The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

"This was turned into the film starring Humphrey Bogart. It’s about a group of miners who go to the Sierra Madre because they’ve got wind of a fabulous gold mine. Of course, they get torn apart by jealousy, rivalry and encounters with bandits. The prose is hard-boiled, almost as though Raymond Chandler had written it; a real tough-man book, as you can imagine given that Humphrey Bogart was in the film. It’s by this mysterious writer B Traven. Nobody really knows who he was, though there have been plenty of theories. He clearly knew about working conditions in Mexico and how tough and inhuman they were. There is a famous episode when the federales , the police, are challenged because they have no badges and one of them says: ‘We don’t need no stinking badges.’ Traven sets up this tough, amoral Mexico which presaged the Hollywood Westerns and plays to the fantasy that if you go south of the border, there are no more laws. It’s long been endlessly exciting for writers to fantasise about and there’s a kind of American myth that it’s more elemental and wilder across the border and men can find – or lose – themselves there. All the Pretty Horses is a more recent example of the genre. I’m not sure it ever was as wild as writers like to imagine. I also don’t want to paint too dark a picture of it, because it’s a wonderful country full of surprises, although it runs by its own rules. I suspect Mexico is altogether more complicated than English and American writers have given it credit for. There are cosmopolitan areas like Mexico City and then the desert and the jungle in the far south. That’s why for my last book, Tequila Oil, I drove in from Texas and carried on right to Yucatan in the jungle. I wanted to see the whole thing."