A Book A Week: A Spy's Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque by E. B. Held

While we were on vacation in New Mexico we stumbled into a cool little indie bookstore called Bookworks. And you know I can’t stumble into a bookstore without stumbling out with books. Here’s one of them.

A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque by E. B. Held, University of New Mexico Press 2011.

Held is a former CIA operative, and his book is about important, undercover events in the Cold War that took place in New Mexico, especially Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Los Alamos. The tidbits he shares are fascinating. But the book can’t decide what it wants to be. Tourist guidebook to interesting espionage sites in New Mexico is the cover’s stated content. But I’m not sure if Held means to inspire people to visit these sites, or to give people already familiar with the places some added nuance of understanding. Background familiarity with key figures in the nuclear arms race and Cold War espionage is helpful.

Inconsistent naming of figures (sometimes by code name, sometimes by real name, but not in a comprehensible framework) is confusing. As are the occasional forward and backward jumps in time. There are, however, some golden kernels of plot in there that could be part of a very entertaining narrative. The role that a shop (which would later become a Häagen-Dazs ice cream store) on the square in Santa Fe might have played in the assassination of Trotsky is one such treasure.

Trotsky’s Häagen-Dazs! Come on! Golden, I tell you.

This book has a hyper-local, hyper-specific interest base. It could have been written in a more engaging manner without losing the tether of the publicly known facts of the cases and the reasonable inferences about the situations. My one irritation with the book is that Held sometimes devolves into ascribing motivation to the people in the stories without any obvious evidence or apparent first-hand knowledge. These moments are distracting, and they made me wish he’d thrown open the doors and gone all the way to creative non-fiction with the story. The tidbits in here could be inspirational for other writers out there, looking for historical or pseudo-historical fodder for a narrative.