The Hector Lassiter novels (ten of them, including HEAD GAMES) frequently incorporate real people.
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.
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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 20th 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…
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| An elderly Butcher contemplates his former chief's skull in HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. |
Read more about Fierro from Jim HERE.
Charles Bronson portrayed Fierro in a 1968 film "Villa Rides". In the clip following, Bronson depicts a
notorious Fierro moment of blood-thirsty mass murder, also acknowledged in HEAD
GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. (A little Easter Egg for you: The character portrayed by Robert Mitchum, a pilot, you'll see in there also makes a cameo in my Hector Lassiter novel, THE RUNNING KIND):
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