Jan Reid was a senior editor at Texas Monthly and also contributed to Esquire, GQ, Slate, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, and the New York Times. An early article about Texas music spawned his first book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. Among his fifteen other books are a well-reviewed novel, Deerinwater, for which he won a Dobie Paisano Fellowship; a collection of his magazine pieces, Close Calls, that was a finalist for the Carr P. Collins Award; Rio Grande, a compilation of choice writing and photography on the storied border stream; and The Bullet Meant for Me, a reflection on marriage, friendship, boxing, and his physical and emotional recovery from a shooting in Mexico. Reid also wrote an award-winning biography of Ann Richards, Let the People In. Two of his novels, Comanche Sundown and Sins of the Younger Sons, won fiction-of-the-year awards from the Texas Institute of Letters. Reid died in 2020. His last novel, The Song Leader, was published in 2021.
THE GETAWAY THAT DIDN’T LASTON A COOL EVENING IN late spring, Mark Jones and Francisco Perez entered Joseph’s Foodliner, a small market in northwest San Antonio specializing in homemade egg rolls (4 for a dollar) and fresh Chinese snow peas. Young, longhaired, bearded, they had apparently charted an ambitious career
By Jan Reid and Jamie Frucht