Velvet Was the Night

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey. 304 pp. $28

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Throughout her career, the style-shifting novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia has demonstrated a remarkable ability to employ the tropes of genre fiction while simultaneously subverting and decolonizing them. Her 2020 bestseller "Mexican Gothic" takes on "Wuthering Heights" via H.P. Lovecraft, while "Untamed Shore," also out last year, nods to Patricia Highsmith and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Moreno-Garcia has written a vampire novel set in Mexico City, edited an award-winning anthology of Cthulhu Mythos stories by female writers, and, later in 2021, will publish a sword-and-sorcery novella. (She also writes a freelance column for The Washington Post with novelist Lavie Tidhar.)

"Velvet Was the Night," her riveting new noir, is an adrenalized, darkly romantic journey set during Mexico's Dirty War. The novel opens with the Corpus Christi Massacre or El Halconazo — "The Hawk Strike" — of June 10, 1971. On that day, thousands of student demonstrators took to the streets in Mexico City for a peaceful march, only to be attacked by los Halcones — the Hawks — a paramilitary group organized and trained by the CIA as part of the U.S. effort to suppress leftists and communists in Central America. Almost 120 demonstrators were killed.

"The chief requirement of a Hawk was he needed to look like a student so he could inform on the activities of the annoying reds infesting the universities," muses Elvis, a wiry, 21-year-old Hawk and onetime juvenile delinquent who admires the aristocratic mien of his suave boss, El Mago. Elvis admits that he doesn't like violence: In his free hours, he memorizes new words from the Illustrated Larousse dictionary and hangs out with a fellow Hawk, El Gazpacho, a cinephile who introduces him to Japanese film. Still, at the student demonstration, Elvis and the rest of El Mago's Hawks follow their boss's command to "grab any journalists, take their cameras, rough them up."

Elsewhere in the city, Maite, an unmarried, seemingly drab secretary about to turn 30, scans the titles of a newspaper stand for her favorite comic book, Secret Romance. "Love, frail as gossamer, stitched together from a thousand songs and a thousand comic books, made of the dialogue spoken in films and the posters designed by ad agencies: love was what she lived for." At night in her apartment, Maite feeds her parakeet, obsesses over the story lines in Secret Romance and teaches herself English from the Illustrated Larousse dictionary, all while playing music from her prized collection of vinyl, with Arthur Prysock's "Blue Velvet" in heavy rotation. (There's much amusing discussion of Maite's record collection within the book, and Moreno-Garcia provides a terrific playlist, spanning tracks from the Beatles to Los Hooligans.) By the end of Chapter Two, we know that she and Elvis are destined to meet — but how, and when?

Moreno-Garcia keeps us guessing, especially after Maite agrees to watch her neighbor Leonora's cat for several days. A rich art student who favors hippie garb, the beautiful Leonora resembles one of Secret Romance's heroines, only without the copious tears. When she doesn't show up as scheduled to reclaim her cat, Maite goes looking for her — not because Maite particularly cares about Leonora's fate, or the cat's, but because she wants to get paid for her pet-sitting gig.

"Velvet Was the Night" alternates between Maite's point of view and that of Elvis, as he and El Mago's Hawks embark on a sinister side job for their boss. This being classic noir, it's no spoiler to disclose that Maite and Elvis find themselves separately involved in a quest for the same woman and the same MacGuffin as they traverse Mexico City's rain-swept streets, crossing paths with leftists, journalists, commie priests, secret police, CIA and KGB operatives — and each other. After a glimpse of Maite, Elvis reflects that "to be honest he found her more interesting than Leonora. It was the eyes that did the trick. There was a spark of pain in them, there was shock and something cloudy and lost. As if she'd been dreaming, and had suddenly been awoken by the clapping of thunder. It made him curious."

Elvis broods on how this stranger with sad eyes reminds him of an illustration of Bluebeard's wife. Other allusions abound, especially cinematic ones: David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive," Julio Bracho's "Distinto amanecer," Carol Reed's "Odd Man Out," samurai movies and Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless."

But Moreno-Garcia always leaves her own indelible stamp on any seemingly familiar genre. Maite's swooning fantasies are offset by a bone-deep pragmatism: She knows that the heroines in Secret Romance are always saved by men with deep pockets. Reluctant tough guy Elvis is the one drawn to an unknown woman's gaze, "dark and deep, slightly lost and unfocused," and whose mundane act in the novel's final pages is as quietly courageous as it is romantic. "She was part of a story," Maite realizes at one point, though readers may feel that she's also part of the kind of yearning song you listen to in your room, alone, long after midnight — "Strangers in the Night," perhaps.