“What’s Denver’s dating profile?”
When the prolific novelist, Rachel Howzell Hall, asked me that question in a podcast interview, I was stumped.
“Is she sultry or what?” Rachel continued. “I want to know more about the city. Who is Denver?”
Rachel’s question forced me to dig deep into why I write crime novels about my hometown. While Denver doesn’t carry the mystique of the usual suspects of Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, it is the only place I’ve called home and, for me, the perfect setting for a mystery.
Denver is a beautiful place to live. Blue skies and painted sunsets are the norm. While many who live outside of Colorado think of snowy blizzards blanketing the Mile High City, we locals boast that we enjoy over three hundred days of sunshine each year.
In her poem turned song, America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates described what she saw traveling from Massachusetts to Colorado.
‘O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties,
Article continues after advertisementAbove the fruited plain.’
In Denver, the beauty Bates depicted is within easy reach. Spacious skies are a daily reality. Amber waves and fruited plains lie a short drive to the east. To the west, the Rocky Mountains are often robed with a majestic purple as they wear their crowns of snow.
After a long pause, I assembled an answer to Rachel’s question.
“If there’s a person who wears a mask and is in denial that the mask is on their face, that’s Denver,” I said. “My city is that person who looks wonderful from afar, but up close you realize that they’re wearing a lot of makeup.”
Denver is a beautiful place to live and I love the city I call home. However, in this beautiful place to live, not everyone is living beautifully. Denver is a city of contrasts ripe with possibilities for any crime and thriller writer. There are many writers who’ve looked beneath the surface of this wondrous place and found compelling conditions for their crime stories.
Here are five of my favorite books that feature the Mile High City:
The Poet by Michael Connelly
Between Connelly’s icons of Detective Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, we find Jack McEvoy—a crime reporter in Denver who specializes in death. In The Poet, McEvoy is a crime writer for the now defunct Rocky Mountain News. His opening line, “Death is my beat” leads us into a world where a poetry quoting killer is on the loose in the streets of Denver murdering homicide cops. As former journalist, Connelly writes what he knows.
The Poet is a serial killer novel compared with the likes of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs.
Angels in the Wind by Manuel Ramos
Heralded as the ‘Godfather of Chicano Noir,’ Manuel Ramos is a must read for Denver-based crime fiction. Ramos, a retired lawyer, is the author of eleven novels, the two-time recipient of the Colorado Book Award and finalist for Edgar and Shamus awards. In 2021 he was Inducted into Colorado’s Author Hall of Fame.
A native Coloradan, Ramos infuses his novels with themes of family, culture, politics and Chicano activism. For Ramos, it all began in the late 1980s with his iconic character Luis Montez, a burned-out Chicano Lawyer and continues today with Gus Corral and his Mile High Noir series.
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
The accolades for David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s breakout novel are abundant. Time magazine named Winter Counts one of the 100 best thriller, crime and suspense novels of all time. Virgil Wounded Horse is a local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When the local authorities fail to protect victims, Virgil is the one people hire to deliver needed justice.
Winter Counts takes place primarily outside of Colorado on the Rosebud Indian Reservation; however, Wanbli Weiden’s story finds its way to his hometown as his protagonist follows a lead to Denver. Not only does Virgil find that the drug cartels are booming in the Mile High City, he also discovers the caves, cliff divers, Mariachi bands and sopapillas of the iconic Casa Bonita restaurant.
Annalee Spain Mysteries by Patricia Raybon
Annalee Spain is a theologian turned amateur detective in 1920’s Denver. A lover of Sherlock Holmes and his deductive reasoning, Raybon’s protagonist also employs her instincts as a black woman to solve crimes.
Patricia Raybon, a Colorado Author Hall of Fame inductee, shines a spotlight on post-World War I life for African-Americans in Denver, including the ever present threat of the KKK. Denver is not the sort of place we think of for white hoods and cross burnings but in the 1920s it boasted one of the largest memberships per capita in the US—Denver with 55,000 members was second only to Indiana’s 75,000.
Book one in the Annalee Spain Mystery series, All That is Secret, was a Stephen Curry Literati Book Club pick and also garnered a Christy Award.
Morally ambiguous stories set in every dark nook and isolated cranny of the Denver metroplex.
Editor Cynthia Swanson says that “Even a city that boasts three hundred days of sunshine a year has its sudden, often violent storms—and writers have long taken advantage of that metaphor.”
This anthology features short stories from over a dozen Denver writers. I particularly enjoyed A Life of Little Consequence by Twanna LaTrice Hill set in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and Francelia Belton’s Dreaming of Ella set in Five Points about a good-hearted trumpet player who makes a series of bad choices in his pursuit of fame.
These are just a few of the many crime stories set in the Mile High City. As a reader, if you swipe right on any of them, you won’t be disappointed; however, consider yourself warned of what you might find when you get a closer look at this beautiful place to live.
***
