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Back The Great Pretenders
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for The Great Pretenders
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. PART III
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-one
  29. Chapter Twenty-two
  30. Chapter Twenty-three
  31. Chapter Twenty-four
  32. Chapter Twenty-five
  33. Chapter Twenty-six
  34. PART IV
  35. Chapter Twenty-seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-one
  40. Chapter Thirty-two
  41. Chapter Thirty-three
  42. Chapter Thirty-four
  43. Chapter Thirty-five
  44. PART V
  45. Chapter Thirty-six
  46. Chapter Thirty-seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. Readers Guide
  52. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  53. Acknowledgments
  54. About the Author
  55. What’s next onyour reading list?

Adios Diablo was indeed different—it was the story of an American railway inspector in 1915 who answers to corporate interests in the US. He goes to Mexico to make routine inspections, where he encounters the Mexican Revolution in all its chaos, turmoil, and drama. The story included a Mexican girl; not your usual lacy señorita, but a real soldadera, complete with a gun, a bandolier of ammo, and the kind of sexiness that Rita Hayworth does so well, brazen enough to make plain what she wanted from a man, but sufficiently simmering to sidestep the Hays Code. There was also a train wreck. And there was a Negro character: a middle-aged man who had fled Texas many years before and was vehemently on the side of the revolution. This man and the railroad inspector had to learn to trust each other, another strand of story that made it richer. Leaping up off the page, the film seemed to splash across my vision: the sound of the train wreck, the dust and smoke, the sacrifices of the men and women fighting the Mexican Revolution. And that, of course, was the whole trouble. The story wore Simon’s old proletarian sympathies like a badge of honor. The hero was a man of conflicted integrity, the heroine was no shrinking virgin cowering in the corner, the struggle was that of people who had been oppressed for eons rising up against corporations who had grown fat and rich from their labor. All well and good, even heroic, but in Cold War America, any revolution looks like a call to Red arms.

I took it home, and Terrence read it, cheered to see that the black character was not a shoeshine boy, or an Uncle Tom, that no one did a jive dance or wore a turban. “This is exactly the kind of picture that will help America save itself.”

“Agreed. But no one will make it today. For Whom the Bell Tolls could not get made now unless Robert Jordan was a sniper knocking off unwashed peons who want to deprive bankers of their nobly won gains.”

“You should let Simon know so he doesn’t get his hopes up.”

“I want his hopes up. If he can write like this, he’s come back to life.”