If anyone has the stomach for covering a major news story in a place where not even journalists are safe, it’s Joe Gannon. Gannon worked as a freelance journalist in Nicaragua and El Salvador from 1984 until 1990. He wrote for the Christian Science Monitor and other major newspapers, reporting on a violent and historic time in Central America.
So his response to my question—“What’s you’re reaction to journalists getting beheaded in Syria?”—is noteworthy.
“I would never go to Syria! It ain’t worth it!” Gannon blurted, emotion catching in his throat. “I watched that video of [freelance journalist and New Hampshire native] James Foley’s beheading. It was frightening. It’s a much more dangerous world today. When I was overseas, an American passport offered a certain shelter. Today, it gets you beheaded.”
We were talking about Gannon’s debut novel, the Night of the Jaguar, which takes place in Managua in 1986. Without spoiling it for you, let’s just say the world Gannon paints in his book isn’t particularly hospitable for American journalists—or anyone else. Still, as he compared his own adventures as foreign war correspondent with what he knows journalists in places like Syria face today, he revealed a kind of humility I wasn’t quite expecting.
That sense of humility, that understanding that even the bravest badasses among us are ultimately human and therefore vulnerable, surely informed Gannon’s creation of the protagonist in Night of the Jaguar, Captain Ajax Montoya.
If, to be a really successful detective novelist, a writer needs a really great protagonist, Gannon hit pay dirt with Montoya; indeed, his publisher, Minotaur Books, gave him a two-book deal based in large part on the appeal of the central character. And no wonder: Gannon’s protagonist is, in the rich tradition of the genre, one compellingly fucked-up dude.
A former journalist and longtime Valley resident who teaches Language Arts in the Springfield Public Schools, Gannon told me that the inspiration for his protagonist was Nicaraguan revolutionary Omar Cabezas, a commander in the Sandinista guerrilla war against the Somoza dynasty and a prominent Sandinista party member. Over the desk where he wrote his novel, Gannon said, he hung the cover art from Cabezas’ Fire From the Mountain, a best-selling personal account of his days as a guerrilla.
Initially, I tried to resist getting involved with Night of the Jaguar. Gannon, who’s published a number of pieces in the Valley Advocate over the years, had sent me an invitation to his Sept. 10 book release party at Broadside Books in Northampton, so my curiosity about Night of the Jaguar was already piqued when a rumpled manila envelope showed up on my desk a few days later. I opened it quickly, just to see that I was right in guessing I’d find Gannon’s book inside. When that’s exactly what I found, I tossed the 306-page hardbound volume aside, tried to ignore it. For more than an hour, I turned my attention to other matters, but the book and the fact that I knew the author nagged at me.
Part of my reluctance in cracking the book came from knowing about Gannon’s background as a journalist. As much as I’ve enjoyed reading Gannon’s contributions to the Advocate and other local newspapers—enjoyed reading him in large part because he is a lively writer with strong opinions, which he delivers without flinching—I worried that his move from foreign war correspondent and political writer into fiction might result in a heavy, preachy history of CIA misadventures in Central America and the failure of most fat and happy Americans to give a damn.
But I finally yielded to temptation, and that’s when I met Captain Montoya, a former comandante in the Sandinista revolution, now a heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, insomnia-ridden policeman:
“He’d been up for five straight nights reading his thesaurus and smoking one Marlboro Red after another. It was all he had left now—now, nowadays, at the present time, currently. He’d been stone-cold, cold-turkey sober for five days. And that was maybe the biggest pain in the ass he’d had since he was last sober. Four years ago, almost to the day. His impulsive sobriety was accompanied, not surprisingly, by an inability to sleep or to fight off that parched inner voice—demon, fiend!—constantly begging, demanding, imploring Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Gimme just the one drink! Which was why he had taken up reading the goddamned thesaurus all night long in the first place.”
As it turns out, Night of the Jaguar is a fast-paced, entertaining book from beginning to end. Montoya is a wonderfully drawn character, worth mentioning in the same breath as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux and Dennis Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie. At no point did I feel Gannon forcing my eyes open to all that I failed to learn about Nicaraguan politics when Ronald Reagan was in office and Iran-Contra topped the news. Instead, I felt myself following Montoya into a lush and broken place where the line between sanity and madness seems in constant flux.
When I spoke with Gannon later, I began to realize not just how long Gannon had been working on his debut novel—he actually started it in 1990, after leaving Nicaragua, and only rediscovered the manuscript in 2011 when he found himself in an MFA writing program with a bad case of writer’s block—but also the staggering amount of writing and rewriting that went into it.
Here again, Gannon showed notable humility, heeding suggestions from friends he enlisted to read the book in progress. When, for example, he loaded up an early draft with “a 40-page section of historical context on Nicaragua,” Gannon said, his mentor, author Sterling Watson, told him it “was a crime against humanity and to never do it again.” Recognizing his “rookie mistake,” Gannon tossed the 40 pages.
Gannon said he also received pointed criticism from local author Matt Rigney, a close friend and the author of In Pursuit of Giants: One Man’s Global Search for the Last of the Great Fish.
“At one point,” Gannon told me, “Matt sent me a single line of critique: ‘Montoya sounds pissy.’ I was trying to have him sound tough, but Matt thought he sounded pissy. I ended up rewriting nearly every line of [Montoya’s] dialogue in the book.”
Gannon was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin, a town in the thick middle of southeastern Massachusetts that he describes as “a little mayonnaise and white bread suburb of Boston.” He’s lived in Northampton off and on since 1980, when he came to UMass after a stint in the Army. His affection for the area runs deep.
“I was in Abu Dhabi for two years until 2013 and I did not fully realize the stunning beauty of this place until I returned from the desert,” he said.
But his view of Northampton is complicated. He said he often finds the Valley “a little stifling, a little too correct—like my protagonists, I like rough edges, rough characters and rough situations, those which cannot be smoothed over.” In a letter to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, he recently wrote, “There is something wibbly-wobbly and namby-pamby about living in this Valley where every living creature is supposed to get through life without ever being inconvenienced by the glorious messiness of it all.”
But, Gannon said, “I am lucky to be living here while I am beginning what I hope is a long writing career.”
Indeed, after a second Ajax Montoya thriller, which is due to his publisher later this year, Gannon has plans for a historical crime-fiction work set in Northampton in 1925.
Earlier in our conversation, Gannon told me he felt he was mainly done with journalism when he left Central America in 1990. As we finished our talk, I asked if he feels able to get at truths in detective fiction that eluded him as a journalist.
“Detective fiction can be very political,” Gannon said. Fictional detectives like Montoya, he said, “can travel seamlessly through all social classes and see the good, but usually the bad, in all classes. The detective in crime fiction is always the character whose moral compass points true north—no matter their own personal failings.”
