Reading is seeing the world – past, present and future - without leaving your living room. Three Denver-based authors have been my travel guides recently.
First is Ausma Zehanat Khan. “A Deadly Divide”, the sixth novel in her mystery series, came out in 2019 but I only unearthed it from my to-read pile last month.
Khan brings global perspective to her fiction. She was born in Britain and raised in Canada by her Pakistan-born parents, who held salons for Urdu poets in her childhood home. She grew up to be a human rights lawyer, researching war crimes in the Balkans for her doctorate in international human rights law. When she and her husband, political scientist Nader Hashemi, settled in Colorado where he directs the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies, she left law and turned to writing. I’ve interviewed Khan and seen among the treasures lining the shelves of her home office in Denver a leather-bound set of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle titles, a gift from her father when she was a teenager.
All Khan’s mysteries feature Canadian police detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty. Esa and Rachel – I am on first-name basis after reading all the books in the series – have followed cases from Canada to Iran and Greece. The first Esa-Rachel book, "The Unquiet Dead," links a death in Toronto to the 1995 massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Esa and Rachel investigate a mass shooting at a Quebec mosque in “A Deadly Divide”, allowing Khan to explore the rise in nationalism and Islamophobia manifesting around the world today.
“A Deadly Divide” has plenty of twists, turns and surprises. But when I read a mystery, I am less interested in figuring out whodunit than in puzzling over the motivations and personalities of the detective characters. They are outsider characters who, in the hands of some of my favorite mystery writers (among them Walter Mosley, Dashiell Hammett, Manuel Ramos and of course Khan) help us understand what it means to be human. Khan’s Esa is a second-generation Canadian Muslim who faces discrimination and suspicion because of his religion and dark skin. His partner Rachel, an ice-hockey playing Irish-Canadian, is constantly forced to prove herself in the male-dominated world of policing.
A deep empathy runs through all of Khan’s books. She was a human rights lawyer, after all. “A Deadly Divide” is at its heart about men and women trying to understand love in its many aspects: star-crossed, collegial, romantic, at times so misguided it resembles hate.
The second book by a local author I recently finished is also a mystery that’s more than a mystery. And Patricia Raybon’s “All That is Secret” allowed me to travel in time. It is set in Denver in the 1920s, when the white supremacists of the Ku Klux Klan controlled the city’s politics and economy and terrorized Blacks, Latinos, Catholics, Jews and immigrants.
Annalee Spain, the detective at the center of “All That is Secret,” is a Black theologian who has been professionally marginalized because of racism and sexism. In her personal life, she is estranged from her father, the only parent she has ever known. Her father’s violent death is the central, but not the only, mystery of “All That is Secret.”
Annalee is a Sherlock Holmes fan. Raybon begins each chapter with a Doyle quote, reminding me of Khan’s leather-bound set. Raybon, who once wrote for the Denver newspapers the Post and The Rocky Mountain News, brings a good journalist’s knack for clear and engaging prose to “All That is Secret,” her fiction debut. Raybon has published nonfiction work that includes the books “My First White Friend” and “Undivided: A Muslim Daughter, Her Christian Mother, Their Path to Peace”, and essays on race and faith that have appeared in “The New York Times Magazine” and other publications.
In addition to uncovering secrets, Annalee is having a crisis of faith that gives Raybon’s mystery depth. Annalee – I am already calling her by her first name – is a character I want to know more about. Luckily, “All That Is Secret,” is the first of a planned three-book series. As she ended “All That is Secret,” Raybon dropped some interesting hints about what’s ahead for Annalee, setting my imagination racing.
While Raybon and Khan offer multi-layered plots, the third Denver-based author who has held my attention of late did so with simplicity.
Well, simple on its face. In "Potted Meat," Steven Dunn subtly builds a coming of age novel out of terse sentences and imagery honed until it gleams. His “Water and Power” is a companion to “Potted Meat,” following the first novel’s main character as he leaves high school, joins the Navy, sees the world and meditates on the isolation, brutality and hopelessness of war. Dunn, who won a prestigious Whiting Award for writing last year, layers his own realism and Afro futurism with material from government reports and interviews he’s conducted with ordinary Americans.
I found poetry in unexpected places in “Water and Power.” For 20 pages, Dunn lists the Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghani civilians killed in America’s war on terror. It was strangely hard to turn away from the saying of names, particularly with news from Ukraine on my mind.
Dunn was born and raised in West Virginia, where “Potted Meat” is set. He spent 10 years in the Navy – much of “Water and Power” is set on a submarine -- before coming to Colorado to study creative writing at the University of Denver. Dunn is now based in Denver and teaching creative writing at Regis University.
Deep under the ocean, deep into the psyche of a teen-ager in West Virginia. Denver during an earlier time of nationalism and bigotry, Canada in the present day. It's been quite a literary journey.