All the Yage in Reno is the second novel in what the Spanish critic Phillipe Cordova called the "Essential Dan Landes novels" - those four magical realism detective stories that Robert Rahula wrote during his years living in Panama (Bathhouse Stories, All the Yage in Reno, Exigent Circumstances, and Uninvited Guest) - but the fact is, the character of Dan Landes appears much earlier in Robert Rahula's novels. He first appears as a minor character in Island of Misfits, and then again in One Last Fling. But it was not until Bathhouse Stories that Dan Landes emerged as a true protagonist and as the embodiment of antagonism between the North American and Latin American cultures. In his essay The Hero's Journal, Robert Rahula wrote: "To be a hero is to be conflicted, because the essential conflict of humans is the subduction zone between our rational analytical world and the invisible emotional world of the Fates. One plate is invariably forced beneath the other until the pressure becomes too much. When I talk about the inherent faults of the hero, I'm talking about actual faults, not metaphorical ones. " Yet, it is easy to question Dan Landes as a hero of anything. Forced to resign from his detective job in Los Angeles in disgrace, he seeks refuge in Central America, only to flee back to the