I had the great pleasure of reading an advance copy, and was struck on the first page by its literary strength, its meticulous, rich detail and the aching humanity of its characters, as well as its finely crafted plot. This December we’ll see the release of Lay Your Sleeping Head, from Kórima Press (now available for pre-order), a reimagined and substantially rewritten version of that first book. In communicating with Michael for this interview, I discovered we were both in Los Angeles during the same time period, and both considered queer bookstore A Different Light (Silver Lake location) central to our writing and reading lives. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.As a mystery writer myself, it shouldn’t be surprising I jumped at the chance to interview Michael Nava, an icon in the genre. His seminal Henry Rios series was heralded as the gold standard when the books came out, beginning with The Little Death in 1986. Particularly striking is Nava's vision of the legal system as a true instrument of justiceignoring distinctions of position, wealth or sexual preference.Ĭopyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. Through legal documents as much as police work, Rios tracks the murder's clues back to Hugh's family and its conflicts between old money and opportunists, both so greedy and eager to control the family fortune that they will sanction any form of legal trickery, corruption, even murder. In both there is a sense of the protagonist as a lost soul trying to justify another person's existence and thereby his own. Lawyer Henry Rios's loyalty to wealthy wastrel Hugh Paris, with whom he once had a brief affair, strongly recalls the male bonding in Raymond Chandler's classic The Long Goodbye. This murder mystery about a gay public defender in the San Francisco area is distinguished by good writing and by skillful adaptation of the genre's traditions.
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