Trinidad Noir

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People think they know the Caribbean, the white-sandy-beaches-rum-and-Coca-Cola-smiling-natives-waving-palms Caribbean — you know the one. And sure, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has sun, sea, beaches, the whole tourist schtick. But this southernmost country in the Caribbean archipelago is filled with paradoxes. She isn’t always the idyllic tropical dream. Far from it. Sometimes she’s a nightmare.

In Trinidad Noir, you’ll trail the country’s criminals, her prostitutes, her officious bureaucrats, her police, her ordinary citizens. Expect to be intrigued. Expect to be entertained. But don’t expect to understand Trinidad.

It’s ironic that this volume is the first noir collection to come out of this country because, in a sense, Trinidad was founded on crime. Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1498 was the start of a criminal enterprise of epic proportions: it began with the theft of the island from its indigenous Carib people, then their genocide, followed by African slavery and the importation of indentured labor to man the obscenely lucrative cocoa, sugar, and coffee plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, Trinidad’s political climate of excess and corruption is buoyed by an economy bloated with oil and natural gas monies and by an element of society afloat in drugs and guns. There’s fodder enough here for ten volumes of Trinidad Noir.

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