Mystery and History: Part One
FROM MYSTERY TO HISTORY: PART ONE
My last novel, Rag and Bone, was published 13 years ago and it marked the end of my career as a mystery writer. Last year, I finished writing The City of Palaces, the first of a projected quartet of novels called collectively The Children of Eve. These books, set in Mexico, Arizona and Hollywood between 1895 and 1929, are based very loosely on the life of the silent film star, Ramon Novarro – a gay, Mexican immigrant who achieved international fame in the 1925 version of Ben Hur – and my grandfather who was a Yaqui Indian; a tribe whose ancient homeland is in the modern-day Mexican state of Sonora.
When I tell people about this new project, they seem puzzled by my shift from writing crime fiction to writing historical fiction. Internally, however, there is perfect continuity between Henry Rios and Jose Gavilan and Mateo Flores (the two boys who are the center of my current project.) As a novelist I am less interested in genres than in my own obsessive themes and interests.
I am chiefly obsessed as a writer and a human being with the social, political, cultural and moral position of the person I call the Outsider/Insider. This person – male in my novels but, in life, just as often or more often a woman – is someone who belongs to a dispossessed minority but who nonetheless achieves some degree of status and authority within the dominant culture.
Henry Rios, for example, is a gay Latino (and also a recovering alcoholic) who is also a first-rate lawyer with a law degree from Stanford University. The Rios novels are as much about how Rios experienced his double reality (spic faggot on the one hand, learned counsel for the defense on the other) as they are about whodunit and why.
In the mystery genre, moreover, I discovered an extremely useful literary vehicle to explore my obsession with the Outsider/Insider. For in the American noir tradition, the detective is presented as the archetypal outsider; a man (he was always a man) who embodies the virtues society pretends to honor – physical courage, loyalty, decency, gallantry – but rarely demonstrates. Society regards him with disdain if not outright contempt as hired muscle, a thug, a low-life fixer. The detective is made brutally aware of society’s assessment of his status but refuses to internalize it. He moves amid society’s hypocrisies and self-delusions, fully conscious of the moral ambiguities and the corruption around him, but with a clear sense of his own moral footing and his own human and professional worth.
Moreover, the mystery concerns itself unambiguously with large issues from which most so-called literary fiction shies away; questions, literally, of life and death, of the meaning of justice and of systemic corruption.
When I began to think about writing fiction, after a long apprenticeship as a poet, I wanted to write about large issues and the conflicted position of someone who knows his value even in the face of aggressive social contempt. Ah, ha! The crime novel.
Who was better poised to occupy that outsider role than an actual outsider like Rios?
As it turned out, my insight was not an original one. The 1980s and the 1990s saw an explosion of crime fiction populated by protagonists who, in the traditional white, straight, male dominated mystery field, had been victims, criminals or comic relief. I am thinking of writers like Sara Paretsky, Walter Moseley, and Lucha Corpi, among many others. For me, this was the golden age of American crime fiction and I was honored to be part of it.
After seven Rios novels, however, I had exhausted the possibilities of the mystery novel for my own particular purposes of exploring the Outsider/Insider. I found myself slipping into the formulaic and, worse for a writer, I was bored. Writers, like other artists, must grow in their craft and continue to challenge themselves or they stagnate. So I bid farewell to Henry Rios.
My obsession with the Outsider/Insider, however, remained just as strong. Indeed, as demography has begun to change America’s complexion from white to brown, as women have begun to outnumber men as breadwinners and professionals, and as LGBT people have begun to win recognition of their civil and human rights, the question of who is an outsider and who is an insider in America has never been more pressing, challenging or fascinating.
As I looked for a way to continue to explore this question, I found myself reaching back into the past.
In my next entry I will talk about the genesis of my current project.
