Steven Torres' serious, funny short stories

I once had a colleague who had been born in Puerto Rico and who would hold forth at the drop of a hat on race and ethnicity in America. In fact, he wouldn't wait for the hat to drop; he'd speechify whether his listeners wanted to hear him or not.

His saving graces were considerable intelligence and a bracing questioning of our industry's orthodoxy at a time when diversity was a corporate buzzword. He dismissed the Miami Herald's Spanish-language edition, for example, insisting that Latinos in the United States wanted to read and speak English.

I thought of this when reading one of Steven Torres' stories about Ray Cruz, the most dangerous man in New York City:

"The man holding Carver thought for a second, then started shouting in Italian again.

"`Speak English, maricon!' Ray roared. At the same time he pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the gunman’s right shoulder. He let go of Carver and went from crouching to sitting, and Ray Cruz took a step closer, put another bullet in the man’s chest, six inches below his chin."

That's humor about which could write a paper or at least rub one's chin thoughtfully after one got done laughing.

Another thing I like is Torres' juxtaposition of stories about Ray Cruz with others about a counterpart named Viktor Petrenko. Without providing too much of a spoiler, I'll say I read each as the flip side of the other, or else as contrasting perspectives on the moral destiny of men who do bad things.

(No, Torres says, he did not know when he wrote the Petrenko stories that there was a celebrated figure skater of the same name. There are no double Salchows or triple Axels in these stories, and the protagonist's landings are anything but smooth.)

*

Steven Torres is author of the Precinct Puerto Rico novels, The Concrete Maze, and the short-story collections Killing Ways, Killing Ways 2, The Box and Other Odd Stories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Steven Torres' crime fiction across cultural borders

I don't like to get too anthropological about crime fiction, and Steven Torres is a novelist, not a social scientist.  Still, Torres' position as a member of at least two worlds (he was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, moved back to Puerto Rico, then came back to New York) probably makes it easier for him to look across cultural borders and ask, "Why?" Here's one such bit from The Concrete Maze:

"`Why is cockfighting illegal?' he asked. `We eat chickens anyway.' I didn’t have an answer for him. In fact, I didn’t have a single word for him, but that didn’t stop him.”

That's not all there is to Torres in the almost two books of his I've read in recent days. More than most crime writers, Torres has his protagonists try to imagine what it's like to walk a mile in the other fellow's shoes. Here's a bit from Death in Precinct Puerto Rico:

"In her mind, he sat in a dejected state, as many prisoners sit in prison when they begin to feel what they have done." 

And, though his books are not comic, Torres' eye for detail in the fictional Puerto Rican town of Angustias will elicit smiles, as here when, out of space in the tiny station-house jail and the municipal office, Sheriff Luis Gonzalo has a deputy resort to an emergency alternative to hold a suspect:

"Vargas walked his man up the center aisle of the church, stopping to genuflect with his prisoner before the altar as he headed towards the back of the church where the offices were." 

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Steven Torres' worlds

Steven Torres' Concrete Maze is a revenge story with two nice twists: the point-of-view character is not the vengeance-seeker but rather his nephew, who both narrates the quest and describes its effect on his uncle. And the tale is no revenge fantasy. Rather, it offers a human and physical landscape (the Bronx and Manhattan) that feels real.

Here's one example I especially like:

"Finding a Carlos in Manhattan was like finding a Bob in Kansas."

The nephew-narrator is both an insider and an outsider, part of the quest for revenge but not its center. Torres' own circumstances may predispose him to such a narrative stance. He was born in the Bronx to parents who had come from Puerto Rico, then moved to a small town in Puerto Rico briefly before returning to New York. Torres acknowledges that the town is part of the background of his Precinct Puerto Rico series. More generally, I have to believe that moving between two worlds sharpens one's ability to both partake of and objectively observe those worlds.

(Torres talks about The Concrete Maze in an interview with Allan Guthrie.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012