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. The first novel in the Lambda Literary Award–winning series that Christopher Bram calls 'a large-scale moral portrait of one man's life,' The Little Death is at once an atmospheric noir mystery set in 1980s California and a scathing indictment of the power of old money and a legal system caught in the maws of escalating corruption.Author Michael Nava on Creating the Iconic Gay Character Henry Rios Determined to find the truth, he knocks on the Bay Area's most gilded doors, where he discovers a family tainted by jealousy and greed, warped by a fortune someone's willing to kill-and kill again-to possess. When Paris is found dead of an apparent heroin overdose, Rios is the only one who considers foul play. But no sooner does a mysterious benefactor bail him out, than Paris shows up on Rios's door-paranoid, shaken, and terrified that his grandfather wants to murder him. Rios understands lost souls a little too well and has always stayed loyal to the troubled and wealthy wastrel.

His new client, Hugh Paris, who has been arrested for drug possession, is the black-sheep scion of an important and prosperous San Francisco family-and one of Rios's former lovers. Accustomed to dealing with the minor offenses of the disenfranchised, he's reached a crossroads in his life. Henry Rios is a Latino public defender battling alcoholism, dangerously close to burning out. Murder rocks a moneyed San Francisco family in the novel that introduced ' a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir' ( The New Yorker).

The little death michael nava