“No border town is anything but a border town.”
So says Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, describing his drive back from Tijuana early in The Long Goodbye. Like a lot of Marlowe quips, it’s both true and false. The town where he has just dropped his buddy Terry Lennox is a place that only exists because of the border, a transactional zone where everything is for sale. But Marlowe has spent the previous chapters carefully avoiding any question that would reveal his friend’s real purpose in going there, because he and we know what else the border represents: sanctuary, from the same law that Marlowe finds predictably waiting for him outside his apartment in an unmarked black sedan upon his return.
For fugitives, the border is the finish line in the race for freedom. And as the mystery of just what Terry Lennox was up to unfolds over the course of The Long Goodbye, we learn that the freedom represented by the border includes something deeper—the possibility of escape from the social and economic strictures of American life. The question of whether any of the characters can achieve that freedom is what gives The Long Goodbye its lasting power, and why the border provides such a powerful narrative engine in American crime fiction.
“Stay thirsty, my friends.” The idea of the Mexican border as the gateway to real freedom shows up all over American popular culture, from the earliest Westerns to contemporary beer commercials. It’s a line on the other side of which you are permitted to do things you can’t do here. Most importantly for the law and its targets, the border demarcates the end of one jurisdiction and the beginning of another. But it is also a frontier between cultures, languages, and climates. The liberty it represents in the American imagination is as Dionysian as it is juridical, and that deeper allure is always there at the edge of noir narrative—especially in crime novels primarily set in Southern California. Even a square like Perry Mason is seduced by the pleasures awaiting him on the other side whenever a case gives him a reason to do so. You can hear it in The Case of The Troubled Trustee, when he entices Della Street and Paul Drake to help him hunt down a client in Ensenada with a pitch that sounds like a Dos Equis ad: “a wonderful Mexican city, wonderful food, sweet lobsters, the caguama, or big turtle from the Gulf, enchiladas, chile con carne, refried frijoles, ice cold Mexican beer—”
In any crime story, borders are one of the easiest plot devices to deploy. They are the chalk lines on the playing field—the end zone for the criminal protagonist, and the out of bounds for the paladins of justice in pursuit. That finish line can anchor any kind of story that involves an effort to evade the law, and it can be any kind of border: the county line, the line between states, the land border with another country—not just Mexico, but Canada, and the coastal waters—or even the airport of some faraway country. It can have the intensely rugged landscape of Westerns, as a desert and river that can only be crossed at extreme peril, often on foot or on horseback, or it can simply be the vanishing point you drive to as fast as you can. The idea of it persists even in a globalized and electronically networked age in which the border crossing is a kiosk in a sterile airport—just ask Jason Bourne, or Edward Snowden. But the Mexican border is the one that plays the most powerful role in our crime fiction.
In Westerns, the Mexican border is geographically expressed, a frontier encoded in the land. Even when it has the clarity of a river to cross, the border reads more like a zone than a line, a wide, desolate terrain that changes slowly as the traveler passes through it, a territory in which it’s often hard to tell which side the cowboy or bandito is on. You have to penetrate it more deeply to find the real difference, as with Cormac McCarthy’s filibusterers marauding their way across northern Mexico in Blood Meridian or the wolf-shepherding boy of The Crossing. William Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have to go all the way to Bolivia to find the freedom the border represents from the reach of American law. The cultural differences are there in those stories—an escape from the Puritanical gaze into an exoticized Spanish Catholicism and postcolonial tropical languor. But it’s only with Prohibition that the line becomes more crisply drawn.
The outlawing of alcohol by the Eighteenth Amendment provided a much clearer definition to the border, defining the space in which a certain kind of pleasurable vice was permitted. The commercial activity associated with that vice is what really gave birth to the prototypical border town Marlowe is talking about, especially a town like Tijuana, which came into existence only after the new border was somewhat arbitrarily drawn in the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, and grew into a kind of Mexican Vegas during Prohibition. The border’s redefinition as the place you have to go to exercise your more libertine liberties gave the border’s legal line a much sharper cultural and moral resonance.
For the writers of the pulp era, the run for the border was a part of everyday life, a possibility that was always there, with a pull that persists well into the postwar era and takes on added dimension. You can really feel it in stories like The Long Goodbye, a story all about blackout drunks, including a fictional novelist with whom one assumes the real one felt a close kinship. Terry Lennox does more than escape the reach of the law. He escapes the reach of the social realities that have turned him into who he is. When he finally reappears, altered by plastic surgery, he has even crossed the line of ethnic identity—an escape that Chandler suggests is more transgressive than the earlier escape from the law. Chandler’s stories are full of characters who assume new identities in California after leaving some more repressive town back in the American Heartland, but Terry Lennox takes it to a different level by marring his American identity with a scalpel.
That idea of California as borderzone of identity takes on new meaning in the hands of Walter Mosley. Mosley shows us the noir streets of postwar Los Angeles through the eyes of Easy Rawlins, a Black combat veteran for whom L.A. represents an escape from a different type of cultural oppression—the Jim Crow-era racism of his native Houston. In Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley deftly tethers the L.A. experience of of Rawlins and his fellow Texpats to the world they left behind, and shows us Easy’s evolution from mortgage-bound factory worker to self-determining private detective through his courageous navigation of the lines of racial identity and segregation in their myriad permutations. In the process, Rawlins helps us more clearly see the colonial reality of California, in a way otherwise sharply observant fictional detectives like Marlowe are blind to.
Contemporary white writers of Southern Californian crime fiction also take the borderzone in different directions. In his L.A. Quartet, James Ellroy pierces the border between the Hollywood version of LAPD and its real but secret history, revealing the lies hidden behind the badge, the deep corruption and violent abuses of power that maintain American power over a conquered population, precinct by precinct. Michael Connelly is more generous in his portrayal of the law, at least as personified in homicide detective Harry Bosch, whose second adventure in The Black Ice takes him across the border into cartel land. But in a much later book, The Crossing, Bosch crosses a very different border—the border between law enforcement and criminal defense—and learns what the machine of the state is like from the perspective of its innocent victims.
In his masterful narco-novels, Don Winslow shows us the contemporary evolution of the U.S.-Mexico border into the DMZ of a different kind of prohibition, one characterized by extreme brutality, Orwellian surveillance, and variations of vice that would make Chandler blush. Winslow’s books are business novels of the border, about the entrepreneurs in the symbiotic trafficking operations that exist on both sides—the banned narcotics that come from the Mexican side, and the illegal guns that come from the American side. And the freedom those entrepreneurs find in the borderzone is something much darker than their gin-soaked predecessors: the freedom to increase your market share through paramilitary violence, whether you are the special ops potheads of Savages or the cartel jefes of the Border trilogy.
The power of the border as cultural looking glass through which characters pass becomes more evident in stories about that passage by Mexican and Mexican-American writers. In Yuri Herrera’s beautifully written Signs Preceding the End of the World, a young Mexican woman, having mastered the art of survival in her narco-run town, crosses over into the U.S. to search for her brother and finds an even scarier place—a realm where spectacular mirage masks the repressive violence, and the price of economic opportunity is the loss of identity, dignity, and real freedom. For Mexican noir novelist Francisco Haghenbeck, California is where the real horror lies—in his popular novel El Diablo Me Obligo (The Devil Made Me Do It, adapted for Netflix as Diablero), L.A. is the domain of demons. In the Texas writer Fernando Flores’s dystopian Tears of the Trufflepig, the borderzone is the place where capitalism is free to invent new modes of exploitation, like genetic engineering and the trafficking in endangered species as fine dining.
The use of the border to represent the dystopian qualities of the U.S. is most intensely depicted in the filmmaker Alex Rivera’s cyber-noir Sleep Dealer, in which American companies enforce their control of the Mexican water supply with armed drones, and the underclass of Tijuana have to buy back-alley cyborg enhancements in order to get work remotely operating construction robots in San Diego from info-maquilas on the Mexican side. When one guilt-ridden Mexican-American drone pilot decides to cross the border in search of his victims, he has to endure his own robotic interrogation at the last armored checkpoint, and realizes that the real purpose of the border wall through which he must pass is to keep people in—on the American side.
Rivera’s dystopian border wall is not that much of an exaggeration of the real one, at least as it exists at the main crossing between San Diego and Tijuana. Even in a year of borders closed by a global pandemic, the idea of walls between countries seems like a medieval solution to a problem more effectively solved by 21st century means, and its persistence reveals that Rivera is onto something—something Chandler was onto as well, even if he may not have been as self-aware about it, and something Winslow shows us in all its dimensions. The enforcement of the border is not so much about keeping contraband and people out, as it is about performatively asserting the existence of that border as unbreachable demarcation of identity.
For writers like Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner, and even their contemporary heirs like Winslow and Connelly, the very act of novel writing was an escape across the border of convention from more existentially confining jobs in business and law, and the idea of the crossing had a deeper appeal than its easy availability as an ever-ready plot device. Marlowe’s complicated bromance with Terry Lennox before and after his crossing encodes something about the complicated relationship we all have with our own self-conceptions. You can see it in the slow transformation of Winslow’s DEA agent Art Keller into an authentically bicultural figure over the course of three novels that span decades on both sides of the border. In all their pulpy permutations, our crime novels of the borderzone show us a truth hiding in plain sight—that the border is a tangible embodiment of the ways we allow our identities to be contained by society, and the crossing is not just the fugitive’s path to sanctuary, but the buttoned-up American’s path to an existential liberty society tricks us into believing we already have.
