La Pinche Vida

Welcome to La Pinche Vida, I am your host JLR Hernandez. The purpose of this blog is to introduce a series of novels I have written titled “Tales from La Pinche Vida.” Each novel is titled “Tales from La Pinche Vida: (2-word subtitle)”. The novels are crime related stories that use Houston, Texas, as the nexus of each tale. There have been other novels that have used Houston as a backdrop (the first that comes to mind is Lindsey’s stuff, but the titles escape me). My novels are unique (as far as I know, anyway) in that they tell the story from a “brown” perspective; that is from the view of Latinos, mainly Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chicanos, coconuts and pochos (more about these descriptives later).
When I was growing up there was no such thing as cable or satellite television, and forget about the Internet or console games! Entertainment came in the form of whatever was on the 3 networks and rerun programming on the UHF dial. There was also the movies and reading. Reruns of Perry Mason, Dragnet, Highway Patrol, and the like developed my love for the detective story. Old movies like the Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and others were fuel to my fire for the mystery/thriller/suspense tale. When I found out about Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, and others, I was truly hooked.
Needless to say, as I grew older and the detective genre continued on network television with the advent of Mannix, Hawaii Five-0, Cannon, and let’s not forget Magnum, P.I., I was getting my fill. One thing began to bother me, though. That was that very few of the characters in any of these stories, whether it was an old movie or a new TV show, was of the brown persuasion, i.e., some sort of Latino. And, when there was a Latino in the story he was either a crook, fat, lazy, or lacked intelligence. If the characters were women, they were singers, dancers, prostitutes or some other minor, unflattering role. Granted, there are Latinos like that, but not all Latinos are like that.
So a few years ago I decided that I would write a detective story where the majority of the characters were Latinos. The good guys and the bad guys would be Latinos. I wanted to make it as realistic as fiction can be so I interspersed people of other ethnicities and races throughout the story to make it representative of the story backdrop.
Over the next few months I will post excerpts from the first story, TFLPV: The Ride, which introduces the private investigator, Tacho Barron. I hope you enjoy it. To help you find your way around let me point out a few things. First, at the top of the page you will find links to other pages in this blog.The page titled TFLPV: (subtitle) will provide the storyline for each tale. In this case, the story being highlighted is the Ride. The page titled The characters gives you a short narrative of each of the main characters in the novel, and the page titled TFLPV: (subtitle – Chapter ‘X’) will contain the chapter.

One last thing, since there are several words in Spanish, both formal and slang, that are part of the prose I have also included a page titled Glossary that contains the Spanish words with definitions.