 And we thank you for all being here tonight. I already have shared in the chat, and I'm gonna do it really quickly one more time. There's a doc that has library news, but also links to all of our presenters and to their books. And you can get them at the library or from your favorite local bookstore. And we also put their mega list. We had to put it in two lists because it was so big. And yeah, some great read, and great recommendations. And we'll continue if books and resources come up, we'll add those to the doc as we go. San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramutushaloni peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that the Ramutushaloni understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Ramutushaloni tribal people for enduring commitment to our mother earth. The indigenous protectors of the land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramutushaloni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramutush community. We recognize to respectfully honor Ramutush people, we must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge and how we care for San Francisco and all its people. And there is in that document a great resource and reading list for first persons and particularly Bay Area first persons. So check that out. And if you know what native land you're joining us from, you can put that in the chat box. And now I'm gonna breeze through a couple of San Francisco Public Library upcoming events. Next week we have Lucy and Tech Johnson talking about Toscanini. And we have Arthur Ed Fuller and Gary Grossman talking about their latest book, Red Deception. In partnership with the Museum of African Diaspora, we have the Continuing Series Conversations Across the Diaspora with Wollis Soyinka. And the 23rd, we have the amazing Floror Yucanto. I'm gonna get this one by then, I know I am. Floror Yucanto is a 24th street corridor, literary institute, and they are really campaigning to maintain all the amazing literary arts down on our 24th street corridor here in San Francisco. And they are just a great group of people and they'll be doing some reading and talking about their mission. And that's actually live. So you can come to our library and see this. And it's also gonna be hybrid. So you can also tune in and zoom if you can't make it to the library. But we would love to see your face on the sixth floor. So come on down. Carolina de Robertas and Julian Delgato Leopra talking about the president and the fraud and writing. And then, yes, this is all part of Viva. We have a lot more coming up. We are also breezing into Filipino American History Month poets. We have a night of nine authors. All reading is gonna be intense. So all amazing Filipino American authors with their latest books and they will be reading from that. Film screenings and then are on the same page for September and October is Carla Cornelville Vincentio's The Undocumented American and she will be in combo with Jonathan Blitzer on October 26th. And that is it. And so without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to Michael Nava. And we always welcome Michael back. He is such a great panelist and brings all the best writers and people to us. And we're just a huge fan of his at our library. Michael is the author of an acclaimed series of eight novels featuring gay, Latino, criminal defense lawyer, Henry Rios, who the New Yorker called a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir. He is the recipient of seven Lambda literary awards in the gay mystery category and the Bill Whitehead Award for lifetime achievement in LGBT literature. His most recent Rios novels, Lies with Men was published in April by Amble Press and LGBTQ Press, of which he's also managing editor. The Washington Post review of the novel called Navas Master, Master of Genre, a master of genre. Michael, thank you so much again for joining us always. We appreciate your knowledge and your wonderful connections in our community. Take it away. Thank you, Anissa. I wanna thank the library for sponsoring this panel and also Mystery Writers of America of North Cal for who is our co-sponsor. And I just wanna get into it because we have a lot of very interesting territory to cover with these fantastic writers who I look forward to meeting in person one day. Lucina and I have Matt, but everyone keep your mic on so we can actually have a conversation. So we're doing this on September 15th because among other things, tomorrow is Mexican Independence Day. So I chose this date deliberately. So let me do the introductions and we'll get to, I've got a couple of questions I wanna start us out with and I hope we do have a conversation. So do feel free to chat, you know, don't let me be the, not necessarily the ringmaster here. So Lucia Corfe, born in Mexico, is a teacher, a poet, a children's book writer, a memoirist and I believe the first published Latina Mystery Writer. Her acclaimed Gloria de Mosco mysteries include eulogy for a brown angel, crimson moon, cactus blood, black widow's wardrobe and death at solstice and are set against the background of the Chicano-Chicana civil rights movement. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in Oakland, California, where for many years she taught in the Oakland Unified School District. Alex Segura is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and comic books. His crime fiction includes the Miami-based Pete Fernandez Mysteries which include the Anthony Award-nominated novels, Dangerous Ends, Blackout and Midnight Miami. His short story, 90 Miles, just received the 2021 Anthony Award at BoucherCon for Best Short Story. His forthcoming novel, which we released on May 15th, which is Alex's birthday, Secret Identity combines two of his passions, noir and comic books. Bestselling author, Brad Meltzer says of Secret Identity that it's a new and beautiful exploration of the genre revealing the darkest depths of our true selves. Raquel de Reyes' forthcoming debut novel to be published on October 12th, is Mango, Mambo and Murderer. It introduces us to Miriam Guinona-Smith, an academician who becomes a reluctant cooking show star when she returns with her family to her native Miami. Her book has already garnered advanced praise as a delicious page turn of a mystery and a flavorful blend of culture, crime and Caribbean cuisine, which reminds me, Raquel, when we get to you, would you please explain to this Mexicano, what is sofrito? Yes, not a problem. Richie Navias' young adult book, Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco is the 2021 recipient of both the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award in the Young Adult Book Categories. His adult novel, Hitch to Death Rattle, was praised by no less than Sarah Peretzky as something that's been missing from recent fiction, a vivid, loving look at the city, at city living from the street view and fierce and funny with a light touch that masks Navias' inviting social commentary. His other books include the Anthony Award nominated, Noir Yurekin and Roach Killer and Other Stories. It is truly a great, great pleasure to be with you. And... Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Thank you for the invitation. Absolutely. Sure, let me start. As you know, the terms Latino, Latina, Hispanic, Latinx cover a lot of ground when applied to immigrants or the descendants of immigrants from the Spanish-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere, which includes everything from Argentina to Mexico and the Caribbean. So in your opinions, is there a common culture that unites us? If so, how is that reflected in your writing? Let me start with the grand dame, Lucha. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. I think that what... If we are Latinos writing, you know, what we have in common is the general language of, you know, the Spanish. But if you ask me, you know, to say that there is one in Mexico, for example, you know, if there is one Spanish that is spoken all through Mexico being the same, well, basically in the way that Spanish has rules and we all follow them and we all kind of... But when it comes to the culture itself, you know, in Mexico you have very many different regions. And I am from Veracruz, from a very small town in the southern part of Mexico, the state of Veracruz near Tabasco. And there you have a particular accent and of course a particular kind of music too. You all have heard the Bamba, right? So, the regions in Mexico are so different sometimes. You have been in Mexico, many of you, right? Yes. Yes. And you know what I'm talking about? You go to Guadalajara, that is almost like, you know, something else. Mexico City, forget it. You know, and so, Veracruz, of course, people immediately think of La Bamba and the music because that is, you know, really so, so powerful. And so authentic. And Veracruz being the first state in Mexico that was founded by the Spanish because that's where they arrived. So, we have La Malinche, who is Doña Marina in her naming after she was baptized, who was actually, we call the mother of La Raza, La Madre de La Raza, because she was so important. And actually, my first four poems that I wrote are called Doña Marina, you know. And I wrote them by the Marina poems. And they were the first four poems that I felt that I had something in me. I didn't start writing until I was, you know, going through a divorce, had a young child you know, I was at Berkeley, I was alone, I had no family. And so, out of desperation, out of not knowing what to do, go back to Mexico, I already had a child. I couldn't go back to my parents' home really. Should I stay? I had just been learning English, you know, all of that. So, out of that came the need to communicate. And because I had very few friends and I was working and I had a child, my child, Arturo. So, I began to write just every night just to see where I was at. To find myself in this new world and to make sense of everything and decide finally what the future would be for myself and for my son who was born in Berkeley, California. He's a true Berkeleyan. And so, anyway, that was my beginning. I started just writing every night after, you know, I put away everything that's ready for the next day. My son was asleep. And I just began to write whatever was happening to me. So, it was like a need to do it because I had no one else to talk about these things. And so, that's how I began. One day I began to see that there was something going on in me that I felt at home doing this every night near midnight. And that then that would eventually come to be real to me and I began to write whatever. I think many of us start writing because we're filled with words that we can't express in the other way. So, Raquel, what do you think about this commonality issue? Well, you know, I do have a culinary cuisine coming out and so it would be nice to say food but that's not necessarily the case. I mean, I think the thing that connects us all is colonialism is who colonize these lands. And if we move it to what I'm more familiar with which is the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, those commonalities are very much, yes, with food, which is something I do talk about in my novel that's coming out. But also, I think something greater than that is that we do have, I mean, we have the language. And there's a sense of family, you know, and there's a strong desire to keep the family intact and to do whatever needs to be done for the further generations. And I find that that is, I see that wherever I am. You know, I see that in Mexico City, I see that in Uruguay, I see that in Argentina. You know, I see that in the Dominican Republic. I mean, I see the sacrifice that the parents make for the further generations. And I do think that that is something that is common to us and I don't know why, though. You know, and so maybe that's the big question is why is that so important? Well, I mean, I think that's a really interesting point. You know, I remember talking to some white writer about the anti-hero. And I said, the anti-hero is really the vice of white writers because I come from a community that's still aspirational that actually still has to believe in the American dream to the whole anti-hero of Trump is it's a luxury of people who have arrived. Alex, what do you think about this? I mean, I think, yes, language is the common factor, but even that morphs and changes wherever you are, like even within countries, you're gonna have different dialects and different tones. And, you know, I think the big mistake often made is treating it as a monolith, whether it's for political reasons or cultural reasons and even cuisine. I've had, you know, I'm Cuban-American and I've had people tell me, oh, you know, Cuban food's really spicy. And it's just like this idea that you just, because you know one person that happens to be Latinx or Spanish, you know them all. And that's something we always have to fight against. We always have to, and even as a writer, I can write to my experience with comfort. I can write about the Cuban-American experience and I can write about that. But if I'm writing outside of that, I have to do the work. And I think it's that idea that it's this monolith that I think we still have to push back against, you know, with charm, like we always do. Like I was saying, you know, we're united, let me put it this way, two thirds of us have been colonized and conquered and enslaved by the other third of us. You know, we have that colonizer as part of our, all of our names and the language we speak with our abuelos. So that's within us, this conflict. And I think even though the considerations as like Alex was saying, and Lucha, like within Mexico from county to piece to piece, there are different considerations. Cuban-Americans considerations can be different than Puerto Ricans, different than the New Yorkans, different than Argentinians. This is, again, we're not a monolith. But I think there's a sense of loss, a melancholy sense of a past from having lost land, lost beliefs, lost language, lost people, lost freedom. All this is in our cultural memory. It links all of us. And I think when I bring that to my work, all my characters are pretty pissed off because they have this sense of loss. There's a concept in Korean culture called Han, H-A-N, at least the Englishized version of it, this beautiful sorrow that they all have. And I think a lot of Latinos and Latinx have this sense of there was something before that we had it that we no longer have. And with my characters, they're all pissed off about that. So that actually, so I go in as I write them and that helps me develop who they are. And I try to focus, for example, on their issues that I think some, you know, as Alex, as you were saying, we're still aspirational. So for example, like in hipster death rattle, it's about gentrification and displacement. This, you know, not having enough to own your own home and having to be moved out. And that's something that a lot of us, certainly a lot of Latinx Americans have to deal with in the United States, well, and then all these other issues in the other countries, all the way up and down the Southern cone, Mexico, this constant, all these revolutions, bad governments, this is something almost a common theme in Latin America. And I think that continues from just a history that is full of being disenfranchised, being marginalized, being enslaved, all the issues are there. So I think that's part of what links us. I'm going on and on, but I try to bring that into my work. And I think, again, we're not a monolith as Alex says, but I think there is a flow through of loss for all of us. Yeah, I think it's a tapestry. I think there's things that unify us, you know, the commonalities, but yeah, totally. I love that. And I agree. No, I agree. And I hadn't thought about it like that. And I really should have, you know, being Cuban American, you know, our home. Yeah, we look at it 90 miles, right? Alex, we look at it and we can't get to it. Yeah, there's always that deep sense of other. I mean, Raquel probably grew up listening to like Cuban radio, like Miami radio, you know, it's this other part of you that you can never have. I mean, it's just there and it's just something you become used to, like there's always gonna be a piece of my family that we can't put together. I also think that we're united by Catholicism as not necessarily spiritual practice, but as a cultural influence. And to Richie's point, I think that the particular kind of Catholicism that evolved, at least in Mexico, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it really promotes a certain fatalism. Oh, that's interesting. I thought you were gonna say it was a syncretic that it had been mixed in with African religious, but why would you say fatalism? That's interesting. Because Catholicism teaches us that the better world is not this world, but the world that we will inherit and that the poor have what they call the special option. That the poor will be glorified in the world that comes after, which can be where there's, so don't try to improve your state in this. So I find that there's a certain fatalism, a certain psychological fatalism, I think, with Lucha. I think we see it that way, but what we're talking about is, I mean, the Aztecs had in the Mayans, too, had their floricantos, you know. But, and that was great poems you can still, you know, if you go to the museum in Mexico, you will see some of those things. And, but the problem was when suddenly the Spanish came and that was cut off. Then it was the vision, la visión de los vencidos, and those were the Mexican people in general. So it's difficult to say that, you know, that didn't continue, it did something to, I think it was a Spanish, actually, the Spaniards, who were a bit fatalistic despite all of their, you know, and that was passed on to the culture, to a culture that was a culture of the vencidos. And floricanto became rather a poetry of tears. And sorrow, you know. So that kind of runs through every Mexican, I think, runs through as a duality, as a second persona we all have, you know, and we keep hidden. And that is interesting when it comes to the poetry of women, of Mexican women. You know, so anyway, I'll stop there. So let me pass to this question about why we write crime fiction. What is it about that genre that speaks to you as a writer? Why did you want to do it? And did it speak to you specifically, you know, as a Latino and Latina writer? So Richie, let's start with you this time. Okay, I've got two main points about that actually, about what made me a crime fiction writer. First, I was ingesting a lot of comic books and reading Chandler and Hammett and loving all that. But a substitute teacher gave me a murder on the Orient Express in seventh grade. Changed my life. Very different kind of writing. I mean, private, just Chandler and everything was kind of juvenile in a way, you know, it's very male, but here was something that was a whole other world. Very fascinating for me. On the other side, I have a pet theory about crime fiction writers and that they are drawn to it because they experienced crime at some point early in their lives. When I was a kid, my father was a bolotero, a numbers runner. And every afternoon, he would sit in the kitchen by the phone and take numbers from people. And he would take us, and usually me because I was the baby, to pick up the money and drop off the money. And one time he comes back, I used to stay in the car, he came back and he tossed a wad of cash into my lap. And he said, that's $10,000, you ever see that before? And, you know, I have never, I had never seen that before, haven't seen it since. But I had a familiarity. And I think this is why a lot of people get into crime fiction as well. There's a familiarity or a comfort with that dark side of the world that's attractive. And so you get drawn to it. I think there is a tension. Whoops. We last read you, Chris. He's frozen. Maybe I'll come back. Yeah, okay. Well, I just want to riff on that because I had a similar experience. Did I froze? Yeah, yeah. Okay, there you are, you're back. Yeah, I was just saying that, yeah. Latinx people, we're often accused of crime and so we're writing about crime fiction is like, should you really keep us adjacent to that? Shouldn't you just make us all nice role models? And I think the Kremlin's got them again. Okay. I'm going through. Sorry, so I'm... Whoops. You froze again. Raquel, what's wrong with you a bet as a child? Well, no. You know, the dad who hands you this wad of cash. So literally $10,000 just like Richie. To be like, we used to work a flea market on Saturdays. Like in the 80s when it was the hustle and you're trying to make money, you work all week and then you go to the weekend to do this flea market and do the hustle, right? And I remember one time, I guess we had a good run of it and he handed me $10,000 just like you and me and so that I knew what it felt like. Okay. So that I understood hard work and money. And I won't tell you what all that was, but I will say that growing up in Miami, in the 80s, crime was everywhere. I just finished watching cocaine cowboys, the documentary on Netflix. And I watched it and Billy Corbin is one of the gentlemen who made the documentary and I shot out a tweet that was like, watching this, it brought it all back to me, the trauma of it. And I would tell people about this stuff and it was unbelievable. And so to see it and realize that, no, that actually was what was going on on the day to day that we were witnessing and living through and it didn't matter if it didn't touch you directly, it was so adjacent to you that it was within reach. And so yeah, and I liked that theory that you have because I think you're spot on. So Lucha, I think I read that you also were an Agatha Christie reader and that that was part of your inspiration for Gloria Damasco, where does she come from? You know, I came to the mystery, to the crime story in a different, from a different, you know, what happens was this, I was, I started school very young because my brother would live in this tiny town, you know, everybody knew everybody else. Was supposed to start school, grammar school and he wouldn't go without me because we were, you know, we were always together. And so, you know, because it was a very small town, my father went and talked to the principal and said, you know, he won't come without her. But she's too young. She said, well, you know, okay, well, finally they decided my father and the principal that I could have just been a little corner quietly. If I was quiet, I could come with him. Of course, he was going to get tired of bringing me to school, right? Taking me to school. He didn't get tired of taking me to school. And I, in my little corner, my father would work, would correct my homework every day because I was a non-existent student. I did not, I was invisible. But I sat in that little corner and I learned everything of the first grade. My brother went on to second grade and I went with him in the same category, you know, of non-existent, you know, just a little corner. And I learned all everything about that. I learned to read and write and this and that. So that by the time I had to go, you know, to the first grade, I knew everything about the first grade and the second grade. Of course, you know, I lived in a small town. They had to call, you know, somebody in the capital, you know, to see if he was okay. He was legal to have me take the test and for me to go on to the third grade. They did not accept that, but I did go to the second grade. And by the time I went to the third grade, my third grade teacher, I was reading very well, you know, to my age, to my, you know. And she decided that I was going to get bored and that she wanted to teach me some points that I could recite, you know, and during school. So school parties and get-togethers and all that. And so I started and she showed me how to decline that poem with your hands, with gestures, with this, you know, the tone of voice that you had to use for this or that, at some point, my father, because she was teaching me mostly this revolution, viva la revolucione and all of that stuff. And so, you know, my father went to the principal, the teacher and said, you know, I want her to learn all the kinds of poetry. There is such beautiful poetry, you know, that I think she should. So they said, okay, you know. And so I started reading poems from, you know, South America, from everywhere, Spain, you know, Mexico. And so I completely got submerged in that. But that's my beginning as a poet, you know. My beginning as a crime writer, it's a different one. I could read so well that my father, of course, you know, he said, he asked me to read to him because he was having problems with one eye and he couldn't read the paper. And he asked me to read, choose from anything in the newspaper that I wanted to read to him. And that included poetry and everything. I mean, there was a literary part of a page that all newspapers in Mexico had, you know. So I would read from that. But also, but he said, but you cannot read from the crime page. And he would take it out, hold it, put it in his pocket and get rid of it. But I was so interested and curious about the crime page. I would go, he didn't, he wouldn't, you know, he wouldn't burn it, he wouldn't have nothing. He would just throw it in there. So I went and I would get that and I would look and I would read, you know, under my bed sometimes with a little, you know, all these things that were so forbidden and the forbidden fruit is always delicious. So I started, but then, you know, as a child really you get bored with all the same thing over. All las tripas del hombre porque lo, this and that, porque lo acuchillaron y todas las tripas estaban sobre la carretera and et cetera, et cetera. And I thought, I got bored of the same descriptions all the time, you know. But then I became interested in one, the first time that I thought about the history story, the crime story. There was a woman who had married a very, very lecherous and, you know, awful man. And this was in another town, you know. So I was reading the newspaper, Paquina Roja and then it was described how she had put a, gotten these, all these yerbas and she had made a mancurje of, you know, all kinds of poisons and everything and she gave it to the husband. But what happened was that she hadn't gotten, she hadn't gotten the poisons right and the guy didn't die, you know. He survived all of that, but he was kind of crazy. Well, she was said, you know, her punishment was going to be to always have to serve the needs of that crazy man and she could not attempt again to kill him. So that was the first time that I thought there was an intelligence behind this crime. It wasn't just, you know, Gucci Yasus and all of that. Or a quick death, you know, with a pistol. No, there wasn't an intelligence behind all that. And that caught me. So that was just the thought of it. And I think that was my beginning as a crime story, although it would take me 20 some years after that to divide my first crime story. Alex, what about you? Yeah, I mean, Raquel touched on this a little bit, but in Miami, it's almost kind of like the white noise, a sense of bad things happening or crime. And, you know, watching cocaine cowboys did bring a lot of it back to me, but it always felt like ever present. You'd watch the news as a kid and it was just constant, whether it was riots or crime or violence. And I mean, my parents, their first house was in Florida city before, you know, when it was not a very safe place to be. And they would joke, you know, they stole everything from your room, except you and the crib. They stole your crib, you know, like they broke into the house so many times. So it was kind of this thing. You just figured that, you know, crime was present, ever present and obviously things got better, you know, and what have you, but it was always kind of in the back of my mind. And I was a kid that grew up on the pulps, you know, comic books, sci-fi, pulp crime novels, true crime. I read The Godfather way too early. I think I took it off my abuelo shelf at like eight. And I was a, I was just a reader. We're all readers, so I would read, but I don't regret that, but it definitely like set me on a path. And I think the reason I got into writing crime fiction was a love for the genre and a love for true crime, especially, you know, bringing, you know, I use a lot of true crime for inspiration in my work, especially in the PI novels, but it was also the lack of seeing myself, you know, when I wrote my first Pete novel, I didn't see anyone like me. I was, you know, the Latinx characters were the funny sidekick or the drug dealers or the criminals. And I loved crime fiction because it could transport you to somewhere else. I could see Baltimore through like Laura Lipman's eyes and I could see DC through George Pelicanos' eyes, but I still had that sense of, what about me? You know, where am I in this? You know, where, you know, there's always a supporting character, but there was never any protagonist that I could relate to as, you know, a Cuban American who had this blended culture but also was learning, you know, just coming of age. And so that's what spurred me to write. It's, I think the passion for the genre would always be there, but I think, and it was presumptuous. It was like the hubris of youth, like, well, I'll do it. You know, I will fill that space, but, and obviously after I spent more time, you know, you start to realize that there were so many great writers, you know, Godelina Aguilera Garcia was writing about Miami, Edna Buchanan had a Cuban American protagonist in her PI series. So it's, it was, that was big, a big motivator for me to try and just kind of add to that chorus, but also to fill a space that I personally was feeling as a reader. So, let's, let's stay with you for a second. I want to talk about Secret Identity, which is your upcoming book, which is, I loved it. Oh, thanks. So in Secret Identity, a young Cuban American woman comes to New York from Florida in the 1960s. 70s, yeah. 1970s to work in the comic book industry because she wants to write comics, which is like, it ended up itself a really unusual setting and she's also gay. So can you talk about comics and your own work in that genre and your inspiration for Commonwealth ends? Yeah, I mean, I never expected it to happen again, but like when I started writing my Pete novels, Pete kind of showed up. He walked into my mind and that, that was that. And then you just kind of let the character bumble around and that becomes the story. At least that's how it works for me. And, and Carmen showed up for me and she was fully formed. And I knew she was from Miami like me and I wanted to tell the story of someone trying to break into this industry at a time when comics were not so prevalent. Like now, I mean, now we have like Ant-Man movies. We have like Loki on TV. Comics are ever present. And if I could go back in time and tell 12-year-old Alex, like there's gonna be a Hawkeye show, I would not believe you. It's just like, because for so long, comics were this insider-y, like second side thing that nobody really talked about it. You didn't say you were a comic book fan. You would not be popular in school. It was like some different kind of currency. So I wanted to stop at a time when comics were at their low point. This was before there were comic shops, before it really started to grow as an industry and people would write comics to go before they did something else. You'd write comics and hopefully get a gig writing a novel or working on a TV show or doing something different. But I wanted to show Carmen's passion as a contrast to this low point for the comic book industry. So she loves it so purely and she just can't get a foot in the door because she's a woman because comics was very much a boys' club at the time and it's still in many ways, still a boys' club in some ways. And so she approaches her boss at this company, this third-rate comic book company and asks him to give her an opportunity and he just says, look, I can't give you a job. You're my secretary. What would people say about that? And so the only way she sees to getting in there is by ghostwriting a story with a colleague, this guy Harvey, who is a very ambitious junior editor and he promises her, look, we'll get you credit. Don't worry, we'll figure it out. I just want your help. And then he's murdered. And so she has to not only reclaim this character who's become a hit, who's become like the flagship title of this company, but she has to solve the murder of her friend. And interspersed in the comic or in the book, our comic book pages of the comic she writes. And I think we have a lot in common. I have a lot in common with Carmen. She's from Miami, she's Cuban-American. There's a lot of things we don't have in common. I'm not a queer woman. There's things that I would have to, I had to research and I obviously know comics very well. I've worked in comics for 20 years, so I know the industry, but I also had to do, it was the most journalistic book I've had to write. I had to speak to women that worked in comics in the era. I had to speak to other people that worked in comics in the 70s before I was born to just give me the context of what the contrast is between comics now and comics then. And it was a very different industry. It was an industry in kind of teetering on the brink. People thought comics were dying because nobody went to the newsstand to buy them anymore. You didn't have comic shops or that secondary market. You didn't have that fan culture yet. There's a comic book convention in the book, but it's a very early one where it's kind of something you just do in a hotel lobby as opposed to now taking over the Javitsen or San Diego Comic-Con. So, and I wanted to play with the idea of creation and controlling your ideas and intellectual property and using that as a motivation for murder I thought was really intriguing and having that kind of shift from prose to comics and the meta-conversation happening between the two mediums was a lot of fun. Yeah, and the comic pages are spectacular, by the way. Yeah, Sandy Jarrell, who's like an amazing artist and I've worked with him on a few other things, but he also got the period, right? It looks like a Frank Miller, Neil Adams vibe. It's got, and the lettering, the letterer used a font that resembles hand lettering because back then they didn't have digital fonts and lettering, it was all done by hand and by pencil and so he recreated like a hand-drawn font and so it really feels like from the time. We have questions, but I really wanna get to my questions because I have a question for each of you about your books and we'll try to get questions from the audience at the end of this. I'm Raquel, Mungo Mambo and Murder might be classified as a cozy mystery and that's a description I've always found a little condescending and since it's usually applied mostly to women writers also a little sexist. What do you think, how do you think of your book? What are the takeaways you hope for your readers to get? Well, I do think, well, I was a big cozy fan for sure, but what, you know, a weird thing happened with cozies. I would say that I was a traditional amateur sleuth fan. That was what I read. I read a lot of Elizabeth Peters. Of course, I read all of the Add to the Christie, you know, because that was what was on the shelf at my local library and then, you know, what let's say late 90s, early, you know, late 90s, the 90s really, you know, we moved from amateur sleuth into cozy, which is very much about setting. It's very much about you're gonna fall in love with these characters in these settings and you're gonna follow them over the course of the series and there's going to be a large character arc for your main character. And then there's going to be all these series of murders in between, right? And I was game and I went through that, loved it. There was always a fun, you know, character and setting to find. And then something happened that just within the industry what they kind of latched onto, all cosies had to have a hobby, you know, if it was quilting, if it was yarn, I don't know, like candle making, there was like everything, right? And I feel that that changed the readership and the industry has been catering to that readership, but now that readership is changing again, thankfully, because that's what happens. I mean, things come in waves, right? And things hopefully always evolve, right? And I think with this new wave of writers who are coming in that it's changing and we had a discussion on one of the groups that were all in that somebody mentioned it was edgy cozy. And I don't know that that's the case, that it's edgy, but there is something that's changed about it. One of them is location, there's a lot, I remember when I first started writing, I tried to sell myself as I'm writing a city cozy. So we're not in a little point town, you know, I wanted to write it in Miami. You know, Miami has community, why not, right? That didn't go over so well, that's the reason why it took me so long to get a contract. But anyway, I think people need to remember that, I'm sorry to interrupt you, is that these are marketing terms, like how you're writing the story that is coming from you and Richie's writing his story, we're all writing our stories and then they get marketed and shelved in some way. Right, and your cover tells you what it is. So my cover is very much fits into that. You know what you're getting, right? But you're also getting something new. You know, my cozy has a good bit of Spanish in it because that's how we live in Miami. We live in two, if not three, if not four languages at the same time. And that makes it a little different and that makes maybe the core reading the readership that the publishing industry is maybe still thinking that they're marketing to. Maybe that's not the readership anymore. Do you know, like there's something going on and there's change afoot, I believe. Can't happen fast enough, Richie. Hipster Death Rattle combines, hi. Yeah, hey. Yeah. So Hipster Death Rattle combines current social issues like gentrification and the slow exploration of print media with classic tropes of Norr fiction where a reluctant protagonist who's almost an antihero gets pulled into a web of crime and corruption. And in some ways, Tony is a descendant of Rick in Casablanca, I think. Oh, thank you. So who are what were your influences in devising this particular story? Ah, so yeah. I had gone to college to become, well, first an astronaut but then I decided I was going to become a crusading journalist. And then my 19 year old self would be very disappointed that I ended up writing celebrity puff pieces and trade magazine articles about light bulbs. Cause that's the way life went for me but there was still a sense of wanting, I had this frustrated sense of wanting to do something to change problems in the world. And so that's where Tony's, the idea of Tony came from. And by the way, his name is Tony Moran on purpose. It's Tony Moran, but you know, it's purposely ambiguous so that someone just looking at the back cover would go, oh, it looks like it's about an Irish guy. Right. This just in case to broaden my market. But the idea came, I was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was heavily, was mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood in the 70s and 80s and 60s, going back to the 50s. Generations of Puerto Ricans lived there. In the 90s it started getting gentrified by hipsters. And I had come back from college and I saw this happening and it filled my heart, my soul with bile. I was immensely angry. Everything I knew was being ripped apart. There was this sense of entitlement from these people coming in, friends and family had to, had with force to move out. In fact, my family had to move out because of the increasing rents and cost of living there. So I wanted, because that journalist was still in my heart, I wanted to do something. And so I wrote, I started writing, scribbling something, but it was mostly a screed. I couldn't form it. It was perhaps too close to me to make a story out of it. And it was only years later, about 10 more years down the road where I really started getting more into crime fiction where I realized, well, this is the hook. This is the way I can hook myself into the story. Crime fiction is wonderful in that all those wonderful tropes are very flexible. You can hang a lot of things on those and you can call them traditional. You can call them noir. You can even call them a thriller using a lot of those same tropes. And, but you can use them as a backdrop to examine something else. This is like when you have, in a funny way, when they do cozies or the amateur sleuth books, it's a way to, for example, to examine the quilting world or certain communities. And that's, I mean, you're hanging certain tropes, but you're changing the background. So here I was using a typical thriller structure, but I used it as an opportunity to talk about gentrification and displacement because it wasn't being talked about. There were some articles about it. Of course, my idea was to change the world and to stop it when I first came up with, yes, I will fix this. And of course, it was far too late by the time I had even noticed that the machine was already running and the city certainly wasn't gonna do anything about it. I live in a city that belongs to the developers. So, but that was the gestation of the story. It involves hipsters, it doesn't, I really try not to vilify them. They're also just looking for a home. I just killed them in the book. I killed them in the book, yeah, sure. I mean, I was also working out some of that bile. I was trying to like work, I mean, that's what writing is for, writing is your exercise or demons. But at the same time, I try to show, it's a myriad of different voices. But yes, Tony is our New Yorkan protagonist and we follow him through as he tries to figure out, even in his slacker style as an anti-hero who doesn't really wanna do anything as he's pulled into this mostly by guilt just because he kind of has to his ex-girlfriend, his mama pushing him. And hopefully that will at least make people aware of these issues. Thank you. So I think we have a couple of questions. And this is how we're gonna handle questions. Are they gonna be in the chat or are you gonna tell me what they are? We can do anything you would like to do, Michael, but I do see Cheryl head has her hand raised. If we wanna unmute Cheryl, we can definitely do that. Let's do that. Hi, Cheryl. Hi, Cheryl. Hi, Cheryl. Where's Cheryl? There she is. Cheryl, show us your face. Hi, Cheryl. No, you won't see my face because I'm in bed. That's true. It's really a great conversation and to hear the variety of pathways that you've taken to get to your writing has just been amazing. So I really don't have a question, just I'm in all of all your stories and I enjoy your work so much. That's all I have to say. Likewise, Cheryl is an amazing writer. Thank you, Cheryl. Cheryl head is an amazing African-American and gay writer. So thank you for being here, Cheryl. Do we have any other questions? If not, I have other things I wanna ask. There are no questions at this moment, but I'm sure they'll come in now that we've opened this gate. So... You've answered them all. Let me ask. So one question I had is, I send it out to you, is it's interesting to me that none of our protagonists are cops. So what's that all about right now? Me, okay. Well, my main character is definitely not. She's an academic and I did specifically write her as an academic PhD to be aspirational because I think that that's very important, especially for a Latina. Yeah, well, why? I mean, in Miami, if my main character was a police officer in Miami, she would have to be corrupt. I mean, I would have to play that card because that's literally in the news today at every single day and not to disparage, but there certainly still is an element of that. So, you know, what I want to do in my crime fiction is to have justice served. And I can't do that with a law enforcement character. One, the system that we have does not ensure justice, right? And two, I don't know that that would be realistic for my setting, to be honest. So, yeah, and I think very much so that justice is not a straight line and I think that with a police officer it's very much investigate, arrest, go to court and we think that that's the end of it, but that rarely is the end of it. I mean, it rarely is. So, Alex, Petra Dandes is a reporter and Carmen is like an aspiring comic book writer. So, what do you think about the absence of cop protagonists among Latinx writers? I know that there's one of us who does a cop, but I'm not aware of it. Yeah, I mean, I think for me it was whenever you dive into a genre like PI fiction that is so loaded with tropes, it's you choose the ones that you want to honor and echo and you kind of invert the other ones to work for you. I was always, I love private eye novels and private eye stories, but and Carmen is in many ways an amateur detective. She takes on the role to solve the crime. She subverts the law. She's kind of that night errant, but not the same as the PI. And for Pete, I hate the idea of the heart-drinking PI. I don't think there's, you can't have three martinis hop in a car and save the day. It just doesn't work. It only works when Raymond Chandler's writing it and it's beautiful prose and you are hypnotized by the words, but in reality it's not going to work. So, I wanted to counterbalance that and show Pete as a recovering alcoholic, someone who's actually going through the process of recovery and that arc is his journey. But in terms of being a police officer, I was also a little jaded because it felt to me like every private eye was an ex cop or an ex detective, grizzled ex homicide detective, booted out of the force because of something that went wrong that wasn't really their fault. So, I started racking my brain about what could this person do that gives him the same kind of inquisitive nature and ability, but isn't necessarily a cop. And I have a journalism background and I think I'm really particularly proud of the newsroom stuff in Silent City because it feels really genuine and of the time. And I also wanted to show a PI learning how to be a PI. I didn't, you know, a lot of my favorite series, you start with an established character. You never really get Philip Marlowe's origin story. And Lou Archer is Lou Archer from the beginning, you know. So I wanted to show the arc of a character becoming a private eye. So Pete's never really officially a private eye until the end, spoiler alert. Until the end of Miami midnight, he decides that he's going to do it. And in terms of the cop, you know, like Raquel said, if I had made him a cop, he would have to have been corrupt just by playing the averages and it's not a judgment. It's not, you know, it's just the way it's on the news. You know, you can just look at it on the news. And I think there is one good cop in the stories and it's Pete's dad. And he's almost like this mythical figure. And part of the story was kind of exploring how he wasn't perfect either. So I'm really, in fact, intrigued by the gray areas of morality, the gray areas of decisions and making challenging decisions and making the hard choice and victories that aren't full victories. So that was part of the journey. And especially how it wove in the police too. Richard, did you ever consider writing the book with a cop protagonist? I have an issue with authority figures. So that would, that's probably not going to happen. The cops that I do write about are a little unsavory. My first experience with a police officer was when I tried to use a bus pass in the subway and I got a ticket and I didn't get the tough love that you see in movies where they say, okay, young man, you know, that kind of romantic spirit of the cop. Puerto Ricans have had a very dicey relationship with cops in New York City. Puerto Rico has been under the thumb of the United States for quite a long time. And then there was an independence movement with the FALN. And there was a guy named Oscar Lopez Rivera who was arrested back in the 70s. And then he served plenty of time, obviously quite clearly tied to certain bombings. Obama, a President Obama community sentence, but police were livid. And what they didn't want was justice. What they wanted was revenge against this guy. And that really, that's just part of the way the police certainly in the last couple of decades, a few decades had become more and more militarized in New York City. So things like the Adner, Louima case or the Central Park five, they're agents for the state. And it's quite scary, especially the last few years, the way cops are, they seem to just follow orders. And so I don't have a great trust of them. So I would never write a straightforward cop. I could write about a noir story about a cop who is corrupt. And that would come from my gut, but I could never, it would be very difficult for me to write a, Hey, I'm going to save the day and everything's all right. I know that there are good cops because they quit the department and they tell people later on, oh, this is, there's these quotas and this racial profiling that's going on. But for me, I guess I'm just too cynical about police officers to ever make them a protagonist or a hero. Thank you. So Luther, let's close with you. In eulogy for a brown angel, you open on the day of the 1970 national Chicano moratorium where the journalist Reven Salazar was in fact murdered by police. He was shocked by a member of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, correctly. So, but you do have a sort of sympathetic police character, the detective in there who, who helps Gloria. Yes. So talk about police, police in your novel. The police. Well, well, I mean, there is obviously the private cop, you know, which is a detective, right? There are quite a few in besides Gloria. Gloria actually has, has formed the, you know, joined someone who was a policeman but quit and decided to go into private, you know, I don't know exactly what he thought. But anyway, they could, they meet and at some point they become, they have an agency together. And so, you know, he has a lot of, with not a lot because there haven't been a lot of, Latino and, and Chicano cops, you know, and so, especially in Oakland. So, but, but there are now quite a few. And so that kind of opened the door for me to be able to, you know, go into that and explore it. Because then, you know, Gloria Damasco and Justin Escobar, who have now an agency, Detective Agency, also have friends they grew up with, they went to school with, in some cases, that joined the police department in Oakland. So, but they're still Latino, you know, they're still that Latino difference. And so that, that was very interesting for me to, to explore. And from the very beginning, I tried to focus on those that do right. And then, you know, the other ones, the Maliantes, you know, they're going to come up because they, they're going to get into the action, you know, but anyway, because in the community, there is a lot of, of course, you know, there's been so much aggression. The police against, you know, the, the people, you know, the Mexican people, the Chicano people, the Latin Latinos, you know, and this is why I was fascinated with the Chicano, national Chicano moratorium in March in Los Angeles, you know. And I, I had nightmares when I finally realized who was going to be killed because this is a young boy, you know, the victim of all that. And it happens during the March and it broke my heart, but I couldn't say no. I had to accept that I love my characters and I, I love even my murders, you know, like we all know. So, you know, it was difficult. It was difficult to, to do that. And, and I think that tension is what pretty much got into the novel. As a mystery, I've been told, it's a very well-written story and this and that, blah, blah, blah, but there is really very little mystery in the whole thing, you know. So I took that to heart. And I, I love people when they tell me things about, you know, how they see the work and what they believe that I'm doing or not doing, you know, I was breaking a lot of rules of the mystery story, although I had written what those rules were. And I was pretty aware that I was doing that. And I was taking my chances. I mean, I would suffer for it, but that was okay. Because that's what I wanted to do. That's what my characters demanded from me. So then, you know, it became a lot easier to, to deal with all that because my detectives are, although they have people, they know who are their friends or in the police department, you know, you know, you know, so they're real cops. And that you can see it more and more in towns, you know, like Oakland. Thank you. I think we've run over. I hope that's okay on yourself. Oh, of course it is. You can stay as long as you want. I have to go watch the Giants play the Padres. My second cousin is pitching for the Padres. Oh, wow. Fantastic. Yeah. Although I'm rooting for the Giants. My family trouble. I just want to thank you all. I mean, what a pleasure. I wish we could. I wish you were all here and we could just sit around and talk for hours about this. This was fun. Thank you. Thank you for each other. It's been so wonderful. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. And thank you, Anissa. Thanks everybody. Good to see you, Alex. I'd like to have you all back for a publishing talk. I think that I got like a little pre. Channel talk and it was exciting. So keep us in mind and library community. I'm putting the link in there one more time. We had a question and all those links are there and you can watch this again and share it with your friends on YouTube. Thank you everyone. And we'll see you again. Bye everyone. Bye bye. Have a good night.