Later this week, comics writer Alex Segura — who has served in editorial and executive capacities at companies like Archie Comics and DC Entertainment for the better part of a decade in addition to his writing work — will release the third installment in his series of Pete Fernandez mysteries.
Centering on a Cuban-American detective who is generally thrown into investigations he wants no part of, the series so far has included the acclaimed Silent City and Down the Darkest Street. Segura, for his part, is probably best known to comic book fans as the writer behind Archie Meets Ramones. He’s also got a one-shot for The Archies coming out in May.
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Segura joined ComicBook.com for a conversation about the latest Pete Fernandez story, Dangerous Ends, and why it’s as good a jumping-on point for the series as he’s ever written.
You can pre-order a copy of Dangerous Ends from Amazon, either in hardcover or for the Kindle reading app.
A character like Pete Fernandez didn’t start out as a Jack Reacher or even a Fletch, where it was obvious the kind of trajectory that he could or would be on. Is it challenging, after introducing a man on the brink of despair, to keep what made him unique in Silent City and Down the Darkest Street now that you’ve established him as competent and given him a more “comfortable” existence?
Well, first and foremost, I wanted to show an arc and progress for Pete with Dangerous Ends. I didn’t want to write another novel where he’s a novice with a drinking problem. That’s his origin and it’s been told. I wanted to show that he was evolving and changing. He’s not a polished or perfect PI when we see him at the beginning of the book, but you’re getting the first inkling that he’s trying to get his life in order. Just in time for a crazy case to land in his lap.
Given the controversies around police violence, did you consider that having the client be a police officer opens up a little bit of a political can of worms right at the moment?
A bit, sure, but I didn’t want to water down the story. It doesn’t avoid dealing with the political landscape – be it police violence or the Cuba/Miami dynamic. That said, I think police corruption, too, is a common enough theme in crime fiction that I was comfortable using it as a starting point. And it’d be too predictable if everything were exactly as it’s laid out in the beginning. Crime fiction is a great vehicle for not only telling a good, memorable story, but for shedding light on the problems and realities we face as people, so that’s something I always try to keep in mind.
Dangerous Ends finds Pete and his partner Kathy taking on the case of ex-Miami Narcotics officer Gaspar Varela, who’s serving out a life sentence for the murder of his wife. Varela’s daughter, Maya, thinks there’s still a chance for her father to be exonerated. But that requires new, previously-unseen evidence. That’s when Pete and Kathy come in. Around the same time, they find themselves in the crosshairs of Los Enfermos, a bloodthirsty gang of drug dealers and killers with a pro-Castro slant. The once-simple cold case has put them both in a lot of danger, and the signs point to the case reaching further back in time, perhaps to the beginning of Castro’s communist regime in Cuba.
But the starting point, at least in terms of the Varela storyline, was an actual true crime saga – the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, the green beret in prison for murdering his wife and children in the 70s. He blamed the murder on a Manson-like group of deadly hippies, in the wake of those murders and the metamorphosis of the live-free sixties into something much darker with Altamont, the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the first inklings of Watergate. I wanted to explore a case like that, one that’s controversial and features two vocal sides still fighting over the verdict, and set it in Miami and tie it into another big element of the book, which is the Cuba/Miami backdrop. I don’t want to give anything away, but these two things weave together as the story progresses and I hope it keeps people engaged and surprised.
Similarly, in the time since you started writing this book, Castro has died. Does that impact that element of the story at all?
It doesn’t alter the story, but it did happen as I was looking over page proofs, so I was able to keep the book up to date. Dead or alive, Castro looms large over Miami and its relationship with Cuba, especially while the country is still run by his brother. So, no, it didn’t change much in the story, but it was nice to keep the book as timely as possible.
When you have a character who we’ve seen retreat into depression and substance abuse in the past, is that just something that Pete will be dealing with, at least on the back burner, for as many books as he’s around?
I think so. I don’t think there’s a cure to the stuff he’s dealing with. We won’t get to a book where he’s magically A-OK. That would feel dishonest to me. The books always work on two tracks, at least the way I think about them – there’s the overall mystery and conflict, but there’s alsoPete’s personal journey and struggle. When we meet him, he’s at his bottom. The second book, Down the Darkest Street, shows us – and him – that he could be pulled even deeper into the depths of his own making. Dangerous Ends, while still a hardboiled and noir story, is about him trying to get his life together and still cope with the problems he’ll have to face if he chooses to continue down this path of being a detective.
Would you say “Dangerous Ends” is a good jumping-on point for people who haven’t read the previous books? If so, what if anything would you say they need to know going into the book?
I try to write each book as if it were the first. I include references to what came before, but I also want it to feel welcoming to new readers. At the same time, I want to have ongoing plot threads from the previous installments, so readers of the series feel like they’re experiencing one, long narrative. It’s a challenging tightrope to walk. But I’ve jumped into series in the middle of the run before and always found it valuable when the book was written in a way that made it easy to get me up to speed. That usually made me go back and read the series from the beginning. So I try to keep that in mind.
In terms of what they need to know, it’s simple: Pete Fernandez is a Miami PI who has gained some notoriety in the city for his past cases. He’s also a recovering alcoholic. He works with his partner, ex-reporter Kathy Bentley, and has good taste in music.
What has your experience with the continuing narratives of comics done to influence or assist you in writing a series of mystery novels?
There are aspects of comic book storytelling that I didn’t really see reflected in mystery fiction, like the origin story. You often start PI series midway – the detective is established, his world is in motion, etc. I wanted to show how Pete started – before he formally became a detective. What motivated? What conflict helped define him? That’s comic book 101 stuff. Same goes for crossovers. I was having dinner with a mystery writer friend, Rob Hart, who is also a big comic fan, and we were talking about our favorite crossovers. It got us to thinking about doing it in prose. So we wrote a novella where you see Pete, in a story set before Silent City, crossing over with Rob’s PI character Ash McKenna. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time that’s happened, but it struck me as a unique idea and we treat it as “canon” in our respective series. I mention Rob’s character in Silent City and he drops Pete’s name into his latest. So, stuff like that has spilled over into my prose writing.
Given the gritty, hard-boiled sensibilities of some of the Dark Circle books, how much has your love for detective fiction influenced the work your doing as the editor on those?
Oh, for sure. When I got the Dark Circle gig, I wanted to approach it more like a TV network, and treat each storyline as a season that built toward something bigger. Each book was more of a genre exercise than a straight up superhero book. That worked to varying degrees, and whether they’re overt or not, it’s a challenging market for new superhero books. But the thing that you see influence all the book, whether it’s something supernatural like HANGMAN or off-the-wall like THE FOX, is that we took a really grounded approach to the characters and let the other elements build off that.
Would you ever consider trying to adapt Pete Fernandez to a comic or graphic novel?
Never say never, I guess. But it’s not something I’m working toward. Just thinking about the fourth book in the series now!
