Subcomandante Marcos, a professor-turned-rebel who leads a social revolution from the jungles of southern Mexico, joined forces with a novelist to create a crime story.

BY LISA J. ADAMS
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY - Only three weeks ago, Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II received a clandestine message from Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos. The proposal: Let's write a crime story together.

Taibo accepted the unusual offer and within days, the first installment of The Awkward Dead was published in La Jornada newspaper, a leftist daily that faithfully runs the long-winded, often poetic missives on Mexican and world events that Marcos issues every so often from his hide-out in the jungles of southern Chiapas state.

Judging by the first chapter, which appeared on a recent Sunday, the novel is based loosely on Marcos' real-life story: a pipe-smoking professor-turned-guerrilla who led a 1994 uprising in the name of Indian rights and continues to champion a quieter social revolution from Chiapas.

Marcos is writing Chapters 1, 3 and 5, which will revolve around a Chiapas-based Zapatista investigator named Elías Contreras. Taibo will pen Chapters 2, 4 and 6, and will focus on the Mexico City exploits of Detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the protagonist in past Taibo novels.

In Chapter 7, the two investigators will finally meet -- at the foot of the Revolution Monument in Mexico City -- and begin a joint investigation. Neither author knows how the tale will end, however. Each chapter is spun off the preceding one, with Taibo's character responding to the actions of Marcos', and vice versa.

Taibo and Marcos already have contracts to publish The Awkward Dead in book form throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in Italy. It will appear in Spanish in the United States, where negotiations are also under way for an English version.

Taibo has said all proceeds will be donated to an as yet undesignated nongovernmental organization that works in the Zapatista zones of Chiapas.

A self-described leftist who is sympathetic to the Zapatistas, Taibo has never met Marcos face to face; they communicate using ''the method of Chinese spies,'' he said coyly. And he insists the subcomandante did not reveal any ulterior motive for the project.

''Our pact is based on the idea that we are going to write a novel together,'' Taibo told the AP. ``We all know that it will not be an innocent novel.''

The book will ''criticize certain realities that exist both in the mountains [of Chiapas] and in the urban world of Mexico City,'' said Taibo, who has turned in Chapter 2 and is now awaiting Marcos' Chapter 3. An introduction to Chapter 1 in La Jornada said the story ``promises to get into the guts of the national disaster.''

In the first chapter, we meet Contreras, who begins to recount his relationship with a character named Subcomandante Marcos. Contreras also talks of future meetings with a mysterious Chinese man in public baths in Guadalajara, which has prompted Taibo to wonder how he is going to develop that character.