DOUGLAS FAIRBAIRN – Street 8. Delacorte, hardcover 1977. Reprint paperback: Dell, 1978.

   Street 8 is Calle Ocho in Miami. Anti-Castro Cubans are everywhere. The white dudes are a dying breed. To keep his used car lot going, former Marine Bobby Mead hires a Cuban salesman to sell cars to the locals.

   One of the all time great first lines sets the scenario: “Afterwards, Bobby Mead kept thinking that he had known all along that Oscar Perez was going to get his head blown off.” Try to stop reading after that. I dare you.

   So, anyway, Bobby owns a used car lot. Has owned it for years. But now he’s barely making it, making the hire of Oscar Perez all the more necessary.

   Oscar starts out really well, very motivated, selling a ton. But then Oscar’s buddy gets rubbed out by the local Cuban “Death Squad”. The Death Squad gets rid of anybody who opposes Ramon Pache — a local politician who hopes to unite the Cuban vote behind him and take over Miami politics.

   Pache was a major right-wing political opponent of Castro in Cuba, and has used this past to leverage his political future in Miami. Pache has no interest in returning to Cuba and challenging Castro. But he uses anti-Castro sentiment as a tool to unify his political power. And anyone Pache’s Death Squad liquidates is automatically deemed to be a Castro-spy who deserved to die.

   When Oscar’s buddy gets killed, Oscar just can’t get over it. So Oscar starts shouting at all the customers, at all the passers by: “Pache! I hate you! I hate you!… I shit on your image! I will destroy you!”

   So, yeah. Hence the first line of the story.

   But if you think you know where it’s going from there, you’ve got another think coming (it’s never been ‘another thing coming’ — you just think it’s ‘another thing coming’ because of a Judas Priest song).

   Bobby Mead is a mess. He hasn’t given a shit about life ever since he screwed his 14 year old daughter. You read that right. Yup. Incest.

   Oh but don’t worry. His daughter’s 17 now, stars in amateur pornos, is a runaway, a prostitute, and a flower girl. And she tells him it’s fine. She wanted him to. It was the best sex she ever had. And for him too. He’s in love with her and doesn’t want anyone else.

   Yeah. Disgusting and disturbing. But Bobby Mead agrees with you. He hates himself. He agrees that he’s disgusting and disturbing.

   Bobby tries his hardest to drink himself to death. But it doesn’t seem to be happening quick enough.

   So when Pache makes an offer Bobby can’t refuse, converting Bobby’s garage into a bomb factory, Bobby agrees. But he doesn’t just say yes. He makes friends with the Death Squad guys (lead by another former Marine): True believers in the overthrow of Castro.

   But when the Death Squad discovers that Pache has no intention of overthrowing Castro — that he’s just leveraging anti-Castro sentiment for his own gains in money and power, they decide to go after Pache themselves. With Bobby leading the charge.

   The book is trey bizarro. Not in prose — the prose is straight and tight and hard and clear. But the story itself is literally incredible, as in not credible. But incredibly not credible, if that makes any sense. It’s not simply unbelievable. It pushes believability beyond a limit that somehow moves beyond its own unbelievability into a world where its lack of credibility hardly matters.

   To have incest in your novel is bad enough. But to have unrepentant incest, where the victim assures you that it’s okay, where the protagonist’s psychiatrist girlfriend, nonplussed, says ‘oh — no worries — it happens all the time’: that is simply astounding. Astoundingly tone deaf. But like a set of ginsu knives: Wait! There’s more! The incest isn’t even part of the story! It’s a side issue that’s never resolved. It’s just acknowledged that he fucked his daughter, years later they both look fondly upon the incident, and let’s move on to the story about the Cuban Death Squads.

   But I guess I can forgive it — because the incest thing I guess serves as a barely subconscious sublimation into alcohol fueled self-destruction as white American ex-Marine Bobby Mead leads an Anti-Castro Death Squad hunting hypocrites to the cause.

   Golly Jeepers, man. Whew.

   So I can’t recommend the thing. I can’t recommend anything that puts the incest taboo into question. Sorry. But I will say this. Douglas Fairbairn could really write.

   One example I’ll leave you with — and another side-track completely irrelevant to the story. But illustrative of just how talented this writer was. He can encapsulate a life in a sentence. A life sentence, you might say:

   
   So, yeah. Anybody that can write sentences like that ain’t all bad. He’s damn good, even. But the incest just killed me. I couldn’t handle it. Maybe you can handle it better than I. If you can, it’s a memorable book. Kind of Charles Willeford meets James Crumley. With some incest thrown in just for the fun of it.

   Another review here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1762