Port Tropique

It was a dark and stormy night. In the banana republic of Port Tropique guns, money, sex, power, and politics are shuffled slicker than a Vegas blackjack dealer. All the dames have red lips and cold eyes and cruise the bar without leaving their seat. The men wear panamas drawn down over their eye and speak in grated muffles. The local authorities are unwashed louts and everything is sweat and heat and panting in the dark. It's every ginjoint in every movie in the world rolled into one little book with nothing to do with Ben Franklin. Great for a Saturday afternoon.

Barry Gifford is a poet (in fact) with a will to communicate. He drew each chapter as an artist, framing his stalled antihero with keen intelligence. We have become so saturated with standardized images and imagined protocol among gangsters/CIA bagmen/gun runners that it takes an author of rare imagination to write immediate prose that pulls us from the cookie-cutter version, back into the human mind. I've lent this book to many friends and they all raved, except the last one, who failed to return it. I wish he or she would deliver the goods.