Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel, Velvet Was the Night, set in 1970s Mexico City is a historical fiction, noir romance. Moreno-Garcia captures the escalating violence between Mexico’s government and protesters setting a chaotic and frenzied backdrop for this crime novel that finds detectives in the unlikeliest characters.
The story is a dual narrative told from the perspective of two antiheroes: Maite, an unhappy secretary living vicariously through romance comics, and Elvis, a misfit criminal turned hit man working for secret police to suppress protesters. It is impossible to place this novel in any one genre or mode of storytelling and it is equally impossible to put this novel down as it slowly unfolds with revealed secrets and plot twists you will never see coming.
The novel starts with a protest infiltration gone wrong; Elvis and the organization he works for are meant to stir up violence amid a protest, disrupting the protesters and deterring further demonstrations. The violence escalates beyond what was intended and this starts Elvis’ storyline of having to lie low and stay hidden.
Elvis himself is obsessed with rock’n’roll music and has given himself his name, after the king of rock’n’roll. He is equally dedicated to strict routines and personal growth which he achieves through word’s of the day to increase his vocabulary. While staying hidden, Elvis gets tasked with quietly finding a missing girl, Leonora. He has little to no information to go from and thus his investigative career begins. He infiltrates secret student protest groups, encounters Russian spies, and ultimately gets led to Maite.
Maite leads a quiet and lonely life as a single secretary in her 30s. She has one friend, a coworker, a nagging mother who openly favors her older sister, and a pet bird. Maite daydreams about romance, burying herself in romantic comic books, and spends all her money on her record collection.
Maite also has a penchant for stealing small trinkets and objects of little use. Known in her apartment for always being around, she often house sits and pet sits for neighbors to make extra money to accommodate her spending problem and this is what connects her to Leonora. On short notice, Leonora comes to Maite urgently and begs her to watch her cat while she is out of town. Maite thinks she will be watching the cat for a weekend and paid for her time shortly after, but, when Leonora doesn’t return, Maite begrudgingly seeks her out so she can be relieved of the burden of cat sitting and get her money. Maite is forced into investigating what has happened to Leonora for personal reasons and only continues with the investigation after meeting the handsome men in Leonora’s life. With these impure intentions, Maite is thrown into a dramatic and thrilling search that she had only ever daydreamed about prior.
The novel pivots around the search for this missing Leonora, a mysterious woman whose secret connections and family background prove key to the major reveals that unfold and keep you guessing as you read. This is what also brings Maite and Elvis together; in his search for Leonora, Elvis becomes obsessed with Maite and imagines himself as her boyfriend. Moreno-Garcia’s creation of these Latinx characters and their unconventional love story refuses to fall into tropes, skillfully avoiding cliches and stereotypes, while at the same time producing dynamic and flawed Latina/o/x depictions.
It is difficult to dissociate Moreno-Garcia’s writing in Velvet Was the Night from her writing in Mexican Gothic and I found myself looking for connections across these disparate texts. The distinct nature of Moreno-Garcia’s writing when looking from novel to novel is a testament to her expertise in storytelling.
Her novels couldn’t be more different, but one constant in Velvet Was the Night and Mexican Gothic was an attention to historic details. Moreno-Garcia builds the reality of her settings through acute attention to the accuracy of her tales. The story world of Velvet Was the Night is created through a variety of pop culture references that allow the reader to fully immerse in this setting, adding texture, sound, and visual aspects to two dimensional pages. For instance, Elvis’ fascination with rock’n’roll music comes to life in the form of a Spotify playlist included at the end of the novel. A reader can listen to the music of the main characters and, in doing so, the book takes on an auditory lens not usually considered in standard novel conventions. The novel also takes on direct reference to comic books actually published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you are like me, you’ll go and google these publications and get to see the colorful world of Maite’s imagination.
Moreno-Garcia builds her historical fiction novel in large part through these pop culture references, but the hyper realistic aspects of this novel become most evident in her reference to comic books. Maite is obsessed with romance comics and is depicted consuming them throughout the novel; her favorite being Secret Romance. She impatiently awaits the weekly installments of the comic and uses the action of the romance comics to color in her own absent social life. She lies to friends and family, claiming the plot points as activities and dates that she engaged in.
Maite incorporates the comic book stories into her life so thoroughly that at times she cannot remember whether an event was something she read or something she had daydreamed herself. The comic book stories become inseparable from her own life and imagination. Maite reads Lágrimas y Risas, recalling the story lines she enjoyed. She looks for Susy: Secretos del Corazón when the newsstand doesn’t have the latest issue of Secret Romance and ends up buying a Cosmopolitan while looking at the latest headline of the publication Excélsior detailing the protests happening in the city.
The attention Moreno-Garcia pays to the publications of this period, particularly the comic book publications, truly bring the story to life in its historical context. She presents the image of a realistic newsstand within the city and the way a normal, everyday person would interact with news and current events at this time—not in an all-consuming manner but sitting at the periphery. She ends up not just creating a fascinating plot but building a whole new narrative about Mexico and Mexican people and how they encounter violence in their environment that does not center that violence and trauma as the sole preoccupation of Mexican people.
Like Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has created another version of complex Mexican identity in Velvet Was the Night that challenges stereotypical depictions.
(Review was originally published in 2022 in the now shuttered Latinx Spaces magazine.)
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