Michael Nava's Blog, page 2
March 26, 2018
Lay Your Sleeping Head
Thirty years ago, The Little Death introduced Henry Rios, a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer who became the central figure in a celebrated seven novel series. In a brilliant re-imagination of The Little Death, Lay Your Sleeping Head retains all the complexity and elegance of the plot of the original novel but deepens the themes of personal alienation and erotic obsession that both honored the traditions of the American crime novel and turned them on their head. Henry Rios, a gifted and humane lawyer driven to drink by professional failure and personal demons, meets a charming junky struggling to stay clean……
October 9, 2016
Lay Your Sleeping Head
Forthcoming December, 2016, from Kórima Press.
Pre-Order Now
Thirty years ago, The Little Death introduced Henry Rios, a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer who became the central figure in a celebrated seven novel series.
In a brilliant reimagination of The Little Death, Lay Your Sleeping Head retains all the complexity and elegance of the plot of the original novel but deepens the themes of personal alienation and erotic obsession that both honored the traditions of the American crime novel and turned them on their head.
Henry Rios, a gifted and humane lawyer driven to drink by professional failure and personal demons, meets a charming junky struggling to stay clean. He tells Rios an improbable tale of long-ago murders in his wealthy family. Rios is skeptical, but the erotic spark between them ignites an obsessive affair that ends only when the man’s body is discovered with a needle in his arm on the campus of a great California university.
Rios refuses to believe his lover’s death was an accidental overdose. His hunt for the killer takes him down San Francisco’s mean streets and into Nob Hill mansions where he uncovers the secrets behind a legendary California fortune and the reason the man he loved had to die.
May 3, 2016
The Making of Henry Rios
I became a mystery writer, if not precisely by accident, then not by design. I began writing this book in the summer of 1980. I had just graduated from Stanford Law School, and was cramming for the California bar exam during the day. At night, I worked at the Palo Alto jail where I interviewed arrestees to determine whether they were eligible for release on their own recognizance. There weren’t that many arrests in our sleepy university town. In the down time, there was only so much studying I could endure and so, late one night, I began to scribble a scene in my notebook about a lawyer interviewing a prospective client in a jailhouse room much like the one where I was sitting. The lawyer was as yet nameless and would remain so until almost years later when he became Henry Rios.
But let me back up.
I didn’t read mysteries until I was in college, when I was introduced to them by my beloved mentor, Professor Ruth Barton from whom I took the only creative writing class I have ever taken. Ruth an avid fan of Rex Stout and I consumed all the Nero Wolfe novels he had written to that point. Having exhausted his work, I began to read other American and English mystery writers. I was aware, of course, that these were “entertainments,” but because Ruth had recommended them, I was unaware they were considered unliterary. She was a brilliant Yeats scholar and, while unpretentious, supremely cultured. She would never give me junk to read. (And anyway, hadn’t so magisterial a figure as T.S. Eliot proclaimed that poetry, my undergraduate end-all and be-all, was “only a superior form of entertainment”?) As a reader of fiction, I did not distinguish between “literary” and “genre” fiction. I read novels that gave me pleasure and that spoke to me. Those are still my criteria for fiction.
After college, I continued to read mysteries appreciatively if randomly, hopping from Ross Macdonald to John D. MacDonald, from Josephine Tey to P.D. James. Just before I started law school in 1978, I discovered the novels of Joseph Hansen. At that point, he had published three of his twelve mysteries: Fadeout (1971), Death Claims (1973), and Troublemaker (1975). Although Hansen’s protagonist, David Brandstetter, was an insurance investigator rather than a private detective, the tone was classic American noir as was the setting, Los Angeles and environs.
Fadeout begins with Brandstetter standing on a wooden bridge in the rain looking down at the swirling waters where, a couple of weeks earlier, a car belonging to a man named Fox Olson, insured by Brandstetter’s company, crashed through the railing. The mystery: Olson’s body has not been recovered. Without proof Olson is dead, Brandstetter’s company will not pay the claim.
“Fog shrouded the canyon, a box canyon above a California ranch town called Pima. It rained. Not hard but steady and gray and dismal. Shaggy pines loomed through the mists like threats . . . Down in the arroyo water pounded, ugly, angry and deep.” The mood set, we are introduced to Brandstetter who is carrying a near-suicidal burden of grief. He describes driving across the bridge “with sweating hands. Why so careful? Wasn’t death all he’d wanted for the past six weeks? His mouth tightened. That was finished. He’d made up his mind to live now. Hadn’t he?” And then, a few pages later, we learn the source of his grief: “Bright and fierce, he pictured again Rod’s face, clay-white, fear in the eyes, as he’d seen it when he found him in the glaring bathroom that first night of the horrible months that had ended in his death from intestinal cancer.”
Wait, what? Rod? My pulse quickened.
Brandstetter is grieving the loss of his lover, a man named Rod Fleming. In chapter six, we get the whole story. In a flashback, Brandstetter, recently discharged from the army at the end of World War II, enters a furniture shop on Western Avenue in Los Angeles to buy a bed. He sees, across the crowded room, as it were, a young salesman, short and dark, with a dazzling smile. “ ‘I want you,’ Dave thought and wondered if he’d said it aloud because the boy looked at him then, over the heads of a lot of other people. Straight at him. And there was recognition in the eyes, curious opaque eyes, like bright stones in a stream bed.” The young salesman, Rod Fleming, sells Brandstetter a ridiculous white wicker bed which he ends up sharing with Brandstetter for the next twenty-three years until his cruel, painful death six weeks before Fadeout begins.
How can I explain to younger people the impact of Joe’s work on a gay reader like me? Maybe some context helps. I read Fadeout in 1976 or 1977. At that time, there was not a single city, county or state in the United States where an employer could not legally have fired me for being gay or a landlord not refused to rent an apartment to me. Indeed, in almost every state, I could have been imprisoned for having sex with another man. The American Psychiatric Association decreed homosexuality was no longer a mental illness in 1973, and California had only repealed its sodomy law in 1974. Even so, almost universally, gay men and lesbian women were still outlaws, widely regarded as sick, sinful or criminal. Yet here was a brave, loyal and competent protagonist in a genre in which gay men had been relegated to evil caricatures. I was hooked.
In 1979, I entered Stanford Law School. In my first year, I met a young lawyer named Matt Coles. Matt, then twenty-eight, shared office space on Castro Street, and sometimes collaborated with the first gay legal organization in the country, Gay Rights Advocates. He came to Stanford to give a talk about the legal rights of gays and lesbians which were, in 1979, basically nonexistent and we briefly dated. (We remain friends after all these years.)
One of our shared passions was for mysteries. As we lay in bed or ate breakfast at Coming Home restaurant on Castro Street, we concocted the plot of a mystery novel we would write together about a young gay lawyer. Although we never got around to giving our protagonist a full name, we did come up with a title for the book: The Little Death, a double-entendre that alludes to both murder and ejaculation. We thought it was a clever gay twist on a classic noir title. Matt reminded me recently that the plot of our novel involved a massive insurance scam but all I remember is that at one point our hero stumbled into a notorious leather bar on Folsom Street called Febe’s.
Midway through my third year I was hired at the Palo Alto jail to be the “O.R.” or own recognizance officer, a job I described at the beginning of this essay.
I loved the jail. After three years of sitting in the back tiers of Stanford’s amphitheater classrooms and trying to care about the Rule Against Perpetuities and the Administrative Procedures Act, here was the law operating at its crudest and most compelling level. Palo Alto’s jail was a windowless collection of cells and rooms in the basement of City Hall. I sat at a beat-up wooden desk in a big room between the reception area where prisoners were brought in through a sally door and the cell where they were strip searched. After being dressed in jumpsuits, they were either brought to me to be interviewed or I was called back to the holding cells to talk to them.
The atmosphere of the jail was relentlessly male and, from my point of view, unmistakably homoerotic. The jail was permeated with the raw stink of men, what I would describe in The Little Death as “a distinct genital smell.” I had encountered that stink in only one other place—the gay bathhouses in San Francisco. Also evocative of the bathhouses was the scene in the strip search cell—a group of men watching another man strip and display his body in postures that included bending over and spreading his cheeks. I tried, as the nuns had admonished us in catechism class, to keep “custody of my eyes,” but I couldn’t help but peek from time to time. To a horny twenty-three year old gay boy, the jail could be a bizarrely sexy place which was undoubtedly one reason I liked hanging out there. But I also liked the realness of the place, the cynical and casually profane jailers, the corn-rowed trustie who sullenly mopped the floors in the middle of the night, the vile decaffeinated coffee that was all the inmates were allowed to drink, the inmates themselves, some touchingly young and innocent appearing, and others who looked like they had been there cheering on the snake when it talked Eve into biting into the forbidden apple. After years of reading noir novels, I felt as if I had stepped into the pages of one.
And so, one June night in 1980, I began to write what became the first pages of The Little Death. They were my homage to those opening scenes in classic noir fiction where the beautiful, seductive dame shows up at the private eye’s shabby office with an implausible story and troubles no sane man would want to touch. But in my scene, the private eye is a burned-out, gay public defender and the dame is a handsome gay boy brought in on drug charges who claims to have no memory of the events that led to his arrest. The lawyer is skeptical but also, in classic noir style, immediately smitten. And that, for the next four years, was as far as I got.
(The essay in its entirely appears as the Author’s Note in Lay Your Sleeping Head, the reimagined version of The Little Death which will be available from Korima Press in fall, 2016.)
March 29, 2014
From Sf Civic Center blog of culture and politics
http://sfciviccenter.blogspot.com/201...
February 24, 2014
Two old writers, talking
Chris Bram and I, old soldiers of the LGBT wars, interview each other
: http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/24/author2author-michael-nava-christopher-bram
Gay and lesbian writers talk about writing
A pride of gay and lesbian writers talk about the importance of our literature
From La Bloga
A number of Latin/a writers, including me, offer words of wisdom, counsel and consolation
August 13, 2013
Recent media
http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2013/06/24/author2author-michael-nava-christopher-bram
“Michael Nava” in Red-Inked Retablos (University of Arizona Press, 2013), by Rigoberto González
The name Michael Nava is inextricably bound to Henry Ríos. For the longest time I wasn’t compelled to read his books because they were murder mysteries—a genre I loved but had outgrown by the time I started college. In my Chicano Studies classes his name wasn’t mentioned even though he published five of his seven titles while I was earning my three degrees. My Chicano mariposa friends did know about him, though, and kept bringing up how cute he was and how charming that he was an activist lawyer who wrote books. I went to the local used bookstore and bought the book with the best author photo, a hardcover edition of The Burning Plain (1997). I also snatched up two paperback editions of The Little Death (1986) and Goldenboy (1988).
Before I made the big move to New York City in 1998, I drove my two cats and boxes of books across the California border, to my brother’s house. And thereafter, every time I visited, I picked up a book or two to read on his lawn. On one occasion I devoured the Henry Ríos paperbacks, enthralled by the plots certainly, but also by the moral struggles of this regular gay guy who just wants to do what’s right. It seemed unfair suddenly that Nava had been excluded from the reading lists of my education—my mariposa education. Here, finally, was a complex representation of a man whose inner demons had less to do with his sexuality than with the social fabric of truth and justice. But most importantly, Henry Ríos didn’t define himself strictly through a single cultural lens—as either gay or Chicano—he was both. And he didn’t qualify his profession through either identity because he was both.
It’s important to note, however, that Nava is celebrated primarily by the queer literary community—the Chicano/Latino literary establishment has yet to catch up. I recall that back in 1997, while I was an artist-in-residence in celebrated Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya’s La Casita in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, my host was telling me he was going to establish a Chicano Mystery Writers Guild because they were growing (he was two titles into his own Sonny Baca series). When I asked him who would be invited, he listed Manuel Ramos, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Lucha Corpi.
“That’s four of us,” he declared.
“What about Michael Nava?” I suggested. He looked at me blankly.
I’m happy to report, however, that in 2005, a teacher-scholar from Tucson, Arizona, wrote Chicano Detective Fiction: A Critical Study of Five Novelists. Without Nava’s seven queer murder mysteries, Susan Baker Sotelo’s analysis of Chicano literature’s “21 whodunits” would be sadly lacking in scope and complexity. That same year, Brown University scholar Ralph E. Rodriguez released Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity, in which the works of the same five novelists (Nava, Anaya, Corpi, Hinojosa-Smith, and Ramos) are profiled.
Michael Nava and I had the opportunity to discuss these matters when we crossed paths three times within the same year in 2010—at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Denver, at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, and at the National Association of Chicano Studies’ Queer Conference (where I picked up the term jotoranos from the hip queer Xicano kids) in Eugene, Oregon, where he presented the keynote address, taking time out of his campaign to be the first gay Latino judge in San Francisco. I congratulated him on all counts, reminding him that we needed him much more than he needed us.*
*[In my judicial race, I won the first round only be defeated in the run-off where I was outspent two to one by the incumbent who had recruited San Francisco’s legal establishment against my upstart campaign. MN]
March 13, 2013
From Mystery to History: Part 2,
From Mystery to History: Part 2
About 15 years ago, as part of the research for a memoir of my childhood, I found myself in Tucson, Arizona in a neighborhood of cinder block houses and unpaved streets called Old Pascua. This neighborhood had been a village once, the settling place of the Yaquis, a tribe of Mexican Indians whose homeland is a river valley at the edge of the desert in the Mexican state of Sonora. At the end of the nineteenth century, Porfirio Diaz, the dictator of Mexico from 1876 to 1911, sent his army into the Yaqui homeland to seize their land, much like the United States government did with its indigenous people. What followed was one of history’s small and unnoticed genocides. The Yaquis were reduced from a population of 30,000 to 3,000. A handful of survivors made their way into Arizona.
My grandfather, Ramon Herrera Acuna – born in Arizona in 1905 – was a child of one of those refugee families. There was no mistaking his heritage; he looked like the Indian on the old Indian head nickel. Yet, he never spoke of his family or the Yaquis. Indeed, he rarely spoke at all; there was a pent-up quality to him. I was a bastard boy and this hard and silent man was the nearest thing I had to a father.
Toward the end of his life, he softened a bit. At one point in high school, I read the books of Carlos Castaneda about a Yaqui “shaman.” I described Don Juan to my grandfather and asked him whether he had known anyone like him. My grandfather said the books were “bullshit.” Yes, he said, there were Yaqui brujos, but the true history of the people had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with suffering. He left it there.
Suffering. An understatement. Barbaric Mexico, a 1904 indictment of the regime of Porfirio Diaz, included a chapter entitled: “The Extermination of the Yaquis.” In it, the author described some of the methods by which the Mexican government waged war against the Yaquis – killing women of childbearing years to prevent further Yaqui children, giving Yaqui infants to Mexican families to raise as Mexicans, enslaving Yaqui men and working them to death on hemp plantations in the Yucatan. Yaquis were burned, hanged, shot and drowned in the Sea of Cortez.
No wonder my grandfather was so filled with rage and reticence. Like other survivors of genocides – Jews, Armenians, and indigenous peoples everywhere – guilt and horror were his gruel.
That night in the desert, for the first time in my life, I saw dozens of people who looked like my grandfather and something in my heart broke open, some sorrow I did not even know existed; the DNA of grief passed down to me from my grandfather.
I had come for the culmination of the Yaqui celebration of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, called in the language of the Yaqui, the Waehma. For what had sustained the Yaquis during the decades of tribulation was their profound religiosity and their personal identification with the Catholic pantheon, particularly Mary and Jesus. But their faith, their religious practices were far from orthodox. Their Christian beliefs coexisted with a more ancient spirituality represented by the Deer Dancer. He enacted a rite of sacrifice and resurrection – the deer which gave itself to the hunters that the people might be fed and was then resurrected in a paradise called the Flower World – which had allowed the Yaquis to accept the Jesuit priests’ story about Jesus’s sacrificial death and resurrection four hundred years earlier.
Thus, while some Yaquis danced a re-enactment of Jesus’s passion in the dust outside the whitewashed church, a deer dancer danced the older story in a ramada off to the side. As I went back and forth all night between the church and the ramada, I knew that here was a story here that I profoundly wished to tell.
At the same time, another story began to work its way into my imagination. The story of a young refugee who, with his family, had been driven out of Mexico during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), arrived virtually penniless in Los Angeles in about 1915 and, within a decade had become, with Chaplin, Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford, one of the first generation of Hollywood movie stars. His name was Ramon Novarro.
I knew only two things about Novarro before I saw one of his movies: he was a homosexual and in 1969 he had been savagely murdered by a pair of teen-age hustlers whom he had invited into his house. Kenneth Anger had devoted a salacious chapter to Novarro’s murder in his Hollywood Babylon and Thomas Tryon, the gay actor-turned –novelist, used the incident in Crowned Heads, his Hollywood roman a clef. But about Novarro the actor I knew nothing until I saw his most famous film, Ben-Hur, projected on the screen at the Castro Theater – a legendary movie palace from the 1920s – with musical accompaniment.
Novarro was exquisite. Exquisitely beautiful. Exquisitely vulnerable. His was not the slab-of-beef heroism of Charleton Heston’s performance in the 1963 version of Ben Hur. Novarro’s performance was nuanced and sensitive and riveting. The film itself, the intrusions of language absent, unfolded with the clarity and strangeness of a deep dream, as if the images were being dredged up from the audience’s collective unconsciousness. This was the beginning of my fascination with Novarro as an actor and, more generally, with silent film.
The two stories came together in my imagination when, long after his death, one of my aunts mentioned that grandfather had once told her that in the 1920s he had lived in Los Angeles where he had worked as an extra in the movies playing Indians in Westerns.
The writer’s “what ifs” started to work their way into my unconscious that “foul rag-and-bone shop” as Yeats called it, where all the ladders start.
What if someone like Novarro had met someone like my grandfather in Hollywood when they were young and poor and struggling to survive? What if the Novarro character – who I called Jose – was in love with the young Yaqui – who I called Mateo? What if there was another character – a young actress – to complete the triangle?
These “what ifs” unfolded against the backgrounds of my other interests and obsessions. My love for Los Angeles which in the 1910s and 1920s was still a kind of paradise where the air was scented with orange blossoms and thyme. My fascination with silent films and the first generation of world famous movie stars, particularly Mary Pickford, a brilliant actor, shrewd businesswoman – the only woman to every own her own studio – and a kind and tragic figure. The startling fact that, at a time when white America was deeply, openly and unself-consciously racist and xenophobic, the movie industry in Hollywood was partly run by East European Jewish immigrants and its stars included the Italian Valentino, Mexican Novarro and Japanese Sessue Hayakawa (all ethnicities who were openly discriminated against); even Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, was Canadian. It got to me thinking about multiculturalism and the suppressed history of the United States, a nation built largely on the backs of the disenfranchised and the despised.
My plan was to explore all of this in a single novel, set in Hollywood, between 1916 and 1922. That was the plan but 15 years later one novel had become four and the first one, The City of Palaces, opened not in Hollywood in 1915 but in Mexico City in 1895. I will explain how this happened in the next installment.
