A Gay Mystery Novelist

wisefolly · Sep 11, 2015

A Gay Mystery Novelist Who Chronicles the Aftermath of AIDS - The New Yorker

Nava also saw in noir a genre equipped to convey the experience of being both queer and Latino in America. “In classic noir novels,” he writes, “you had an outsider hero who embodied the virtues the mainstream pretended to honor—loyalty, courage, ingenuity—but rarely demonstrated.” Much of the pleasure of the early Rios books comes from watching Nava queer noir conventions. In “The Little Death,” Rios worries that a young man is spying on him before he realizes that he’s being cruised; later, the bad guy’s muscle takes the shape of a couple of “Castro clones.” “That was a lot of fun, to turn that stuff on its head, to see the possibility of taking the leggy, breathless blonde and instead of Lauren Bacall, you know, she’s Brad Pitt,” Nava said. In Nava’s novels, sex scrambles the usual categories of the whodunit: victim and assailant, suspect and investigator, and, above all, underbelly and élite. Eros is the great leveller, at least for a moment or two. The function of romance in noir is always to draw the detective into the crime he’s investigating, to implicate him in the narrative he’s trying to construct; in the course of the series, Rios finds himself erotically entangled with at least four suspects. And though at every point he faces hostility directed against his queerness, it also gives him access to a covert network of contacts, bound by an often secret sympathy.
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Sounds like a good noir series (and writer) to read.

CuriousArticles · Sep 12, 2015

I really like the sound of that. Haven't had a chance to look properly at the link as I'm on my mobile. I love books that turn reality on its head.

A Gay Mystery Novelist

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A Gay Mystery Novelist

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