The Friends of Pancho Villa: A Novel

by James Carlos Blake

Overview

With his debut novel on legendary Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, The Pistoleer, James Carlos Blake demonstrated a rare talent for western and historical fiction. His second book, The Friends of Pancho Villa, now back in print, further proved his mastery in the genre, taking on an even mightier figure of North American legend—the most memorable leader of the Mexican Revolution.

Violently waged from 1910 to 1920, the revolution profoundly transformed Mexican government and culture. And Pancho Villa was its “incarnation and its eagle of a soul”—so says Rodolfo Fierro, the novel’s narrator, an ex-con, train robber, and Villa’s loyal friend. Killers of men and lovers of life, the revolutionaries fought for freedom, for a new Mexico, for Villa. And in return, they shared victory and death with their country’s most powerful hero. The Friends of Pancho Villa is a masterpiece of ferocious loyalty, bloody revolution, and legends that live forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802189103
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	198,459
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

James Carlos Blake is the author of twelve novels. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and a recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for In the Rogue Blood. He was born in Mexico, raised in Texas, and now lives in Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

"I loved the Revolution," says Rodolfo Fierro, the main character of Blake's new historical novel. "It set free the man I truly am. It let me do what I do best as well as it can be done." With these noble sentiments out of the way, Fierro gets down to what it is he does best: slaughteringrich and poor, male and female. The ex-convict and train robber certainly was in the right place at the right time. During the roughly 10 years the Mexican Revolution tore across the land, it unleashed a human catastrophe unparalleled in that country since the Conquest. Fierro teams up early on in the action with Pancho Villa the bandit/revolutionary, one of the few who seem to revel in love as much as in death. He, for example, dislikes torturing prisoners, because it takes too long. "The time you spend torturing a man is time you could spend dancing and making love," he tells Fierro, who has just witnessed fellow revolutionary Emiliano Zapata's followers roasting an old man to death. Blake (The Pistoleer) blends fact and fiction into one of the few novels that risk political incorrectness by frankly describing the murder, betrayal and deceit that turned a revolution against dictatorship into a civil war that cost the country nearly a third of its population and left psychological scars that last to this day. He deftly follows the political twists and turns that prod Villa to continue as a leader even after his beloved Francisco MaderoMexico's first president after the dictator Porfirio Dazis brutally betrayed and killed by vying revolutionary factions. This is not for the faint of heart, but then, neither is revolution. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly