RAISED IN B'VILLE, BLAKE-LOZANO WAS A RENOWN AUTHOR

 

The author James Carlos Blake-Lozano in 2003. He was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Credit...Steve Campbell/Houston Chronicle, via Getty Images

By Michael S. Rosenwald
New York Times

James Carlos Blake-Lozano, whose savage, lyrical novels about outlaws, bootleggers and gunslinging murderers resurrected the violent history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, drawing comparisons to titans of American letters like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty, died on Jan. 11 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.

His brother Rick said the cause of his death, at a nursing care facility, was pneumonia.

Mr. Blake, the descendant of a 19th-century English pirate who was executed by a firing squad, was born in Mexico but grew up in a Texas border town. There he learned that some forms of violence – in his case, decking racist classmates who called him a “greaser” – had a certain nobility.

Rebellious, nomadic and prone to divorce (he was married four times), Mr. Blake was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Before turning to writing full time in his late 30s, he had been a paratrooper, snake catcher, mechanic, swimming-pool maintenance man, jail officer and teacher.

“The more experiences a writer’s had in his earlier, pre-writer life, the luckier he is, because those experiences will compose the main well of insight he has about life, insight that of course has plenty to do with the degree of truth in his work,” Mr. Blake told Firsts, a magazine for book collectors, in 2001.

James Carlos Blake-Lozano was born on May 26, 1943, in Tampico, Mexico. His father, Carlos Sebastian Blake, the son of a colonel in the Mexican Army, was a civil engineer who specialized in building roads. His mother, Estrella (Lozano) Blake, the daughter of a Mexican horse farmer, was raised in Brownsville, a Texas border town.

The couple met at a dance hall and settled in Tampico. James had a twin brother, though he didn’t know that until he was 6 years old. It was a secret his grandmother told him.

His parents wanted him and his future siblings to be educated in the United States, so they moved to Brownsville in the early 1950s. In school – St. Joseph's Academy –  he was picked on by other students because of his Mexican heritage, he fought often.

“It taught me – though I didn’t know it till years later – that without physical courage you can have no other kind,” he told GQ.

After James completed fourth grade, the family moved to Florida, near the Everglades, where James worked as a snake catcher during his teenage years. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a paratrooper after graduating from high school.

After his service, he studied English at the University of South Florida and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He then worked a succession of part-time jobs while publishing short stories in Glimmer Train, Quarterly West and other literary magazines.

In his later years, he wrote a series of crime novels about the Wolfes, a family of outlaws who operated along the Texas-Mexico border.

Mr. Blake lived in Tucson, Ariz., for many years. In 2021, after he suffered serious head injuries from a fall, his brother Rick moved him to Florida so he could help take care of him.

In addition to Rick, his survivors include another brother, Edgar, and a sister, Christina Lucas.

Mr. Blake was once asked what it was like to be compared to Cormac McCarthy.

“That was embarrassing as hell,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “No serious writer likes to be compared, but it’s nice to be compared to the best.”