If you don't know this author you are missing out!  I wondered why he hadn't had a book out for years and years.  I just learned that he died in 1999.  RIP, Gary!

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"Gary Jennings is the greatest among our
historical novelists"
- NEW YORK TIMES

 

"I'm a writer. I write not only for a living,
I write because I'm a writer."
- GARY JENNINGS - 1993

http://www.garyjennings.net/

Gary Jennings led a paradoxically picaresque life. On one hand, he was a man of acknowledged intellect and erudition. His novels were international best sellers, praised around the world for their stylish prose, lively wit and adventurously bawdy spirit. They were also massive - often topping 500,000 words - and widely acclaimed for the years of research he put into each one, both in libraries and in the field. Where the erudition came from, however, was something of a mystery.

Born in the little city of Buena Vista, Virginia, the son of Glen E. and Vaughnye Bayes Jennings, nothing in his upbringing suggested a belletristic future. The story was his birth was on the second floor of a movie theatre that his parents owned. The theater burned down - and so it went. The family moved to New Jersey in the early 40's and he graduated from Eastside High School (of "Lean on Me" fame) in Paterson, N. J. He attended the Art Students League in Manhattan, but from that point all formal education ceased. Jennings was completely self-educated. Responding to an ad in a New York newspaper at age 17, he was hired as an office boy in an advertising firm. It was a steady climb up the ladder in advertising; he thought he might use his artistic talent, but ended as an Account Executive. After a break to serve in the Korean War where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal - a decoration rarely given to soldier-reporters and a personal citation by South Korean President Syngman Rhee for his efforts on behalf of war orphans, he returned briefly to advertising. It was during this period that he met Bill W. The desire to write was so great that he decided to cut the strings and write full time. New York was not an affordable place and he had always wanted to go to Mexico ... so he did. He left everything and moved to San Miguel de Allende. There he continued his free lance writing, wrote 10 children's books, edited Gent & Dude magazine, and wrote two novels. Gary - the novelist During his twelve-year stint in Mexico, Gary became fascinated with the Aztecs. He learned Spanish, haunted archeological digs and immersed himself in the Aztec history and culture. There, he wrote, Aztec his breakthrough novel. He wrote about the Aztec world with vivid intimacy and with an unprecedented authenticity and with literary grace. He brought something more to that story, something that would inform all four of his subsequent novels: an exotic, often erotic wit, based on characters possessed by an irrepressible Rabelaisian lust for life, stylish charm and zany joie de vivre. His men and women were eccentric, roguish, unabashedly bawdy. Jennings enlivened their adventures with an energetic prose, an electrifying power and a narrative drive that many believed unique to historical fiction. Leaving Mexico, he stayed briefly in Texas, then in Marin County, Ca and finally back home to the Shenandoah Valley in Buena Vista, Virginia. He stayed there until the mid 90's and then returned to New Jersey to be near his oldest friends. . . . more about Gary Garry Jennings literally roamed the world in the course of researching The Journeyer, for which he faithfully duplicated the travels of his hero, Marco Polo. He did the same in the process of researching Spangle, during which he traveled with a circus troupe. He went back to Europe to continue his research and finished Raptor, a book on the Goths. Demand for more of Aztec finally convinced him to write Aztec Autumn and to prepare the material for then unnamed books on the Aztecs. During l998 and l999 Gary collaborated with a composer and lyricist and wrote a musical play based on the life of Joe Hill, a union organizer his father had met in Paterson, N.J. He also compiled research for a book set amid the hanging gardens of Babylon and was putting together a book of his short stories. Gary died on Friday the 13th of February l999, passing quietly while watching late night TV. He had had a dinner party planned for the next evening with his agent, his doctor and his two best friends. He is greatly missed by friends and fans alike.

The Novels ¤

Aztec, one of Gary Jennings's best-known historicals, is a multi-layered story about the native response to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. "In rubbing the myths of each race to their common bones, Gary Jennings has produced in Aztec a monumental novel," noted Nicholas Shakespeare in the London Times. Gary Jennings unfolds the story of the overthrow of the Native Mexicans through the voice of an amiable but wry Aztec adventurer named Mixtli. Judith Matloff observed in the Saturday Review: "In picaresque fashion, Mixtli travels the length and breadth of Mexico, working as scribe, merchant, warrior, and ambassador to Montezuma," thus becoming involved in various aspects of the war against the conquistadors. In addition, the novel contains an abundance of details about the Aztecs--their culture, their religion, their customs, their daily life. 

In preparing to write the novel, Gary Jennings lived for twelve years in Mexico while conducting research on Aztec culture and the Spanish conquest. He read many accounts about the wars but found many of them biased against the Indians. So, as Gary Jennings told John F. Baker in a Publishers Weekly interview, "I learned to interpret the ancient pictures and codices and read Nahuatl, the Aztec language...it shows them as people who had a sense of the bawdy, and who had all sorts of human reactions. I wanted to bring them alive as flesh-and-blood people." The author traveled about the country, seeking primary sources and "trying to get a sense, from living Indians, of their legendary past," recounted Baker. Gary Jennings's research paid off, for the voice of his narrator Mixtli is filled with resonance of the Nahuatl speech. As Times Literary Supplement contributor Gordon Brotherston commented, "Much of the novel's power stems from Nahua sources transcribed into the alphabet after the Spanish invasion, not just the direct quotations from Nahua poems and of set pieces . . . but the whole range of devices used by Mixtli to keep his audience alert."

"Historical novels are most often praised or dismissed as novels," observed Thomas M. Disch in the Washington Post Book World, "but surely it is their power as narrative history that is their main strength, the power to evoke the feel of ages lost to memory. . . . So it is with Gary Jennings's Aztec." The novel "has everything that makes a story vulgarly appealing, in the best sense of the phrase," remarked Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times. "It has sex--my goodness, does it have sex! . . . [and] it has violence." While these elements may be appealing, "the violence usually serves a constructive storytelling purpose . . . and the sexual passages almost always relate to the book's most fascinating and subtle aspect, which is the way the hero, Mixtli, unconsciously re-enacts the life of the Indian god Quetzalcoatl," continued Lehmann-Haupt. "It is this particular dimension of Aztec which raises it above the level of a mere historical potboiler."

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In The Journeyer, Gary Jennings relates the "other half" of Marco Polo's adventures, the half the famous explorer supposedly withheld so as not to offend European sensibilities. Part of its appeal lies in its authenticity. The author recreated much of Polo's route for his research, traveling through Italy, the Middle East, and central and southeast Asia by various modes of transport--including camel and elephant. "Thus he enlivens his picaresque story with wonderfully detailed descriptions of the landscape, climate, flora and fauna Polo encountered along the way. The real energy of Gary Jennings's narrative is devoted to those old standbys lust and bloodlust. His zeal for clinical description of sexual practices is matched only by his enthusiasm for the minutiae of Oriental torture. Pound for pound, 'The Journeyer' is a classic." wrote Gene Lyons in Newsweek. "As Gary Jennings did for pre-Hispanic Mexico in Aztec," commented Grover Sales in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "he has enriched The Journeyer with an anthropologist's knowledge of diverse lands and cultures." Added the critic: "Gary Jennings combines inexhaustible research with the yarn-spinner's art, drawing indelible portraits of Marco and his companions on the long journey." Chicago Tribune Book World contributor Jack Dierks similarly found the novel engrossing, explaining that "employing both great sweep and meticulous detail, Gary Jennings has produced an impressively learned gem of the astounding and the titillating. As pure travelogue it is impeccable, and the adventures that befall our heroes come like tales spun out by some erudite and prurient Scheherazade, heaping wonder onto oddity." Sales offered the opinion that "with astonishing speed and consummate skill, novelist Gary Jennings has capped his 1980 Aztec," while Dierks considered the book an "even more compelling work of derring-do."

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For Spangle, his third major historical work, Gary Jennings traveled with nine different circuses in America and Europe. The novel follows the adventures of "Florian's Flourishing Florilegium," a nineteenth-century performing troupe, and Zachary Edge, a Southern Civil War veteran who joins it after the war. Like the author's previous works, Spangle contains the same elements of spectacle, sex, violence, and detail that mark most of his historical fiction. "Yet for Gary Jennings," noted Lehmann-Haupt, "the formula seems to work uniquely. There is something mesmerizing about the world he creates." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor MacDonald Harris felt that Spangle "is impressive in its sheer mass and richness, in the enthusiasm and energy of its telling, in the obvious pleasure the author takes in the work." This enthusiasm, asserted Harris, "is contagious. Before the novel is over we develop, along with the characters, a contempt for non-circus people and a conviction that the only sensible and reasonable thing to do . . . is to run away and join a circus." Spangle has been serialized into three paperbacks: The Road Show (Spangle Part One), Center Ring (Spangle Part Two) , and Grand Promenade (Spangle Part Three).

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For his 1992 title, Raptor, Gary Jennings pressed further into the past than ever before. Set in the fifth century A.D.--and framed by Theodoric the Great's conquest of Rome--Raptor tells the story of a wily hermaphrodite named Thorn and his/her adventures in Theodoric's employ. Styling the work "a ripping yarn," New York Times Book Review contributor Joe Queenan noted: "In `Raptor,' Mr. Gary Jennings successfully demonstrates that a person who could make a very fine living in Las Vegas in the 20th century really had to have both his and her wits about him and her if he and she wanted to survive in the sixth." Thorn's response to his/her situation is to become a predator--a raptor like the hawk he/she has tamed--in order to protect himself/herself and his/her interests. "Thorn is a memorable character, and unique outside of science fiction," wrote Judith Tarr in the Washington Post Book World. "Raptor is a splendid entertainment: a historical novel of the old school, impressively researched and remarkably accurate--and above all, a roaring good read." In the New York Times, Lehmann- Haupt declared that Gary Jennings's "latest boisterously imaginative historical extravaganza . . . recaptures some of the magic of `Aztec.'" The critic concluded: "If you loved `Aztec,' then you'll love `Raptor.' And if you haven't read `Aztec,' then prepare yourself for astonishment."

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Aztec Autumn, the long-awaited sequel to Gary Jennings's bestselling Aztec, is another assiduously researched, richly detailed and robust re-creation of an epic ancient historical era.  New York Times writes "Offered in the form of an as-told-to first-person journal, Gary Jennings's fascinating if often gory novel is guided by exhaustive research into practically every facet of life in 16th-century Mexico." With his vigorous prose and clearly visualized details, Gary Jennings brings readers back in time to that world. Descriptions of landscape and culture, gruesome battle scenes and executions, have convincing immediacy. This is riveting historical fiction written with wonderful force."

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Aztec Blood, "Never less than spellbinding, this golden tale is third in a series and follows the exploits of a mestizo boy (half Aztec, half Spanish) in 16th-century New Spain, struggling for survival against Spanish nobles in league with the Inquisition. Cristo the Bastardo spins his tale from a dungeon prison between bouts of torture." writes Publishers Weekly. Booklist  continues "The author has meticulously researched the tortuous history of the colonization of New Spain, revivifying the all-but-forgotten era upon whose brutal foundation the modern nation of Mexico was forged. This lush, exotic page-turner fairly crackles with intrigue, romance, and adventure."

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Aztec Rage, "Jennings, this time with two coauthors, returns to the roily history of the Aztec empire and the colonization of New Spain in this latest entry in the best-selling cycle he began with Aztec (1982), followed by Aztec Autumn (1997) and Aztec Blood (2001). The focal character in this atmospheric yarn is swordsman Don Juan de Zavata; it is his swashbuckling adventures, and the threat of exposure of his true parentage, that lead him--and spellbound readers--from colonial Mexico, where the Aztec civilization lies in ruins, to the Spain of Catholic repression and Napoleonic ferment. What the novels in this series do so well, and this latest installment is a prime example, is to lend a resonant understanding of not only Aztec and colonial customs and even mind-sets but also how repressed peoples, whether by the act of conquest or the act of religious control, will indeed have their own day--how their resentment builds, in other words. A beautifully detailed novel for historical fiction fans