Jimmy Burns

Created by Charles Portis
(1933-2020)

“Christmas again in Yucatán. Another year gone and I still scratching around this limestone peninsula.”

Best known for his classic (and bestselling) Western, 1968’s True Grit, genre-hopping author Charles Portis never quite got around to writing a private eye novel.

But 1991’s character-driven, tongue-in-cheek Gringos comes awfully close.

JIMMY BURNS is an ex-pat Yankee slacker, a pirate looking at forty, a picaro living in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, doing odd jobs to get along: driving a truck, playing half-ass archeologist, and tracking down missing Americans who have gone astray — whatever it takes to remain “the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers.”

Kirkus Reviews likened him to Travis McGee, for Jimmy’s knack for “salvag(ing) lives, especially the many good-hearted, empty-headed spiritual pilgrims who hope to find the mysteries of the universe revealed among the Mayan ruins.”

So, Jimmy may not be a private eye, per se, but he’s also no dope — he’s got a keen and wary eye for the eccentricities of his fellow gringos, a sometimes wild bunch of zonked out hippies,  UFO freaks, New Age lotus eaters and conspiracy theorists, true believers, Mormons who’ve wandered off their mission, scam artists and their gullible victims, and yes, teenage runaways.

(Teenage runaways. What would the Shamus Game be without them?)

But Jimmy’s chill lifestyle is upended when he realizes he’s being stalked by a UFOlogist named Louise, a sudden influx ex-pat cult members in the thrall of an ex-con biker-turned-guru, and a group of tomb raiders intended on digging up Mayan artifacts.

At various times, it reminded me of Night Moves, and Carl Hiassen, in its sprawling cast of oddball characters, all narrated in first person, in a voice fans of Chandler willinstantly find familiar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Portis was best known for his classic Western True Grit , which was made (TWICE!) into a major feature film, but more than that, he was just a great writer, merrily hopping from genre to genre, recognized by The Library of America ” as asingular American genius, a writer whose deadpan style, picaresque plots, and unforgettable characters have drawn a passionate following among readers and writers.” He served in the US Marine Corps during the Korean War and then attended the University of Arkansas. As a reporter, he wrote for the New York Herald Tribune and was also its London bureau chief. His first novel, Norwood (1966) was followed by True Grit (1968),  The Dog of the South (1979),  and Masters of Atlantis (1985). Gringos (1991) was his final novel..

THE EVIDENCE

• “The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep in the earth and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated. Then they covered it up again.”

UNDER OATH

• “The double-talk of the cultists is expertly filtered through Portis’s lean and muscular prose, and the plot’s as tight as a blood-swollen tick. All in all, totally boss fiction.”
  — Kirkus Reviews
• “Beneath all that, however, what truly drives Gringos is pure love — Mr. Portis’s love for his characters, for Mexico, for all the magnificent eccentricities and pathos and comedy of both…. If Gringos stops to explore one slough too many from time to time, or to chase a folly farther afield than it really ought to, or to take one more elaborate stitch in the thin cloth of the plot than the fabric can stand, forgive it.”
  — Robert Houston (The New York Times)
• ^]“Gringos is Portis’s subtlest, funniest, and most valuable novel for its depth of inarguable wisdom.”
  — Wells Tower (GQ)

NOVELS

• Gringos (1991) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• Down in Mexico
  Mexican Eyes

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.