“Raymond Chandler is my patron saint,” says Lou Aguilar.
The Miami-based author demonstrates that dedication at the beginning of his new thriller, “The Washington Trail,” when a potential client named Amy Gallup shows up at our detective hero’s office.
An attractive young woman sauntered in. Dark auburn hair hung on either side of her emerald-green eyes, thin nose, and full, pink lips. A peach-colored cashmere sweater was loose around her chest, and a blue Scotch-patterned skirt was loose around her curvaceous waist. Gray silk tights accentuated her shapely legs, down to her ankle-high brown suede boots. She carried a small black handbag.
Boys and girls, this is what we
Femme fatale.
“I thought only in Washington could you start with the most minor incident and escalate it into a national threat.”
You see, before all women had black belts in Special Forces training and could take down five grown men at once, women had to turn to other means to subdue their prey, and often that meant appealing to the dreaded “male gaze.”
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe had a love for poetry and chess beneath his hard-boiled exterior, while Aguilar’s Mark Slade was more into ’80s music and classic Westerns.
We first meet the Afghanistan veteran and former Army Ranger as he’s racing around Washington, DC disguised as a motorcycle messenger, tailing a man with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” blaring from his headphones.
Slade caught the culprit after he completely ruined dinner service at a fine Georgetown restaurant. “Brawl” is the word that comes to mind.
Naturally, he has a rule-abiding counterpart to keep him in check: ex-G-man Neil Coke, who’s as quick-witted as Slade is fist-throwing, and their pairing recalls classics like Bill Cosby and Robert Culp in I Spy or Spencer and Hawke in Robert B. Parker’s Spencer series.
The similarity is intentional. Aguilar has been a fan of the genre for years and has noticed a clear change in recent years: “When I go to the mystery section of a bookstore, it’s all women. [writers] “Sex appeal is essential for these sensitive men,” he says, lamenting its “total disappearance.”
Ason Books
Aguilar, a columnist and veteran screenwriter with three novels to his name, saw an opportunity to rectify this situation while fulfilling a lifelong dream of writing a hard-boiled detective novel.
As in the best detective stories, Slade’s Washington DC base of operations is a character in its own right, as important to the story as Boston is to Spencer’s adventures or Los Angeles to Marlowe’s.
In fact, Aguilar told Align that he came up with the city before the character, having cut his teeth in Washington DC as a young reporter at The Washington Post towards the end of the legendary Ben Bradlee era.
Aguilar’s deep familiarity with his former home is apparent on every page, giving the novel a real sense of place, and the setting also proves ideal for Aguilar’s vision.
“I thought only in Washington could you start with the most minor incident and escalate it into a national threat.”
Sure enough, Slade and Cork take on what they think is a run-of-the-mill cheating boyfriend case, but soon find themselves caught between a secretive right-wing cabal within the US government and a group of far-left eco-terrorists, both of whom are after the sinister-sounding apocalypse mask.
Refreshingly, the main villains are eco-terrorists, including Szo, an intimidating, masculine woman who gleefully responds to Slade’s “transphobic” jokes by changing his gender with a cattle prod. We probably won’t be seeing a Slade & Coke series on Netflix anytime soon.
The high-stakes storyline gives “Washington Trail” a heady take on Tom Clancy’s old-school techno-thriller suspense, and Aguilar expertly blends it with the book’s satisfying noir atmosphere. It moves at an “airport-reading” pace, yet still finds time to draw you in with genuine emotional moments. There are plenty of laughs, too, because Slade isn’t the type to keep his mouth shut when he should.
Billed as “The Slade and Coke Mystery,” “The Washington Trail” tells a gripping, twisty, standalone story and introduces a cast of characters who are more than welcome to follow on their many adventures. Aguilar is currently working on a sequel, due for release next fall.
“They don’t make them anymore,” Slade says of the poster of the John Wayne classic “El Dorado” that hangs in his apartment. “It’s too graphic.”
Fortunately, thanks to Aguilar’s superb debut, the same can never be said about hard-boiled detective fiction again. Read an excerpt from “The Washington Trail” herepresented by Aethon Books.
