We thought Lawrence Blochman’s Blow Down was another natural disaster thriller. The Griffith Foxley cover art seems clear on that. We expected Florida, but the book is set in a fictional country on the Caribbean wedged between Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, in a town called Puerto Musa. Those are three countries we love, despite all the problems we had there, so we got lucky choosing this book, as we’re especially interested in fiction set where we’ve spent time. It was first published in 1940, with this Dell paperback coming in 1953.
The story is set in 1938 and is centered around undercover State Department agent Walter Lane, who’s been sent to quietly look into the death of a predecessor who was poisoned—though people in Puerto Musa mistakenly think he succumbed to blackwater fever. Lane soon finds himself caught between German coffee growers on one side of a river and Yank banana growers on the other. The Germans are, of course, Nazis, and Lane is a curious cat himself, because he has a big blue swastika tattoo on his chest.
We were initially baffled that Lane seemed to be the protagonist. A Nazi hero? Impossible, in 1953. It turns out Lane was tatted on a drunken collegiate night a decade earlier, back when a swastika was merely a Hindu religious symbol. Imagine his annoyance when Hitler stole it. Blochman uses the tattoo to make readers unsure about Lane the same way the inhabitants of Puerto Musa are unsure about him. Who is this guy, and where do his sympathies lie? We liked that bit. The truth outs a few chapters in when he explains to love interest Muriel Monroe how the unsightly ink came to be.
The thrust of the story is not about Lane’s youthful lark, but rather $100,000 gone missing, and American radio broadcasts that the Germans may be jamming in an effort to insert their own propaganda. Was the Caribbean coast of Central America ever that important to the Nazis in actuality? We had to check. We learned that there were some minor intrigues there, which makes sense—there’s a well established German community today, and many of them are descended from 19th century coffee growers. We were told while we lived there that the country was part of the Nazi escape route to South America after the Reich’s fall, but we’ve never confirmed that.
In any case, in Blochman’s pre-war fabulation the Reich’s fall is a hope, not a fact, so the stakes are high for Walter Lane. As required for spy fiction there are unknown sympathies, unexplainable coincidences, and unlikely allies. And as a bonus that natural disaster we hoped for actually did occur, as a tropical storm rises up to engulf Puerto Musa before all is said and done. This book did the same to us. It was our first Blochman, but not our last if we can help it. He’s a rock solid stylist, a good conceptualist, and is excellent in all other phases of fictioncraft. We recommend this one.
