Daniel José Older: Complete Bone Street Rumba series + Author Q&A
Author photo by John Midgley
“Urban fantasy presents a tremendous opportunity to talk about what’s going on in the world right now.”
Daniel José Older is the award-winning author of both YA and adult books. In addition to the Bone Street Rumba series, his other books include the Shadowshaper series, Star Wars novels including Last Shot: A Han and Lando Novel, and more. Winner of the International Latino Book Award, he has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, the Locus and World Fantasy Awards, and the Andre Norton Award.
In the Bone Street Rumba series, Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.
Below, find the complete list of books in the series, plus questions and answers from interviews with the author.
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Bone Street Rumba Series
#1 Half-Resurrection Blues
First in the ghostly urban fantasy series by New York Times bestselling author Daniel José Older
“Because I’m an inbetweener—and the only one anyone knows of at that—the dead turn to me when something is askew between them and the living. Usually, it’s something mundane like a suicide gone wrong or someone revived that shouldn’ta been.”
Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.
One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NYCOD’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead. But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own life—and death.…
#2 Midnight Taxi Tango
The New York Times bestselling author of Half-Resurrection Blues returns in a new Bone Street Rumba Novel—a knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death.
The streets of New York are hungry tonight...
Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York’s ghostlier problems. This time it’s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn’s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals—and is bound to take more.
The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie's botánica, where she worked. But the closer they’ve gotten, the more she’s seeing the world from Carlos’s point of view. In fact, she’s starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that—because whatever is bringing out the dead, it’s only just getting started.
#3 Battle Hill Bolero
In the third from the “richly detailed and diverse” (io9) urban fantasy series, the time has come for the dead to rise up against the shady powers-that-be...
The time has come for the dead to rise up...
Trouble is brewing between the Council of the Dead and the ghostly, half-dead, spiritual, and supernatural community they claim to represent. One too many shady deals have gone down in New York City’s streets, and those caught in the crossfire have had enough. It’s time for the Council to be brought down—this time for good.
Carlos Delacruz is used to being caught in the middle of things: both as an inbetweener, trapped somewhere between life and death, and as a double agent for the Council. But as his friends begin preparing for an unnatural war against the ghouls in charge, he realizes that more is on the line than ever before—not only for the people he cares about, but for every single soul in Brooklyn, alive or otherwise...
Q&A with Daniel José Older
Q: I read that you were first a paramedic? What kind of ways did it affect you or help you with telling stories?
“It definitely had a big influence on my work. Paramedics tell great stories, so I take a lot of inspiration from the spoken voice. I think just the idea of not bearing witness to but actually being part of the process and in the midst of trauma has been an important thing in my own process as a writer.”—Exclusive Interview: Daniel José Older—Author, “Bone Street Rumba” Series (Just Add Color: Affirming Ourselves Through Entertainment with Monique Jones)
Q: Tell us a bit, from the author’s perspective, what The Bone Street Rumba series is all about?
“The Bone Street Rumba series is about the secret, supernatural world that runs alongside modern day New York City. It’s about the messy bureaucracy of death and people, both dead and alive, that don’t fit in simple boxes. It’s about seeing past the easy truths and getting into the nitty gritty messy ones. And of course, it’s about fighting evil necromancers and corrupt powermongers and soul-destroying imps and all that.”—Interview with Author Daniel Jose Older (Project-Nerd)
Q: I like your main character, Carlos Delacruz. He seems to view the world with honest clarity (when he hasn’t been drinking too much or pummeled by a ngk or after a girl). Can you tell us a little more about him? Is he based on someone you know?
“Ha! Thank you. I pulled Carlos’ voice directly from my own blog writing actually. I was a paramedic for ten years and I’d come home and post about what I’d done and seen the night before, tell this quirky and tragic and hilarious little stories, and I realized it was pretty easy, and the stories were cool, and if I just made stuff up and threw some ghosts in there, well, that’d be fiction! So I did. Carlos isn’t me, but his voice does come from mine, if that makes sense. And we’ve made some of the same dumbass decisions, but fortunately not all the same ones.”—Daniel José Older Interview (SFF World)
Q: You tell a story about attending a conference where an agent was asked about the industry’s diversity problem. What I find really interesting is what you write a bit later: “We’re not writing for editors and agents, we’re writing past them. We’re writing for us, for each other.” How do you think about your own readership?
“I’ve talked to entirely white audiences and audiences that were entirely people of color. The reaction in both has been positive, but it’s different, too. There are different laugh lines. I tell this story: I read once to an all-white audience, and they were into it. Mesmerized is the word. But they didn’t laugh once. It was a horror story, and when I’d written it on a bus in Brooklyn, I’d been cackling. When I read the same story to people of color, they were on the floor. Both audiences were into it. At one point, I was going to stop reading, and it was at a moment of tension, a cliffhanger, and the white audience said, “Don’t stop.” There’s a difference in how different audiences respond.”—An Interview with Daniel José Older (Read to Write Stories)
Q: People think it’s so easy to get published, but we all know how untrue that is.
“It’s a hustle. And it’s still a hustle. I try and tell students this and let people know that we have this idea that at a certain level, you can do whatever you want, but I get rejections plenty of times still. Shadowshaper was rejected 40 times by agents and that was before We Need Diverse Books and before the publishing industry realized characters of color can in fact sell.”
—Daniel José Older Interview (Antioch Alumni Magazine)
Q: Half-Resurrection Blues is often held up as a work of urban fantasy, and it definitely feels like a strong example of that genre, but I also saw it as this interesting blend of urban fantasy, horror, and also a strong noir element. What kinds of noir stories or writers influenced you on Half-Resurrection Blues, if at all?
“A big writer for me is Walter Mosley. His Easy Rawlins is one of the best contemporary noir series that we have, and that does it as far as the grittiness, but there’s a level of truth telling in those stories that feels raw too, and I love that. That’s definitely one of the writers that led directly into my Bone Street Rumba world.
“I remember one of his books, Six Easy Pieces, a collection of Rawlins stories. That was my introduction to Mosley, and I read it all in one night, in one sitting, and I was like, Oh my god! Because it was a revelatory read. Mosley was doing stuff I didn’t know you could do.
“Back then, I always liked noir, but I wasn’t a fanatic by any means, and I was always a little wary of reading it because I knew, in most of the literature of noir, it was full of all these kind of racist and sexist things. I felt like I always had to be ready for that, reading noir.
“And then I read Mosley and I was like, What?! He took noir and used it to talk about race, class, and gender in a deep way, and still told a fascinating, exciting story that was purely noir, in a voice that was real and spoke to who the main character really is, and not necessarily white.”—The Rumpus Interview with Daniel José Older (The Rumpus Book Club)
Excerpt from the interview with Locus:
“A city is a power-laden place, and it’s so obvious to me because I have that perspective. I’ve lived in it, I’ve worked as an organizer, and as a paramedic. I’ve seen the city from all of these perspectives that are complicated by power. A city is a crossroads—that’s something that always rings true to me, because there are all these different forces smashing into each other. Forces of race and gender and class, history and present and future and industry. All of these things are happening at a crossroads. Not to mention people at a crossroads, personalities, cultures, and change. It’s very dynamic.”—Daniel José Older: Crossroads (Locus)
Q: Anything else you want to leave the readers with?
“Urban fantasy presents a tremendous opportunity to talk about what’s going on in the world right now. Whether it’s police brutality or gentrification or black lives mattering or cultural appropriation, all these things are alive in the city. You can’t avoid them.
“For that not to be central to so much urban fantasy, for that to be basically sidelined by the larger genre of mostly white urban fantasy, is both a literary and a human failure. Why would you pass up an opportunity to talk about such a hugely important and literarily amazing and problematic conversation? All this stuff is great literature and very, very human and tragic at the same time. That’s what we’re supposed to write books about, these moments of history that change the course of things.
“The city is a crossroads, and so often what we see is the city as a cartoon or the city as a nightmare. But most of all, it’s full of humans, and full of power being taken and given and exchanged and all these things. Why would we pass up on that? Why would we erase all that life that’s happening, all that power that’s going on?”—The City Is a Crossroads: Daniel José Older on Protest Art and Urban Lit (Gawker Review of Books)