She was a brilliant Yeats scholar and, while unpretentious, supremely cultured. I was aware, of course, that these were “entertainments,” but because Ruth had recommended them, I was unaware they were considered unliterary. Having exhausted his work, I began to read other American and English mystery writers. Ruth an avid fan of Rex Stout and I consumed all the Nero Wolfe novels he had written to that point. I didn’t read mysteries until I was in college, when I was introduced to them by my beloved mentor, Professor Ruth Barton from whom I took the only creative writing class I have ever taken. The lawyer was as yet nameless and would remain so until almost years later when he became Henry Rios. In the down time, there was only so much studying I could endure and so, late one night, I began to scribble a scene in my notebook about a lawyer interviewing a prospective client in a jailhouse room much like the one where I was sitting. There weren’t that many arrests in our sleepy university town. At night, I worked at the Palo Alto jail where I interviewed arrestees to determine whether they were eligible for release on their own recognizance. I had just graduated from Stanford Law School, and was cramming for the California bar exam during the day. I began writing this book in the summer of 1980. I became a mystery writer, if not precisely by accident, then not by design. In a brilliant reimagination of The Little Death, Lay Your Sleeping Head retains all the complexity and elegance of the plot of the original novel but deepens the themes of personal alienation and erotic obsession that both honored the traditions of the American crime novel and turned them on their head.īelow is the Nava’s introduction for the new novel, which reveals the history behind the creation of the iconic character Henry Rios.
Thirty years ago, The Little Death introduced Henry Rios, a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer who became the central figure in a celebrated seven novel series. This month, Korima Press is releasing Lay Your Sleeping Head, an imaginative reworking of writer Michael Nava’s classic mystery novel The Little Death. Author Michael Nava on Creating the Iconic Gay Character Henry Rios
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