Poetic Justice : Michael Nava’s Mysteries About a Gay Gumshoe Are Populated by a Cast of Familiar Characters

The early ‘80s were a heady time for Michael Nava, lawyer, poet and mystery writer. Embarking on a career as a prosecutor with the Los Angeles city attorney in 1981, he thought he’d found nirvana: “I loved everything about it.”

Openly gay, a third-generation Mexican-American raised in the Sacramento barrio of Gardenland and a graduate of Stanford University School of Law--”I’m nobody’s stereotype,” he says--Nava was intoxicated with “the seediness of the job, the romance of being a trial lawyer, the sense that I was doing something that had social utility.”

But like Henry Rios, the tough but sensitive gay Latino protagonist and narrator of Nava’s suspense novels, Nava burned out. After three years of toiling in grimy courtrooms and prisons, Nava quit.

He left behind a cast of characters that would come to populate his fiction: the cops, the petty tyrants known as judges, the pimps and thieves and demi-mondains, and, most affectingly, the pathetic victims of crime and their unspeakably sad stories.

“The criminal justice system is a very depressing place,” says Nava. “It is a system of victims, regardless of what side they’re on. Terrible things happen to decent people, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Like Henry Rios, Nava could have become “some huge firm’s token minority partner.” But illusions die hard and, like his protagonist, Nava still wanted to do some good in the world. So he gathered up his prosecutor’s experience, got serious about writing and began producing mysteries with a message.

From the beginning, it was a financial and artistic roll of the dice; even now, with four books in print, Nava, 35, pays his bills by working days as a research attorney for Appellate Court Justice Arleigh Woods. His advance for a two-book contract from Harper & Row was just $15,000 per book.

But the payoff in critical acclaim could hardly have been sweeter. Since his first book, “The Little Death,” was published in 1986, Nava’s tight prose, sharply etched characters and fast-paced plots have won him the reputation of a rising star and captured a growing following among both straights and gays.

His Henry Rios is a kinder, gentler Philip Marlowe, the perfect mystery protagonist for the multicultural and multiracial Los Angeles of the ‘90s. Rios’ secretary, Emma Austen, is black; his lover, Josh Mandel, is Jewish; and his clients run the gamut from WASP wastrels to tough street kids.

Nava’s thrillers are faithful to the conventions of the mystery genre, but they are set apart by their insight, compassion and sense of social justice.

“Mystery readers tend to be a bit more intelligent and tolerant than average,” says Nava. “Give them a good mystery, and they’ll take the rest.”

This April marked a vindication of sorts for Nava. With the publication by Harper & Row of “How Town,” Nava completes his leap into publishing’s mainstream. “The Little Death” (1986) and “Goldenboy” (1988) were published by Alyson Publications, a small gay-owned press in Boston, after being rejected by 13 mainstream houses.

“Michael is one of my success stories,” says publisher Sasha Alyson, who also commissioned Nava to edit an anthology of mystery fiction titled “Finale” (1989).

“ ‘The Little Death’ came in over the transom,” Alyson recalls. “It is rare for an unsolicited first book to be outstanding. . . . In a lot of mysteries, the mystery is good but the writing is so-so. Michael’s work is different. He is a poet, and it shows.”

Nava says it takes him nine months to write a book--”and a year and a half to recover.” Because of his day job, he squeezes in his writing at night and on weekends, generally writing three hours per weeknight and all day Saturday or Sunday.

“How Town” (its title comes from an E.E. Cummings poem about a stultifying small town) is Nava’s bravest and most ambitious novel to date. As it opens, lawyer Henry Rios is summoned from Los Angeles to his hometown--a place in the Central Valley not unlike Sacramento--to defend a heterosexual child molester falsely accused of murder.

As the story progresses, Rios is forced to grapple not only with the whodunit elements of the story, but with the ghosts of his past and his own revulsion toward pedophilia. Together with Rios, the reader learns that most child molesters were once victims of sexual abuse themselves.

“It is an enormously courageous, intelligent and powerful work,” says author Katherine V. Forrest, the lesbian creator of a mystery series about Kate Delafield, a closeted L.A. police detective.

Forrest attributes the boomlet in gay suspense fiction--other top practitioners include Joseph Hansen, Mary Wings and Barbara Wilson--to the fact that “gay men and lesbians, initially at least, are so often mysteries to themselves.”

Nava, who came out of the closet when he was 17, says he longs for the day when sexual orientation will “simply (be viewed as) one of many features of our nature.” Until then, he acknowledges that, given “society’s unrelenting hostility” toward homosexuals, he is making a political statement by writing about a positive and affirming gay figure like Henry Rios.

In “How Town,” the fictional attorney underscores his outsider’s perspective when he bluntly informs his client, the heterosexual child molester: “I tell my gay clients the same thing I’ve just told you, and my black and Latino clients, too, for that matter. You don’t need to invent a conspiracy against you. Society is a conspiracy, and everyone who’s different is its target.”

It is a world view that stems from Nava’s own sense of having grown up as an outsider.

“I have spent my life being uncomfortable,” he says. “As assimilated as I am, I have never for one day forgotten who I am and what I am: a homosexual Latino,” never fully at ease in either group.

But Nava has no regrets.

“Being uncomfortable makes you think, and mindless prejudice sparks anger,” he says. “My fury has fueled all of my accomplishments.”

Like any good mystery writer, Nava is coy when his fans ask--as they invariably do--where Henry Rios stops and Michael Nava begins. But like most practitioners of the craft, Nava also leaves plenty of clues.

Setting out to solve the riddle, an interviewer gets little encouragement from Nava’s friends.

“Good luck,” says Alan Heppel, a Paramount lawyer who has known Nava since Stanford and describes his friend as “taciturn.”

‘He plays his cards close to the vest,” adds another friend, a scriptwriter.

Clad in blue 501 jeans, a black polo shirt and running shoes, Nava appears promptly for the noon interview outside his West Hollywood condo. Nava’s friends were right. Driving to the Cafe des Artistes in his red Honda Prelude, it is Nava who begins giving his interviewer the third degree.

“This is one of the most intimidating and least pleasant things I do,” he later says, after the interviewer gets his turn. “I’m an intensely private and reserved human being. Like a lot of gay men, I’ve lived in secrecy for so long it has become second nature to me.”

Slowly, as trust is established, Nava begins to tell his story: “I was born in 1954 in Sacramento and grew up in a Mexican-American barrio. My family was poor. I am the second oldest of six children, and I am the only one of them who made it out.

“I knew by the time I was 12 that I was gay”--Henry Rios describes the feeling as “a kind of wild loneliness and a deep, scary sense of being different”--”but the only word I had for it was queer .”

No less painful were his experiences as a Latino.

“In junior high school, an Anglo girl once asked me where I lived. When I told her, she held her nose and said: ‘Well, that explains why you smell.’ I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me.” (In “How Town,” Henry Rios has vivid memories of being barred from an Anglo friend’s swimming pool by the boy’s mother.)

But it was Nava’s homosexuality that prompted him to leave.

‘I knew it was not a good thing to be in my family situation, so I decided to get out--to leave Sacramento, get away from my family, throw myself at the world and see what happened.”

Books and education were his ticket. Like Henry Rios, who learned of “a world beyond the valley” at the local library, Nava became a voracious reader. At Norte del Rio High School, where his pattern of overachievement began, he was valedictorian, captain of the debate squad and class president.

Nava was 14 when he began writing poetry. “I fell in love with a boy in my class. And since I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, I wrote about it.” Nava pauses and smiles: “He was responsible for reams of bad poetry.”

Nava’s first tentative steps out of the closet at the age of 17 had a profound effect on his writing.

“It went against the grain of everything I knew,” he says. “I had to say to myself: ‘I am a homosexual, and I am still a good human being,’ notwithstanding what the Catholic Church, or my classmates, or my family members say.

“That act of compassion toward myself compels me to be compassionate toward others.” Even toward his character? “Certainly.” Even toward the murderers in “How Town”? “Maybe especially toward them.”

Though he spent four years as an undergraduate at Colorado College and one year translating the poetry of Ruben Dario in Argentina on a Watson Fellowship, Nava considers himself “a Californian to my marrow.” His books are set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley and Los Angeles, “and I can’t imagine living any place else on Earth.”

Nava bought his West Hollywood condo after breaking up with the Century City lawyer with whom he had lived for nine years. Life has imitated art even in his real estate transactions. The former owner of his West Hollywood condo was found suffocated with a pillow in his bedroom while Nava’s deal to buy the place was in escrow.

Nava said he felt sorry for “the poor man.” From his professional perspective, “it was a very uninteresting murder. The murderer turned himself in, and my sleuthing instincts were extinguished.” Nava says he got a break on the price, but he had the bedroom’s wallpaper stripped off and the walls painted white.

Indeed, the Henry Rios books have been an uncanny predictor of events in Michael Nava’s life. In “Goldenboy,” for example, Rios quits drinking, as did Nava.

Perhaps, an interviewer suggests, Nava should make Rios rich and famous in the next book.

Michael Nava mulls over the thought for a moment. “No, Henry Rios doesn’t need to be rich and famous,” he says, “just happy. If Henry Rios can be happy, anyone can.”