James Carlos Blake

James Carlos Blake, regionalist novelist, whose heart and writing skill were on both sides of the border, died Saturday, January 11, 2025. He was 82.

Born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 1943, he was a descendant of a prominent creole family in Mexico City, whose complex and colorful history was often the basis for novels, short stories, and essays. At fourteen, he became an American citizen in Miami.

As a young man, he was not always well-behaved, but after joining the army and deploying as a tunnel rat to the frozen borderlands of the Koreas, he returned a more thoughtful man, and went to college. And he began to write.

"I'm attracted to and write about people who are very resentful of submitting themselves to authority that they don't think is warranted," he told an interviewer. Despite the violent nature of his protagonists, they are always thinkers. "All my characters are intelligent," he said."I've never been interested in alcoholics, druggies, or crazy people, because they are not exercising free will." Sex and violence were hallmarks of his work, he said, because "they are the two great engines of the world."

His historical criminal protagonists, from John Wesley Hardin ("The Pistoleer"), a notorious Old West gunfighter, to Rodolfo Fierro ("The Friends of Pancho Villa"), Villa's segundo and on-demand executioner, to Harry Pierpont ("Handsome Harry), John Dillinger's best friend and constant accomplice, Blake endowed with high intelligence, insight, a big problem with authority, and a dark sense of humor.

His 2012 novel, "Country of the Bad Wolfes," introduced the saga of the fictional Wolfe family, a borderland clan who actions came from a tendency to violence and hell-raising. Four Wolfe family novels followed.

In 2021 he suffered a traumatic brain injury, and after twenty years in Arizona, he returned to Florida to live under the care of a brother.

Throughout his literary career, he wrote inventive, lucid, and tangible prose.

He wrote seven hours a day, seven days a week.