What kind of city is this Denver, Colorado we hear reports of? To those of us who inhabit distinctly grimier, grittier cities, far off Denver can appear dreamlike, pristine, virginal. Clear blue skies, fresh crisp air, the Rocky Mountains just over there in full view! You can’t miss them; they’re massive! Only 715,000 people too – the “Mile High City” apparently (I may have misunderstood the origin of that appellation however – its height above sea level apparently). Turns out though it’s also quite the crime writing city too…so forget the 1995 box office bomb Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead here’s a few Things to Read in Denver if You’re Curious…
Let’s start with the undisputed Queen of Denver crime fiction, Stephanie Kane. Born in Brooklyn, Kane came West as a freshman at Colorado University. She became a corporate partner at a top Denver law firm and she once ran a karate studio in Boulder. Automat, A Perfect Eye and Object Lessons are three crime novels set amidst the art world and featuring Kane’s character Lily Sparks. In Automat (2020), a young actress playing the woman in a movie of the famous Edward Hopper image “Automat” (you know the one – all alone, green coat, mustard-coloured hat) is brutally murdered at the launch of The Denver Art Museum’s new blockbuster Hopper exhibition. Cue Conservator of Paintings Lily Sparks, who also has a sideline in crime solving. In a Perfect Eye (2019) a murder in Denver eerily resembles a painting by the famed Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. Then, in Object Lessons (2021), artists Adam and Eve Castle bring their miniature dioramas to Denver to train cops in crime-scene investigation. But then a string of murders follows that appear connected and linked to the installations. Call Lily Sparks again.
Kane has also written the Jackie Flowers series, several of which take place in and around Denver and Colorado. For instance, Extreme Indifference (2008) sees University of Colorado co-ed Amy Lynch, a daughter of wealth and privilege, disappear, kidnapped, and then reappear by the side of the road only to die soon after being found and, crucially, just before she can reveal her kidnapper’s name. Jackie Flowers gets the case. Dyslexic, Jackie still got through law school against the odds, worked in the public defender’s office, and now has her own practise in a Gothic Victorian mansion in Denver.
Of course if there is a queen, then there must be a king…and in Denver that potentate is Rex Burns, author of the Devlin Kirk Mysteries trilogy. Burns, born in 1935, served with the Marine Corps, earned a PhD from Minnesota U, and then spent most of his teaching career at the University of Colorado, retiring in 2000.
In Suicide Season (1987) Devlin Kirk, a law-school dropout and ex-secret service agent is called into to find who is sabotaging the industrial giant McAllister Enterprises. Kirk doesn’t much like McAllister and he doesn’t much like the case either, but beggars can’t be choosers and he really needs the cash. When the prime suspect, company director Austin Haas, is found dead in an apparent suicide, corporate shenanigans becomes a murder case. Kirk is back in Parts Unknown (1990). With that McAllister money he and his new partner “Bunch” Bunchcroft are Denver’s finest industrial security experts. Nestor Calamaro, a young illegal Salvadorean immigrant, whose family is close to Bunch, has disappeared. Kirk can’t afford any pro bono work, but Bunch convinces him. Then all roads lead to Antibodies Research, a biotech start-up whose work is shrouded in extreme secrecy. Finally we reconnect once more with Kirk and Bunch in Body Guard (1991) with the duo looking into employee theft at Advantage Company where there is also rampant on-the-job drug abuse. Kirk sends in an undercover operative who winds up dead while Bunch, takes a job working as a bodyguard for a man who claims to be hunted by Japanese assassins.
Burns is also the author of the Denver-set Detective Gabe Wager novels. We first meet Wager in The Alvarez Journal (1975), a novel with a real feel for its period – Detective Gabe Wager and his rookie partner spend their nights in the Mile High City trailing dealers, making buys, and acquiring informants, in the hope that a small arrest could turn into a major case. There’s smuggled marijuana, links to California and Seattle and some dealers who really think it’d be better if Wager was dead.
There are eleven Gabe Wager novels in all, all set within the Denver Narcotics Squad. They take any number of dark angles on Denver’s underworld. Book 4 in the series Angle of Attack (1979) see Wager in the middle of a war between Denver’s Italian and Hispanic crime syndicates. In book 5, The Avenging Angel (1983) it’s a radical Mormon group refuses to follow its church into the modern world, killing to protect their way of life. Other books tackle strip clubs, professional rodeo, corruption at City Hall, home grown terrorists, drug gangs and, in the final book in the series, The Leaning Land (1997) the murder of a Native American on Colorado’s Squaw Point Reservation. The Gabe Wager series has really stood the test of the time and reveal a perhaps grittier Denver than we might know nearly 50 years after the series started.
John Dunning was a Denver Post police reporter in the 1970s and from those experiences he created his Cliff Janeway novels. Janeway is a Denver homicide detective and collector of rare and first editions. The five-book series starts with Booked to Die (1992) where Janeway looks into the murder of a book scout passing through Denver. The series roams around a bit – Seattle, Baltimore – and all have an antiquarian book theme in one way or another.
Barbara Nickless has series featuring former Marine Syndey Rose Parnell and her K9 partner, Clyde amid the Denver Major Crimes unit. Sydney starts out as a Special Agent in the railroad police but then joins Major Crimes. The series starts with Blood on the Tracks (2016). Kids are going missing, and gangs are suspected while Denver is buffeted by storm in Dead Stop (2017), then a case moves between Mexico City and Denver in Ambush (2019) while the city’s elite are getting bumped off in book four, Gone to Darkness (2020).
Denver writers really like doing series…. Kate Allen’s Alison Kaine four-book series starts with Tell Me What You Like (1993) and lesbian cop Kaine investigating a murder at a Denver S&M bar that looks like a hate crime. In Give My Secrets Back (1995) Kaine has to look into the bathtub drowning of a top lesbian erotica author while also getting involved in Ms. Leather Colorado. Accidents looks murder to Kaine in Takes One to Know One (1996) which feature a little side trip to New Mexico and finally, Just a Little Lie (1999) with shenanigans at Denver airport.
By now you may be in need of a cozy series. Well Colorado provides. You could try Leslie Caine’s Domestic Bliss Mysteries set in picturesque Crestview, Colorado. It’s an eight-book series with murders, Colorado and an interior decoration theme!
A few more Denver set crime novels:
- Erika T Wurth’s White Horse (2022) introduces us to Kari James, Urban Native, a fan of heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and dive bars, particularly Denver’s White Horse. There, she tries her best to ignore her past and the questions surrounding her mother who abandoned her when she was just two years old. But Kari wants to find out what happened and tracks down her Auntie Squeaker, her disabled dad and her dysfunctional childhood wherein a mystery lies.
- I suspect many people, like me, were introduced to Michael Connelly by his 1996 novel The Poet, his first non-Bosch book. Then we went back and read the earlier Bosch novels and were hooked. In The Poet, Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News looks into his brother’s apparent suicide. Of course it’s more complicated.
- And we should, note Denver Noir (2022) in the brilliant Akashic Noir series promising “mile-high misgivings and perils.” Stories encompass the city’s dark side, mountain views and its roughneck Gold Rush past. Contributors include Peter Heller, Barbara Nickless, Cynthia Swanson, Mario Acevedo, Francelia Belton, R. Alan Brooks, D.L. Cordero, Amy Drayer, Twanna LaTrice Hill, Manuel Ramos, Mark Stevens, Mathangi Subramanian, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Erika T. Wurth.
And finally… I first came across David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, in Denver Noir. His novel, Winter Counts (2021), is fantastic. It starts with Virgil Wounded Horse, a local enforcer on the Rosebud Native American Reservation in South Dakota having to deal out some punishment. Heroin has made its way onto the reservation and hooks Virgil’s nephew. Following a lead to Denver, he finds that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. Any novel with a premise as good as this, and recommended by the likes of SA Cosby and Lou Berney, has got to be worth a read.
So, yes, the air is clean, the mountain view beautiful, but, as ever, down these mean streets a man must go…..
