Could you talk a little about that effort? It is clear from reading The City of Palaces that a great deal of research went into it. Basically, The City of Palaces and the books that will follow are my attempt to retell a chapter of American history to prove, as if it needed proving, that we have always been a multicultural society built largely on the labor and vision of immigrants - in this case, Mexican immigrants. So I looked for another literary vehicle to explore that aspect of my “otherness.” One thing and another led me to Porfirian Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican-Arizona border, the story of the Yaquis, and Hollywood in the silent film era. At the same time, I had become more interested in my Mexican heritage and identity than in my gay identity. That’s why I wrote mysteries, not because I set out to be a mystery writer.īy the time I got to the last book in the Rios novels, I had pretty much exhausted its capacity to explore those outsider themes. This was the perfect setting for a queer Latino lawyer struggling to do the right thing in a hostile world. In classic noir novels - by Chandler and Ross Macdonald, for example - you had an outsider hero who embodied the virtues the mainstream pretended to honor - loyalty, courage, ingenuity - but rarely demonstrated. I found the American noir a perfect vehicle for that exploration. MICHAEL NAVA: When I first turned my attention from poetry to fiction in my early 20s, I wanted to write about my sense of “otherness” and estrangement from mainstream culture - as a gay man in a straight world and a brown man in a white world. What drove you, after all your success as a mystery writer, to make such a dramatic literary turn?
Now, 28 years later, you bring us The City of Palaces (University of Wisconsin Press), which is the first of four historical novels set in Mexico just before the Revolution.
Rios appears in six more of your novels - a widely acclaimed, award-winning series.
DANIEL OLIVAS: In your first novel, The Little Death, published by Alyson Publications in 1986, you introduced readers to a contemporary character, Henry Rios, who is a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer based in Los Angeles.
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