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James Carlos Blake’s Western historical fiction has featured notorious figures such as outlaw folk heroes John Wesley Hardin and the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.
Blake’s latest book, “Country of the Bad Wolfes,” however, is inspired by his own ancestral saga. Not atypically for Blake, it begins in graphic violence – an execution by firing squad. It is 1823, Veracruz, Mexico, and the target is Capt. Roger Blake Wolfe, a British-born Irish seaman-adventurer tried and convicted of piracy and murder.
The wife Wolfe abandoned on the docks of Portsmouth, N.H., is raising year-old identical twins Samuel Thomas and John Roger, sons he’d sired but had never seen. Wolfe’s widow tries to keep her husband’s criminal life and ignominious end a secret, but the curious boys eventually discover the sordid truth about their father.
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“Country of the Bad Wolfes,” by James Carlos Blake Cinco Puntos Press, $16.95, 484 pp. |
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When the twins grow to maturity, the scene shifts and the story takes off in earnest. Samuel Thomas, who inherited the captain’s wild temperament and thirst for adventure, heads west, eventually to join the opposition San Patricios in the Mexican War, and later drifts down to Mexico City.
Sober and earnest John Roger goes to Dartmouth and studies law. But he, too, makes his way to Mexico. There he and his patrician New England wife create a life of privilege and influence on a sprawling empire of coffee plantations and cattle haciendas near Veracruz.
A mysterious American, Edward Little, forges connections with the Wolfe family, which soon becomes centered on another generation, headed by John Roger’s own twin sons. The lives of the Wolfes soon become intersected with the fortunes and regime of Mexican general and dictatorial President Porfirio Diaz.
Across three generations and over decades of violence and revolution, the Wolfe dynasty grows richer and more powerful. Their history and legends play out against the sweeping and colorful landscapes of Mexico and South Texas. Blake lives in El Paso.
Robert Woltman is an Albuquerque poet and writer.
James Carlos Blake discusses, signs “Country of the Bad Wolfes” at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 28, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW.
