Carrie Duncan is in Cabo this month to promote it
Carrie Duncan finally wrote the book she promised when she safely left town. She’s safely gone by about five years now and the book is out. She says it didn’t take her more than about six months but that she screwed around for the first four and a half years of her retirement. Anyhow, all 312 pages of it are here now.
I sat down with Carrie in Northern California where she now lives. Our interviewer of 27 years is now in the role of interviewee. Full disclosure: This is an attempt to flog her book aptly named Gringo Gazette Follies. It’s available on Amazon and in the BookWorm bookstore in Cabo. Yeah. I’ve been enlisted to help flog.
It’s quite good and written in the style of the old Gringo Gazette.
She tells us some of the fascinating behind-the-scenes, lesser-known stories of Los Cabos that occurred in the 27 years she owned the newspaper. Over the years we often heard her threaten what was going to go into her tell-all book when she retired. She would trot this vow out whenever there was something she felt she couldn’t print that week. Some of her detractors might say there was damn little she wouldn’t print but it turns out she did hold back quite a lot.
She tells us that with almost every issue she would dither about printing something and swears that most of these conundrums were because she didn’t want to hurt anyone unnecessarily. As we all remember, she mostly adhered to the old newspaper adage, “If you don’t want to see it in print, don’t do it.”; however, sometimes people would be caught up in something that Carrie felt may not have been entirely their fault, or not their fault at all. She backed off when that happened but do expect to see it in this tell-all book along with a lot of interesting intrigue, and even some hush-hush stuff.
Much of this book is excerpts from the paper, kind of like the Gringo Gazette’s greatest hits. She claims this cut down on her workload and I’m inclined to believe her as she now lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills where she golfs, rides long distances on her bicycle, rides her motorcycle, fools around on her kayak and goes on mountain hikes. And she travels. This year she’s already signed up for 23 days in China, 12 days golfing in Portugal, and several weeks kayaking on the Chesapeake marshes and tributaries.
She claims she’s going to sneak her drone into China next month so you might want to say goodbye to her forever while she’s down here this month. Her plan, which I’m not completely on board with, is to wipe her fingerprints off the craft when she launches it, throw down the controller and run like hell if they get twisted about this eye in the sky. I think it’s safe to say old age hasn’t slowed her down any. Let’s hope she can still run as fast as when she outran immigration officials who would occasionally chase her through town. Yes, she has covered her arrest and deportation in this book. The way she tells it, it was scary, frustrating, and an entirely too up-close look at Mexican corruption at its worst. She’s going around town this month promoting this description of what was not her finest hour, so I do hope she’s still light on her feet.
Reading this book I often laughed so much I felt guilty because, in some places, it is a graphic story of the dark side of Los Cabos.
While you read you may say, “Wow! I never read that!” Or you may have forgotten, or you may be new here in Dodge, and this will fill in a lot of history you didn’t know about. But mainly it’s a stroll down Memory Lane while peeking behind the bushes lining that stroll.
She also includes some of her columns. That was often my favorite part of the paper, and I always hoped she would compile them in a book. There are also some collateral news articles from each issue, which will put the news of that week in context for you. Pictures that originally appeared in the paper also add to the memory stroll.
If you missed her book signing event, you can probably entice her to bring a copy to a local watering hole if you promise to buy her a drink. She can be reached at ca****@un********.rocks. Phone (562) 714-6735. The book is available on Amazon. It’s also available at the BookWorm bookstore on the hwy, km 4.5, next to the Holiday Inn Express.