An Interview with Lewis Shiner on DARK TANGOS
Lewis Shiner’s latest novel Dark Tangos is a taut thriller about the dance, Argentina, and the darkest aspects of politics and the human condition. Advance praise has been building, with excellent reviews in already from Publishers Weekly and Booklist (a starred review). recently released it in an edition of 1,000 signed, cloth bound hardcover copies. At this point, fewer than 100 copies are in stock.
Gwenda Bond caught up with Lew recently to talk about the book.
Gwenda Bond: The settings of your novels have ranged from Mars to Mexico, but your last few books have been set in the U.S. What brought you to Buenos Aires for Dark Tangos? Had you traveled there?
Lewis Shiner: My partner and I started going to Buenos Aires in 2004 to study tango, and we loved the place. I think it was on our third trip, in 2006, that we happened to stumble into a photo exhibit dedicated to the Dirty War—the Dirty War being the violent repression carried out by the junta that ruled Argentina from 1976-1983 with death squads, kidnapping, and torture. It’s where the word “disappeared” as a noun comes from. That exhibit was where I first learned that torturers had taken newborn babies from their victims and raised them as their own. I thought, “This is big. This is very big.” That same trip, the government finally began putting some of the Dirty War henchmen on trial, with the result that the main prosecution witness in the very first trial was “disappeared,” just like in the old days. That happened while we were there, and that also was incredibly dramatic. Those two ideas were the seeds of the book.
GB: Even early on, it’s clear that the recently-relocated main character Rob Cavenaugh’s fascination with tango is going to bring him into the dangerous history of politics in Argentina. How much of the political situation in the story is based in reality?
LS: The political situation is all real. I changed names and created composite characters to protect the guilty and to give myself some dramatic breathing room, but the background is based in fact. For example, the witness I was just talking about was named Jorge Julio López. It would have been just plain wrong to use this real person as a character in my novel, so I created a second kidnap victim, Marco Suarez, whom I could freely implicate in some dirty business back in the ‘70s.
I don’t think of myself as a terribly creative person. It’s easier for me to go back to my research and model things on history than to try to invent out of whole cloth. History is full of the kinds of surprises and contradictions that give a feeling of depth to a novel.
GB: This novel has elements of many different genres—it could be looked at as a thriller or a crime novel but also as a (harrowing, admittedly) romance, centered on the relationship of Rob and the woman he meets, Elena. Was that intentional?
LS: I admit that I like to pile on the genre conventions. The overall structure of Dark Tangos fits the Graham Greene-style suspense novel, where the innocent abroad gets into political hot water. There’s also a whodunit aspect and, as you correctly note, a strong romance thread.
When I first started looking for a scaffolding for the plot, I thought of the classic film noir, like Double Indemnity or Body Heat—woman lures gullible guy into nefarious plot, but instead of wanting him to murder her husband, it’s her stepfather. I eventually got away from that simplistic structure, but I did keep the romance element. I wanted to pull a gender switch, though, making the male vulnerable and innocent and the woman the one with the deep, dark secret, the agonizing conflicts, the desire to push the hero away “for his own good.” She’s Mr. Rochester and he’s Jane Eyre.
GB: Finally, what is it about the tango that sets it apart from other dances for you?
LS: Tango depends less on patterned movement than any other dance I know. To dance tango properly, you are not only supposed to respond to what the instruments are doing, you are supposed to meditate deeply on the lyrics—or on the mood, if it’s an instrumental. You are a pen, and the tango writes itself on the dance floor through your movement, and especially the movement of your partner, because you are always thinking of how you want her to move and not of yourself.
Generally the lyrics are about heartbreak, betrayal, suffering, and death. So instead of the joy you can see in salsa or Lindy Hop, tango allows you to feel thoroughly miserable even while you are holding an attractive companion in your arms and moving sensually to beautiful music. And, at the same time, take pleasure in your pain.
That’s why it’s the national dance of Argentina.