), “the place of reddish willows” in Spanish, Kevin Kerney thinks he may discover his past and his future. Kerney is ex-chief of detectives in the Santa Fe Police Department, shoved into early retirement by a shot-up leg. He works with Navajo Indian Terry Yazzi, his ex-partner whose son is missing, reported AWOL from the high-security White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico.
There’s fourteen novels in Mcgarrity’s series taking kerney from investigating a multi-million-dollar art theft from New Mexico’s state capitol building, uncovering crooked cops, digging into cold cases, homophobic killings and a side trip to the harsh desert and high mountain country of southwestern New Mexico. Mcgarrity certainly knows the world of which he writes—he worked as a Santa Fe County deputy sheriff, he worked as a patrol officer, training and planning supervisor, community relations officer, and was the lead investigator of the sex crimes unit, which he established.
Additionally, he taught courses at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy, served as a caseworker and investigator for the Public Defender’s District Office, and conducted investigations for a state government agency.
And one last Santa Fe series—this time historical—Amanda Allen’s four-book Santa Fe Revival Mysteries. In book one, Santa Fe Mourning (2018) Madeline Vaughn-Alwin’s picture-perfect life fades to gray when her childhood sweetheart perishes in the Great War. The aspiring painter leaves her wealthy New York family behind to travel across the country and start over in California.
But when Maddie reaches Santa Fe, New Mexico, she halts her westward journey, certain she’s found her new home amid the striking scenery and inspiring artistic community. She soon gets wrapped up in intrigue.
A Moment in Crime (2018) sees cinema come to New Mexico and movie fever when director Luther Bishop arrives for the filming of his new cowboy flick. But big trouble when the detestable director is found hanging in his office. In Death Comes to Santa Fe (2023) Madeline encounters murder during the city’s annual Fiesta and a dead body in a nearby arroyo.
And finally in Murder at the Hacienda (2024) Madeline finds herself trapped in the beautiful hacienda of the Luhan family with a killer at Christmas!
So one thing Santa Fe does not lack is crime series. Now for some stand alones and one-off visits to the city….
- A genre that is, I admit, unrepresented in Crime and the City is the romance-crime hybrid. Let’s show some balance then with book one in Zizi Hart’s Sizzling Cities series about sexy law enforcement heroes and the women they protect at all costs from a criminal drug empire. Santa Fe Seduction (2024) features Mari Miller who travels to Santa Fe desperate for answers to the mysterious death of her brother. The Santa Fe PD have deemed it an accidental overdose, but she refuses to believe it. Cruz Diaz, the arrogant, and sexy bartender of Club Cuervo may hold the answers. Of course they solve crime and romp around a bit between the sheets. The other two books in the series hit Alburquerque and St Louis.
- Myron Berd’s Santa Fe Deception (2022) sees psychologist Scott Hunter leaving Santa Fe after a bad divorce. But now he’s back to help solve the murder of her subsequent second husband Blake Martin, the man with whom she cheated on Scott. In Santa Fe, Scott reconnects with Miguel Montez, a detective with the Santa Fe PD to combine Scott’s understanding of psychopathic behavior and Miguel’s sleuthing abilities.
- And a New Mexico set YA novel, Al Arthur’s The Santa Fe Sleuths (2024). In the heart of Santa Fe in 1995 brothers Max and Theo Delgado are no ordinary teens—they’re budding detectives. When a beloved mural disappears from a historic plaza overnight, the brothers are pulled into a case that has the entire city talking. Was it stolen? Destroyed? Or is something more sinister at play?
And finally, back to the eighteenth century—The King’s Lizard: A Tale of Murder and Deception in Old Santa Fe (2012, and The Lizard Tales Book 1) by Pamela Christie. Christie began writing among the tomato plants in her greenhouse in Northern New Mexico in the mid 1970s. And eventually completed the three Lizard Tales in 2000.
It’s 1782 in New Mexico and slavers are operating ruthlessly throughout the colony. Apaches and Comanches battle with Spanish militias to protect their homelands. Governor Anza, at his wits’ end, commandeers the help of Nando, a naïve but wily young mixed-race man, embedding him in his network of spies.
Dead Lizard’s Dance is the second Lizard Tale (2012). Three deaths near the village of Santa Fe are seemingly unrelated, except they are so gruesome they just could be the work of witches. Governor Anza begs Nando to return to dampen the witch fear building in town; all very well except one of the women he is supposed to hunt down may be his own girlfriend. And who killed the prostitute, and then the caravan master, who seems to own half the town?
And finally Lizard’s Kill (2015). It’s now 1788 in the Kingdom of New Mexico and the question is who will be first to plunder New Mexico’s treasure? And who will they murder to get rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Santa Fe is a town steeped in history, a long history by US standards and its crime writing ranges from Pamela Christie’s eighteenth-century tales to the present day. Pueblos, adobe, the Spanish and the settlers—all are here!
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