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COLETTE BANCROFTAuthor Thomas Sanchez's latest novel spins a raucous yet philosophical tale of Cuba, with nightclub bombings and sinister police in "sunny places with shady characters."
From its first chapter, when the title character cruises down the Malecon at sunset in his Oldsmobile Rocket 88 convertible, headed for the Tropicana nightclub, King Bongo draws the reader into the sophisticated, sensual rhythms of Havana in 1957.
But King Bongo, dance-floor royalty and small-time private detective in a city on the brink of revolution, almost didn't get his own book.
Author Thomas Sanchez says, "Originally, King Bongo was going to be in Mile Zero," his acclaimed 1989 novel set in Key West. "But I already had a major Cuban-American character, and I was afraid of watering it down.
"Besides, King Bongo was so immense he was a novel unto himself."
Sanchez meant to write King Bongo back in 1989, right after he finished Mile Zero. But other projects intervened: a screenplay of Mile Zero for Francis Ford Coppola ("Like so many good projects, it's orbiting in the land of Hollywood development, that distant, dim universe") and his 2000 novel Day of the Bees.
But weeks after he finished that book he began King Bongo. It was published in April, and Sanchez will be reading from his Cuba novel tonight at Inkwood Books.
"A lot of people aren't aware of the history between Key West and Cuba and Tampa," he says, but as a former 12-year resident of Key West, he absorbed it from people he knew there and while he was growing up in California.
After living in France and Spain for several years, Sanchez is back in California, in his "home port" of San Francisco.
"The research for this book really goes way back to when I was a child," Sanchez says. "I went to a Catholic boarding school back in the '50s. There were lots of kids of lots of nationalities, and we were all brothers under the skin."
Living in South Florida, he heard a multitude of Cuban histories. "I knew people whose families had been cigar makers, I knew people whose grandfathers had fought with Jose Marti, and I knew people who had arrived from Cuba in the '80s, during the Mariel period, when 125,000 Cubans came through Key West. . . . from one of Batista's cooks to those who are true believers still in the Fidelista path to people in Miami who want him taken out yesterday."
Sanchez has visited Cuba twice in recent years, but he says King Bongo is not about "the current reality."
"What is the real Havana? It is a city of remembrances and dreams. It's a matter of personal experience and revisionist interpretation, a collusion of personal and historical facts.
"I wasn't writing about the real Havana but about Havana as a metaphor, about the mythology of a place."
That setting and the plot of King Bongo - nightclub bombings, missing women, sinister police, assassination plots and mysterious millionaires - lent themselves to a take on the '50s hard-boiled literary style.
"What I had in mind," Sanchez says, "is what the French call grand noir tropique. That's fiction of moral and philosophical bearing that takes place in sunny places with shady characters."
He mentions Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, Albert Camus' The Stranger, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles mysteries. "But I didn't want to just write in that style. I wanted to deconstruct that tradition for a modern audience."
Style is a pervasive element in the book, whether it's music, architecture or fashion. Havana in 1957 was "a high cultural moment. Even though it was occupied culturally and politically by America under Batista, there was a tremendous flourishing of the Cuban middle class.
"American arts and popular culture were at a zenith, whether it was automobiles, movies, fashion. Havana was already a profoundly sophisticated city. But it had that edgy sort of 1950s aura."
One of the enigmatic characters King Bongo tries to decipher is Mrs. Armstrong, a fabulously rich American beauty in the grand tradition of noir novels, the kind of woman Chandler famously described as "a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."
She hires King Bongo to spy on her ne'er-do-well husband, but there's more than a little chemistry going on between client and detective. A scene in which King Bongo accompanies Mrs. Armstrong to a luxury shoe store and watches a flirtation between her and the female clerk is so sexy it practically raises steam from the page.
"That came from a lifetime of seeing women eroticize the shoes they wear," Sanchez says. "I've been schooled in that well, by a lot of women in Paris, New York, San Francisco, all over.
"It's very difficult to write a scene like that, because you want to make it seem effortless."
Although King Bongo takes place on the eve of the Cuban revolution with "the bearded ones" offstage in the mountains, Sanchez says, "I consciously did not want to write a historical novel. Then you're in a box of thinking, would someone really have done this? And that's contrary to my notion of what fiction is. I want that burst of invention."
There are, though, a few characters clearly based upon real people, notably one who is called the bad actor. He's a swashbuckling middle-aged Hollywood star who raises hell all over town while staying at a plush hotel with his teenage lover. And he just might have something to do with the revolutionaries. Could he be anyone but Errol Flynn?
Sanchez laughs. "In the earliest drafts, it was Errol Flynn. But our whole idea of Errol Flynn is not nearly so preposterous as the real Errol Flynn. I switched it to not be Errol Flynn so I could make him even more like Errol Flynn."
Flynn's sex life was the origin of the phrase "in like Flynn," and in 1959 at age 50, he died in the arms of his 17-year-old lover, Beverly Aadland.
Flynn made his last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls, in Cuba during the revolution, with Fidel Castro's cooperation. Sanchez says, "You notice the title. It's not Cuban Rebel Women. Let's say it was a target of opportunity for Errol Flynn."
One of the scenes Sanchez reads at book signings involves the bad actor's seduction of a character called Broadway Betty, who responds to uncomfortable questions by belting out lines from show tunes.
"The first time I read that, as I was reading I realized, my god, I have to sing that. I had never sung in public before. It was like I was on a pirate ship, out on the gangplank. But I sang it.
"Someone told me afterward, "When you first started to sing I felt sorry for you, but by the time you sang the third tune you sounded pretty good.' "
When he's not on the road with King Bongo, Sanchez is working on an adaptation of his 1973 novel Rabbit Boss for an eight-hour television film.
"I'm working with Carroll Ballard, who directed The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf. It will be the 30th anniversary of the book," which is about four generations of people of the Washo Indian tribe.
But tonight he'll be reading about the rhythms of Havana. "One of the major things I wanted was to convey not only the cultural deprivation and segregation but the sense that it was a very heady time, a joyous outburst of life that was bigger than life.
"Not just the downbeat of that time, but the upbeat."
"King Bongo" by Thomas Sanchez, 310 pages, $25, is published by Alfred A. Knopf.
- Contact Colette Bancroft at bancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.
Thomas Sanchez will read from and sign King Bongo at 7 tonight at Inkwood Books, 216 S Armenia Ave., Tampa; (813) 253-2638.