Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Fidel in fiction

Yesterday J. Kingston Pierce, editor of "The Rap Sheet," posted a very interesting item provoked by news that Fidel Castro is having health problems.

Pierce came up with a number of interesting crime novels in which Fidel has figured.

My nomination for the best novel in that category: James Ellroy's American Tabloid, maybe the best American novel of any kind published in 1995. In it, Fidel plays a sizable role, albeit offstage.

While not a crime novel, Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is one of better comic novels I've ever read. It brings home the (sizable) absurdist elements in the otherwise serious history of the English-speaking governments' interactions with Cuba.

--Marshal Zeringue