Craig McDonald: HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL "REAL CHARACTERS" #9: RODOLO FIERRO

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL "REAL CHARACTERS" #9: RODOLO FIERRO

The Hector Lassiter novels (ten of them, including HEAD GAMES) frequently incorporate real people.

All of that carries over into HEAD GAMES, THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, now available from First Second Books.

ORDER HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

Any hero can best be measured by the degree of threat posed by his arch antagonist.

Or so pop-lit theory goes.

The thing with HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, is there there’s a whole hellish host of potential candidates for the role of Hector Lassiter’s central foe, from Yale Skulls & Bones frat brothers, to FBI and CIA spooks, to J. Edgar Hoover, to a certain political dynasty of just-last-week freshly compromised stripes with the surname of “Bush.”

And, there is this OTHER ghost known variously as “El Carnicero,” or “The Butcher,” or by his given name, Rodolfo Fierro.

In this shot taken of Pancho Villa and General John
"Black Jack" Pershing
together sometime before Pershing would lead
the hunt for Villa, Fierro smiles over Villa's left shoulder.

That same moment as portrayed in
HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
(First Second Books)

Rudy was the bloody right arm of Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Fierro’s viciousness and inventive ways for killing are the stuff of darkly-enduring legend.

Across a series of recent blog entries, I’ve been profiling the “real characters”—in other words, the very real historical figures—who populate HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL.

I see no value in reinventing the wheel when it comes to profiling Fierro, AKA, “The Butcher” here.

In this case, I defer to a very fine take on Fierro penned by my brother-in-arms and BORDERLAND NOIR collaborator and fellow journalist (and distinguished historian), Jim Cornelius, as offered up at his very fine blog Frontier Partisans.

Spoiler(?) caution: You’re going to see a certain photo there that might seem to undermine the plot of my novel-turned-graphic novel.

Fierro's alleged end as depicted in HEAD GAMES
THE GRAPHI NOVEL.

I submit this for your cynical consideration: Look around the web, and you can find a similar Kremlin-released photo of a supposedly dead Sydney Reilly (the British intelligence inspiration for James Bond by Ian Fleming’s admission) who some believe (and for which there is some evidence) may have lived well beyond his alleged death in the early 1920s from a shot to the back by a Soviet sniper.

Given the state of the early 20^th Century photography, I’ll only submit it doesn’t take much talent at all to lay there stock still for a few seconds of bad shutterbug practice…

To play dead for a grainy photo is particularly easy when one is allegedly dripping in gold bullion to pay off presumed gawker/mourners before moving on to your sweet new anonymous life.

Just saying…