Brian Gifford's Port Tropique

Brian Gifford is a US novelist best known for his association with cult film maker David Lynch. His fourth novel, Wild at Heart, was memorably, if repulsively, adapted for the screen by Lynch, from a screenplay co-written by him and Lynch. Gifford also co-scripted the 1997 Lynch cult favorite Lost Highway.

In 1980, long before his collaboration with Lynch, Gifford wrote the distinctive noir thriller, Port Tropique.

Through a series of brief snapshot chapters, most of which are flashbacks ranging through the protagonist's memories with relatively few carrying forward the story, such as it is, we learn about the life of Franz Hull, a writer living in the fictional Latin American nation of Port Tropique. He's there, as he tells a journalist visiting the country to cover an impending Communist revolution, to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin. When the journalist asks why he'd be writing about Franklin in Port Tropique, Frans gives a revealing answer:

"Gore Vidal wrote Burr in Rome. Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius in Majorca. Mary Renault wrote The Persian Boy in Cape Town. Sometimes the proper perspective is more easily attained from a distance."

This answer reveals Franz's major problem. He sees life through the funhouse mirror reflection of fiction. All the writers he mentions are historical fiction writers, using real events to weave compelling narratives that may not entirely be "real" or "true." For instance, I Claudius contains a plot where Livia conspires to poison Augustus, her husband and the first Emperor of Rome. No such plot really existed, in fact, little is known of the historical Livia. Yet, Graves invented the conspiracy to make the novel more compelling and to give the Livia character more of a presence in the story. Graves' storytelling was so believable that many believe the poisoning plot actually happened.

This is the curious half-real, half-imagined world that Franz Hull moves, or is it dreams? through, in Port Tropique. A world convincingly evoked with vivid, concrete descriptions of street life, as well as knowing descriptions of the country's political crisis. Although I'm reading a novel, the tone and feel of it remind me of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuczinski's books about revolutions in the developing world in the way that concrete fact is mixed with strong story telling.

All of this is very clever and witty, of course, but what does it have to do with a hardboiled story? Well, in the midst of all of this post modern game playing with narrative, there is a smuggling plot. Every few nights, Franz ventures to the dangerous Port Tropique water front with a suitcase. Various mysterious and disreputable characters pull into the harbor and fill the suitcase with bundles and bundles of money. Soon, he has more than two hundred thousand dollars in the suitcase. With the revolution waiting to explode, should he sit tight and wait for his criminal contacts to claim the money he's been holding for them, or should he simply run away with it?

A hard and all too real choice is to be made. A choice with deadly consequences. A choice that perhaps shouldn't be left with a person so distracted by narratives,a choice that would be better made by someone with a clear headed view of the crisis exploding around him.

Franz makes his choice and the consequences of this constitute the story that Port Tropique has to tell.

An interesting novel, as well as a puzzle. With many red herrings with the slightest hint of the shaggy dog tale thrown in. If nothing else, Port Tropique is one of the most memorable and radical of the hardboiled books.