EL GAVILAN: HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

As our national leadership squares off on the issue of illegal immigration and proposed "amnesty," a series of posts looking back at the themes and controversies informing my novel regarding illegal immigration and its toll on the heartland, El Gavilan. This one is from circa December 2011.

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My signature novels are historical literary thrillers. They feature a 20^th Century author and globetrotter named Hector Lassiter. The Lassiter books span many decades and continents.

My novel El Gavilan, is more contemporary and hits closer to home: it’s set, more or less, in a fictionalized version of Grove City, the central Ohio town where I grew up.

In the 1990s, the Buckeye State began to undergo a sea change triggered by tidal waves of illegal immigration.

The America southwest grabs all the national media attention with its insanely over-the-top cartel violence, self-appointed “Minute Men” roaming the desert with guns and calls for construction of Berlin-reminiscent, soaring border walls.

Fact is, exploitation of illegal workers, human trafficking and all the strife spinning out of the Mexican methamphetamine trade know no boundaries.

As a county sheriff declares to El Gavilan’s presumptive hero, small town police chief Tell Lyon, in a very real sense, “The border is now everywhere.”

As a central Ohio journalist, I saw communities changing as native Ohioans and assimilation-resistant undocumented workers and their families grudgingly struggled to strike some kind of live-and-let-live balance, mostly unsuccessfully.

I experienced this nexus of intimations:

An illegal cockfighting ring was broken up a few miles from my hometown.

In that same Westside enclave, a former blue-collar neighborhood of GM factory workers, nearly all of the signage was suddenly of a decidedly Spanish bent. The local library was scrambling to accommodate a growing population of English-As-Second-Language patrons.

On the opposite side of a looming overpass, an apartment complex became a target of arson. It proved to be a racially motivated firebombing. Lives were lost in that fire…mostly those of children.

The fallout came in many dark flavors and it came down hard. 

The residents of the complex, recent immigrants to Columbus, had no English. First-responders spoke no Spanish. The controversy spinning out of that case drew national attention.

A few counties away, word came of a sheriff who chose to use his slice of post-9-11, Homeland Security grants not to update radio equipment or to obtain bomb-sniffing dogs as so many others were doing.

This lawman instead bought up billboard space and posted warning messages directed at illegal immigrants. He sent bills to the federal government demanding reimbursement of jail costs his department sustained resulting from the feds’ failure to exercise adequate border enforcement.

All of these developments conspired to inspire El Gavilan. They also suggested the title character, conservative hardliner and Horton County Sheriff Able Hawk.

My notion was to take a damaged Border Patrol agent, a man literally running from borderland grief and bloody cartel violence—a grieving recent widower—and drop him into this maelstrom…and to confront him with Hawk.

Tell Lyon accepts the appointment to the position of small town police chief expecting to have a kind of Mayberry-like ride. Tell arrives in New Austin, Ohio, expecting to sort out nothing more serious than some drunk and disorderly hi-jinks…family dramas and little traumas of shoplifting and teens using fake I.D.s to try and buy cigarettes or the like.

It’s a miscalculation Tell comes to rue. He lands in town just in time for the murder of a local Latino woman—a brutal crime that triggers a firestorm of unexpected menace and threatens to trigger a race war.

It’s a cliché to say some novels read as if they were ripped from the headlines.

Clichés become clichés, as journalist-turned-author Ian Fleming once observed, because they’re typically so curiously valid.

In the case of El Gavilan, the novel is indeed ripped from the headlines, but they were headlines I sometimes wrote.