William "Gatz" Hjortsberg hung around with the 1960s weed and whiskey writers crowd that included Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan. In 2012, Hjortsberg published an 800-page biography about the tragic life of his friend Brautigan (Jubilee Hitchhiker), but his best known work is 1978's Edgar Award-winning juju-noir novel Falling Angel (source of the cult movie Angel Heart). His new novel, Mañana, goes back to those days when the adventurous and fugitive went down to kick back on Mexico's Pacific coast with cheap dope and sunshine. Married eight years, Tod and Linda leave the Summer of Love chaos in San Francisco to rent half a duplex in tiny Barra de Navidad for the 1968 Semana Santa celebrations. In a haze of music, surfing, sex, drugs and booze, they party with the next-door group of young ex-cons and dopers on the lam from a Beverly Hills jewelry robbery. Mañana launches with Tod waking from a drugged night to find a girl in his bed, her throat slashed, and Linda and the criminals gone. Packing up his broke-down VW microbus with Hawaiian shirts, leftover Pacifico beer and his back-up weed stash, he takes off to find Linda and learn who killed the girl.
Stoked with alcohol and doobies, Tod makes his way to the cities of Guadalajara and Guanajuato, following leads from loitering street and park pachucos who have heard about gringos trying to sell high-end watches. Hjortsberg's descriptions of Tod's wanderings are detailed right down to the cantinas, plazas and parking lots--clearly he's been there. Part hardboiled mystery and part road trip, Mañana is both an entertaining trip back to the tie-dyed days of sex and drugs and a dive into Mexican life, with its lucha libre, mariachis, tortas and bandidos. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.