No. While the novel is chock-full of real events and people, the reader’s engagement will always hang on a well-constructed plot. This I know. For sympathy, intrigue and heart-pounding suspense, I needed protagonists who would be completely malleable to my authorial control, to give me the flexibility to turn the events exactly as I needed. So Harrison Shepherd is a pure product of my imagination, and so is the indispensable Violet Brown. They were both entirely cooperative.
Of course, I had to imagine Shepherd as fully real in every aspect, including as a writer. No one has really done the Pre-Columbian Potboiler, as far as I know, but I had in mind a category of fiction that came of age around Dashiell Hammett’s time, in novels like The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. This was the last hurrah of the novel as an everyday, working person’s entertainment, and a golden time for some writers who considered themselves entertainers, yet really did sophisticated work. (Interestingly, despite his apolitical subject matter, Hammett was persecuted for communism.) Combine the Sam Spade genre with James Michener’s historical sagas – Hawaii and Tales of the South Pacific — and you’re in the right part of the bookstore.
I spent so much time thinking about Harrison Shepherd’s hard-boiled Aztec novels, I even designed their dust-jackets in my head. Immediately behind my desk is a shelf where I keep my dictionaries, the thesaurus, and the reference books I’m using most during a given project. A couple of times without really thinking I turned around to reach for Harrison Shepherd’s Vassals of Majesty or Pilgrims of Chapultepec. And then laughed at myself, out loud.