Safe Delivery
Jim Sanderson
Reviewed by Mark Busby, Fri., Dec. 1, 2000
Safe Delivery
by Jim Sanderson
University of New Mexico Press, 224 pp., $21.95
Jim Sanderson declared himself a writer of international mystery and intrigue with his first novel, El Camino del Rio, a mystery set on the border. He received the Frank Waters Prize as well as a favorable review in The New York Times. But this new novel is better than his first; San Antonio native Sanderson draws upon his clear understanding of his hometown's atmosphere and complex history to tell a deft story of corruption and redemption in the form of a political thriller.
Sanderson carefully weaves together the stories of three characters: Vincent Fuentes, a Mexican writer and former priest and son of a retired gangster; Jerri Johnson, now a single mother in her 40s working as a private investigator; and Joe Parr, an aging Texas Ranger known throughout San Antonio as the man who captured Bud Harrelson and who now sits in his Alamo Heights back yard speaking to the shade of his dead wife and taking in the Gulf breezes.
Five years before, Johnson was Fuentes' student and lover, whom he left to pursue dreams of revolution in Mexico. Captured and tortured by the ruling party, Fuentes now looks for luxury and does the political bidding of the PRI, his idealism and energy sapped. And so he's back in San Antonio, seeking help from Jerri to set up a delivery of guns in a complex doublecross. The old Ranger reads Walter Prescott Webb and thinks of Ranger history while he lives in a world where clean and safe passages no longer seem apparent.
Sanderson lets his characters tell their own stories, moving easily in and out of their heads as he juggles three points of view effectively. A good story of intrigue must move quickly with the right amount of suspense and foreshadowing, all of which Sanderson handles cleanly. Added to these elements is Sanderson's understanding of his San Antonio:
The Spaniards founded San Antonio where they did because of the river. Now it was the primary reason for San Antonio's tourist industry. In 1897 his widow and old friends buried the old Ranger Rip Ford in a Masonic cemetery full of ex-Confederate officers. The cemetery had been somewhere along this river and had long since been moved to make way for the tourists. Now ol' Rip probably stared up at some tourists' asses as they drank strawberry margaritas or some other ladies' drink in some chichi bar.
Sanderson is on sure footing with this setting, less so with the interworkings of Mexican politics. The complications of the plot seem murky on reflection. Why would Mexican assassins set up their political enemies to be murdered in the United States, when they could more easily do so in the comfort of their home country? And in a novel where most of the secondary characters such as Vincent's father, Palo, and Parr's FBI pal, Ollie Nordmarken, are memorably presented, the revolutionary patsy, Angel Martinez, even with his tag name, is too thin to carry the emotional weight he needs to shoulder.
Still, Sanderson, who graduated from Southwest Texas and Oklahoma State and who now teaches at Lamar University, effectively stretches the limits of the political thriller. In Safe Delivery, he uses standard elements of genre fiction to lead readers adroitly to examine significant human questions.
Mark Busby is the director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest and professor of English at Southwest Texas State University. His first novel, Fort Benning Blues, will be published next spring. Safe DeliveryJim Sanderson
