"Crimes of August" by Rubem Fonseca

It’s 1954 Rio de Janeiro. Alberto Mattos is that rarest of all birds – an honest police detective in a department where everyone’s on the take. Everyone, including his boss, his subordinate, the cops on the beat, and all the other departments. He is also that rare bird who believes in following the law, which means letting suspects go when there’s no evidence. 

It’s a perilous time in Rio and Brazil. A failed attempt to kill a journalist is leading to protests, condemnations, and the military beginning to become more than restless. Politicians, even those who support the current president of the country, are considering changing allegiances for their own safety and survival. The press is do its best to keep public opinion inflamed. One senator, a supporter of the president, has his plate full of worries, including the possibility that his own involvement in graft and corruption may come to light.

Mattos is called to a murder scene. A man of about 30 has been found strangled in his bed; he turns out to be the head of a finance and trading firm at the center of graft and corruption. The evidence is strange – blood on the bed does not belong to the victim, and someone, likely the killer, took a shower after the murder. The man’s wife is having an affair with the husband of a former girlfriend of Mattos. Mattos soon learns that every suspect has a motive, and every suspect has an alibi.

Rubem Fonseca

Through a multitude of interlocking and overlapping circles of relationships, Mattos must thread his way through passion, infidelity, corruption, political instability, and colleagues who assume they are the law. And all the while he’s nursing a serious stomach ulcer.

Crimes of August by Rubem Fonseca was first published in Portuguese in 1990. The English edition, published in 2014, was translated by Clifford Landers. It is a dark tale, tracking several different stories simultaneously, all framed by the detective’s investigation but eventually leading to a fusion of motives and events. Fonseca included a number of real people as characters and real events, artfully blending them into a coherent story. The novel includes a multitude of names, some looking and sounding close but actually belonging to characters. As a result, the novel requires a close reading, but the reward for doing so is a large one.

Fonseca began writing later and he specialized in crime writing. He lived most of life in Rio de Janeiro. He became a police officer in suburban Rio in 1952, writing the crime reports that would later become the basis for his stories. He studied business administration at New York University from 1953 to 1954, returning to the police force in Rio until 1958. He began writing stories in the early 1960s, and published his first collection, “The Prisoners,” in 1963. His works were often censored by the Brazilian military government for their violent and sexually graphic content. Fonseca received numerous prizes for his writing, including the Luís de Camões Prize for Literature and the Juan Rulfo Literature Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. He died in April of 2020.

While Crimes of August is set in a Brazilian city some 66 years ago, and published 30 years ago, at times it seems eerily contemporary and transcending its geography – fearful and power-hungry politicians, elites who believe the law doesn’t apply to them, crime in the streets that seems out of control, and a press less concerned with the news and more concerned with using its power to bring down a government. It’s a compelling story.

Related:

The Taker & Other Stories by Ruben Fonseca.

The Lost Manuscript by Ruben Fonseca.

"The Taker and Other Stories" by Rubem Fonseca

As part of a master’s degree program in the 1980s, I took a course on the Latin American novel. I was familiar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I was introduced to Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, and many other writers and poets. The timing of the course deliberately coincided with two on-campus speeches, one by Fuentes and one by Vargas Llosa. My major paper for the course was on Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral, a massive and complex novel of the Peruvian military dictatorship of the 1950s. 

The course was limited to major Latin American authors, or at least those who were well-known to literary circles in the United States. One writer we were not introduced to was Rubem Fonseca (1925-2020). Close in age to Garcia Marquez and Fuentes, Fonseca began writing later and he specialized in crime writing. He lived most of life in Rio de Janeiro. He became a police officer in suburban Rio in 1952, writing the crime reports that would later become the basis for his stories. 

He studied business administration at New York University from 1953 to 1954, returning to the police force in Rio until 1958. He began writing stories in the early 1960s, and published his first collection, “The Prisoners,” in 1963. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, that collection “exposed the dangerous underbelly of Rio, a subject not yet handled by Brazil’s fiction writers.” 

He continued writing stories and novels, which experienced censorship by the Brazilian military government for their violent and sexually graphic content. He received numerous prizes for his writing, including the Luís de Camões Prize for Literature and the Juan Rulfo Literature Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. He died in April of 2020.

Ruben Fonseca

The Taker and Other Stories was first published in Brazil in 1979, but it wasn’t translated into an English edition (by Clifford Landers) until 2008. It is a collection of dark, often very dark, stories, about serial killers, gangs, thugs, misfits, psychopaths, and the violence associated with them. Fonseca is mining a vein that had not been previously explored by fiction writers in Brazil – the underside and violence of Brazilian society. Many of the stories reminded me of Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct novels, except Fonseca tells the story from the criminal’s perspective, not the police’s. 

In “Night Drive,” an overworked businessman releases tension by taking late-night drives – and running over lone pedestrians. In the title story, “The Taker,” a man is so consumed with anger at the world and everyone he meets begins a rampage with a dentist who extracts his aching tooth – and then he’s joined by a likeminded woman. In “Angels of the Marquees,” a man is so impressed by volunteers helping the homeless that he volunteers to work with them, not realizing with these “angels” are really about. 

“The Enemy” is about a man trying to find the friends of his youth, and none of them remembers what he does. Or they don’t want to. “In Account of the Incident,” a bus collides with a cow on a bridge, and there’s more concern for the food the cow’s carcass offers than for the victims below. “The Eleventh of May” concerns life in a nursing home, and what happens when a few of the residents decide they’ve had enough. “The Book of Panegyrics” tells the tale of a man posing as a home nurse, to protect himself against something that he’s constantly reading the newspaper to find (this is my favorite in the entire collection; Fonseca does a fine job of building suspense). 

The Taker and Other Stories contains 15 stories in all, with only a few missing violence and mayhem. They depict anti-heroes, with misfits and psychopaths deciding to take what they believe is theirs, even if the people affected are innocent and have no connection. A strong theme in most of these stories is what happens in a class-stratified society when individuals in the underclass decide to make some changes. It’s an almost alien, unrecognizable world with its own code of violent behavior.

Not listening

I listen, at first,

to a presentation, informal,

on the business climate in Brazil,

and I think Rio, I feel the hot sands

of Ipanema and Copacabana

under my feet and the smells

of carnival’s flamboyance

and excess assault my nose until

I turn to the mountain

with its huge statue of Jesus

welcoming all with his arms

rigidly straight, not unlike

his arms on the cross.

Photograph of the statue of Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, via pixgood.com.