Spotlight Interview with Lynda Miller

Lynda Miller has been a horsewoman just about from the day she was born. She’s also an academic whose career centered on the subject of storytelling and how children learn language. Retired now, if that word even applies here, she spends her time writing, creating artwork, and co-publishing a magazine that features other writers and artists. She is also a co-sponsor for a book series through the University of New Mexico Press. It was a great pleasure to interview her about her first novel, Denver Undercover, and to hear about the project she’s working on now.

Please provide a short description of Denver Undercover.

The story follows a young gay undercover cop, Ray, who is working to solve the murders of several women whose bodies are discovered along the South Platte River in the warehouse area of 1950’s Denver. At the same time, Ray begins exploring his homosexuality, a dangerous endeavor given his job and the vicious anti-gay prejudice of the time.  As he works on the murder cases, he begins to understand more clearly who he is and how he wants to live his life. I see Denver Undercover as both a murder mystery and a coming-of-age story.

In your bio you explain that the Denver you write about in your book is not the Denver a visitor would encounter today. Please talk about Denver as it was, and how you are able to describe it so well.

Denver in the 1950s was a very different city than it is today. The population in 1955 was approximately 415,500, concentrated in what is now the downtown. Today the population is 2,995,000 in the metro area, which now includes what previously were small towns fifteen or twenty miles away from the downtown.

Growing up, I lived half time with my dad on his ranch outside Denver and half time with my mom and stepdad, Jimmy, in Denver, where he was a firefighter in Engine Company 1, which was located in what was then the warehouse district. That area has now been developed into several tony neighborhoods LoDo (Lower Downtown); Larimer Square; LoHi (Lower Highland); and RiNo, or the River North Art District, which in the 1950s was the historically notorious Five Points neighborhood, where much of Denver Undercover takes place.

I came to know the warehouse area well not only because my mom and I frequently visited Jimmy at his fire station, but also through his stories and what we gleaned from the two daily newspapers, particularly about the violence, drug busts, prostitution, and gun running that seemed part of everyday life along the railroad tracks. At that time, there was a large homeless population arriving and departing daily on the freight trains that ran along the South Platte River, which then, unlike today, was ungroomed and wild.

Weather is something that is easy to forget about with all the other things a writer has to bring into a plot. How do you keep it so consistent in your work and how important is it in this particular story?

I view weather as a character, particularly in mysteries, so I deliberately set the story in the winter months, which in the 1950s in Denver were cold and snowy. In addition, I wanted the weather to reflect some of the emotional tension Ray experiences both in relation to his job and to his sexuality. Because of its role as a character, I find it easy to maintain the importance of weather throughout the story, which concludes with the end of winter and the first inklings of spring.

As part of his undercover work, Ray must pretend to want to be a “protector” for a particular prostitute. What are the differences between protectors, runners, and pimps? 

That’s a great question that I don’t have an immediate answer for! I think I used those terms interchangeably throughout the novel, but I’m not sure that’s completely accurate.

While Ray is good at his work, he doesn’t love it. Why is that?

I wanted to portray Ray as a basically decent guy who doesn’t particularly like having to interact with the criminals he encounters as part of his job, particularly murderers and those pimping for prostitutes. He sees the suffering they cause, which he finds hard to ignore.

Everyone in Denver Undercover has secrets, except maybe Sharlene. Would you agree?

Yes, Sharlene is pretty open about her life, especially to Ray as they become closer friends. I don’t think Leroy has any secrets, either. He has some unpleasantness with his family, some of whom are upset that he’s gay, but that’s out in the open. Also, Ray’s only secret, albeit a big one, is his sexuality.  Whenever it’s safe for him to be out, though, he’s relieved because he’s a pretty authentic guy and doesn’t appreciate deception—the exception being when he’s engaged in his undercover work.

Your insight into some of the sleezier characters in the novel is great. How did you come to know so much about the underworld?

Probably from reading so many mystery novels. Some of what I learned, though, is from internet research. A writer friend and I joke that if anyone ever looked at our internet search histories, they’d think we were planning how to commit some horrible crime and were researching how to package drugs, ship stolen guns internationally, successfully evade murder charges, or engage in a host of other illegal activities.

Generally when a murder is solved in a murder mystery, the book ends. Yours goes on for a bit, which feels appropriate because of your emphasis on character development. How did you make the decision to give your characters the time they needed to sort their lives?

As I mentioned above, one aspect of the story is Ray not only coming to terms with his sexuality but also discovering who he wants to be and how he wants to live his life. Because he and Sharlene become close friends, I wanted to show a future for her other than continuing to work as a prostitute. I also wanted to let the reader see how Ray decides to move forward professionally given both his sexuality and his growing unhappiness with having to hang around with dope dealers, gun runners, pimps, and murderers in order to do his job.

What creative projects are you working on currently?

At the moment I’m writing a series of essays titled “I Rode to Heaven on a Horse,” centered on the importance of horses throughout my life. The apocryphal story is that when my mom and dad brought me home from the hospital after I was born, Dad, holding me in his arms, took me on my first horseback ride. Though I doubt the truth of that, I have photos of me riding by the time I was a year old, and I’ve made sure horses are part of my world ever since. The essays I’ve written so far include one focused on myself as a young girl wondering if my horse, Gay, and I would recognize each other when we both arrived in heaven. Another describes what happened when I, as an adult, attempted to check a suitcase at the airport not knowing that a jacket my rancher nephew had given me had rifle bullets in one of the pockets. In a third, I write about learning that the same nephew, whom I had taught to ride and who shared my love for horses, had been killed in a ranch accident when his horse, running hard, stumbled, which slammed him to the ground, breaking his neck.

Lynda Miller is a native of Colorado and now a happy citizen of New Mexico, where she enjoys both writing and creating graphic art. Her memoir, More Horses Than Cars, which was long-listed for the Santa Fe Writers Project Award in 2021, describes her growing up with horses, who were her best friends throughout her childhood and adolescence and were more numerous than cars.

Her novel which is the subject of this interview, Denver Undercover, was most recently named a finalist for the New Mexico Writers  Book Award in the Mystery Thriller and LGBTQIA+ Author or Subject categories.

Lynda is co-publisher with Lynn C. Miller and Hilda Raz of Bosque Press, which publishes select works of fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction, and an annual magazine, ABQ inPrint, which is half written word and half art. Each issue focuses on a different theme; this year’s Issue 9 is “playing with time as a story.”