Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ‘Velvet Was the Night’ is a noir-thriller as captivating as its title

Throughout her career, the style-shifting novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia has demonstrated a remarkable ability to employ the tropes of genre fiction while simultaneously subverting and decolonizing them. Her 2020 bestseller “Mexican Gothic” takes on “Wuthering Heights” via H.P. Lovecraft, while “Untamed Shore,” also out last year, nods to Patricia Highsmith and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Moreno-Garcia has written a vampire novel set in Mexico City, edited an award-winning anthology of Cthulhu Mythos stories by female writers, and, later in 2021, will publish a sword-and-sorcery novella. (She also writes a freelance column for The Washington Post with novelist Lavie Tidhar.)

“Velvet Was the Night,” her riveting new noir, is an adrenalized, darkly romantic journey set during Mexico’s Dirty War. The novel opens with the Corpus Christi Massacre or El Halconazo — “The Hawk Strike” — of June 10, 1971. On that day, thousands of student demonstrators took to the streets in Mexico City for a peaceful march, only to be attacked by los Halcones — the Hawks — a paramilitary group organized and trained by the CIA as part of the U.S. effort to suppress leftists and communists in Central America. Almost 120 demonstrators were killed.

“The chief requirement of a Hawk was he needed to look like a student so he could inform on the activities of the annoying reds infesting the universities,” muses Elvis, a wiry, 21-year-old Hawk and onetime juvenile delinquent who admires the aristocratic mien of his suave boss, El Mago. Elvis admits that he doesn’t like violence: In his free hours, he memorizes new words from the Illustrated Larousse dictionary and hangs out with a fellow Hawk, El Gazpacho, a cinephile who introduces him to Japanese film. Still, at the student demonstration, Elvis and the rest of El Mago’s Hawks follow their boss’s command to “grab any journalists, take their cameras, rough them up.”

Elsewhere in the city, Maite, an unmarried, seemingly drab secretary about to turn 30, scans the titles of a newspaper stand for her favorite comic book, Secret Romance. “Love, frail as gossamer, stitched together from a thousand songs and a thousand comic books, made of the dialogue spoken in films and the posters designed by ad agencies: love was what she lived for.” At night in her apartment, Maite feeds her parakeet, obsesses over the story lines in Secret Romance and teaches herself English from the Illustrated La- rousse dictionary, all while playing music from her prized collection of vinyl, with Arthur Prysock’s “Blue Velvet” in heavy rotation. (There’s much amusing discussion of Maite’s record collection within the book, and Moreno-Garcia provides a terrific playlist, spanning tracks from the Beatles to Los Hooligans.) By the end of Chapter Two, we know that she and Elvis are destined to meet — but how, and when?