Rex Burns

• Born: June 13, 1935
• Place of Birth: San Diego, California

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; private investigator

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Gabe Wager, 1975-1997; Devlin Kirk, 1987-1991

Contribution

Winner of the 1975 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for best first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975) established Rex Burns as a realistic writer with a spare and honest style. Without relying on violent action or bizarre characters, Burns shaped the police procedural into a novel that presents a convincing portrait of a man at work in a consuming and tedious job. The realities of police work mean that building a case that will hold up in court may be more difficult than discovering the identity of a criminal. The books featuring detective Gabriel Villanueva “Gabe” Wager, which Burns describes as “chapters” in a larger work, are noteworthy for the author’s skill in using indirection and accretion to reveal the depths of a character who is reserved, self-contained, and virtually inflexible. His Colorado settings expose a working-class Rocky Mountain West that tourists never see. In addition to the Edgar Award, Burns has been a three-time recipient of the Top Hand Award from the Colorado League of Authors.

Biography

Rex Raoul Stephen Sehler Burns was born in San Diego, California, on June 13, 1935. His father, who dreamed of retiring from the Navy to edit a local newspaper, was killed during World War II. Burns graduated from Stanford University in 1958 and served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves as a regimental legal officer, reaching the rank of captain. In 1959, he married Emily Sweitzer and had three sons.

In 1961, Burns began graduate work at the University of Minnesota. He earned a master of arts degree in 1963 and a doctorate in American studies in 1965. His doctoral research took an interdisciplinary approach to American culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. Examining the “gospel of success” by looking at popular reading, children’s literature, labor periodicals, and the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his dissertation became the basis of a scholarly book published in 1976 as Success in America: The Yeoman Dream and the Industrial Revolution. From 1965 to 1968, Burns was an assistant professor and director of freshman English at Central Missouri State College. In 1968, he moved to the University of Colorado at Denver, where he was active in the faculty assembly and chairman of the University Senate (1974-1975). He was promoted to associate and then full professor until his 2000 retirement. He also spent time as a Fulbright lecturer in Greece (1969-1970) and Argentina (1977).

Beginning in 1971, Burns began serving as a consultant to the Denver District Attorney’s office in addition to teaching and scholarly writing. The first of his detective novels was published in 1975. He remained a full-time professor; the popularity of late afternoon and evening classes for the students of an urban public university, who are often working adults, allowed him to spend mornings writing and producing a book every year or two.

Burns has published numerous mystery fiction reviews and maintained a regular review column for the Rocky Mountain News. A contributor to Scribner’s Mystery and Suspense Writers, he also serves as an adviser to the Oxford Companion to Mystery. In 2001, he signed on with the Starz Encore Mystery Channel as host of a recurring segment called Anatomy of a Mystery—brief studies of elements found in mystery writing, with examples of popular films that employ those elements. He retired from teaching at the University of Colorado but still serves as professor emeritus in English.

Analysis

In “The Mirrored Badge” in Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work (1986), Rex Burns describes the police procedural as a “novel of manners” and asserts that he was drawn to the form because he disliked the “false portrayals of cops and robbers which, especially in the mass media, can be perilous to viewers who accept them as real.” He also addresses the relationship between detective fiction and questions of psychological and moral importance. Although the genre requires a strict form, he writes, “Crime is chaotic, an eruption into the ordered, public surface of our lives from some dark reservoir below—an intrusion, that is, of life’s formlessness.” The detective writer is thus faced with the problem of exploring the irrational: While “the detective wants only to solve the crime, the writer is faced with the need to explain it.” That attempt, Burns suggests, “can lead the mystery writer to the limits of explaining the possibly inexplicable.”

Burns’s style is generally spare yet sharp. In an article for The Writer in March 1984, he used the term “imagistic compression” to identify his technique of description: “to determine, usually in revision, what precise image, in the fewest words, will blossom in the reader’s mind and make a setting visible to his imagination.” He also seeks descriptive techniques that contribute to the development of the action. As the people at the Mormon ranch in The Avenging Angel (1983) prepare for attack, the smoke rising from the house’s chimney “stood like a ghostly flagpole against the sky.” As Burns points out, the flagpole simile not only sharpens the scene but also captures the “paradox of a domestic fire on a quiet evening and the smoke as a beacon for the invaders.” His dialogue is, in a similar fashion, low-key yet distinctive. In particular, he uses the jargon of various occupations and the grammar and rhythms that betray education and social class to identify characters through their speech.

Burns uses a variety of physical and cultural settings to avoid the predictability of the police procedural, which, like actual detective work, tends to fall into repetitious patterns. He makes Gabe Wager a workaholic loner who goes undercover, pursues investigations on his own time, takes on detached assignments, and reluctantly agrees to use some of his accumulated vacation time when it dawns on him that he can go fishing in a locale that seems to have something to do with a questionable death. Thus, Burns can give Wager some of the range and independence of a private eye while letting him access the resources found only in a major law enforcement agency and subjecting him to the legal constraints of actual police work. Other notable works include Burn's Touchstone Agency Mysteries, composed of Body Slam (2014) and Crude Carrier (2014).

Gabe Wager

The character of Gabe Wager is a central attraction of Burns’s writing. In his scholarly book on nineteenth-century American culture, Burns identified two opposing traditions of successthe materialistic American Dream of the self-made individual rising from rags to riches and the competing ideal of competence, independence, and morality embodied in the image of the yeoman who possessed “wealth somewhat beyond [his] basic needs, freedom from economic or statutory subservience, and the respect of the society for fruitful, honest industry.” To an extent, Gabe Wager is a twentieth-century version of the sturdy yeoman: a working man who preserves his capacity for independent action by refusing either to join the union or to accept the policies and politics of his superiors unquestioningly. The virtue of his independence is a powerful sense of duty. The danger is in the inflexibility of his self-imposed moral code, and the price is loneliness.

Burns sees Wager’s “hard struggle for self-definition in a world that has its labels ready to apply” as giving him “a rigidity that is both strength and weakness.” Wager is not wholly at home in either Chicano or Anglo culture. During his childhood in a barrio in Denver, relatives disapproved of his mother for having married an outsider.

Wager joined the Marines at sixteen and served for eight years in a period that stretched from the Korean Demilitarized Zone to Vietnam’s Landing Zone Delta, and as a consequence, missed the normal experiences of the teen and early adult years, a time when most men learn something about women. There is a broken marriage in his background and a relationship with fellow police officer Jo Fabrizio that is constantly endangered by his emotional distance and stubborn pride.

Although the books use a third-person restricted viewpoint—everything is seen as if it had passed through Wager’s consciousness—Wager is as reticent in his inner life as he is in his dealings with others. Burns skillfully uses minimal outcroppings of introspection to humanize the humorless, self-sufficient workaholic.

For example, the narrative voice and Wager’s personal awareness undercut his apparent self-certainty in a spare passage such as this from The Avenging Angel: “What the hell, you didn’t have to like your partner; all you had to do was work with him. Wager could tell himself that, and he could almost believe it.”

The Alvarez Journal

Burns’s first novel, The Alvarez Journal, established his dedication to the concrete reality of police work: No shot is fired, and the protagonist spends most of the book sitting in a car on surveillance. In the series that built on that beginning, Burns merged the structure and realism of the police procedural with the traditional American figure of an isolated hero who acts as a force for moral restitution.

Burns’s “Novel of Manners” depicts the characteristic methods, mores, and folkways of various specialized subcultures, including that of the working police officer. In many police procedural series, the unit or squad is a substitute for the secure world of an idealized family, with unchanging characters cast in continuing roles and predictable relationships. Although the Gabe Wager books contain some recurring characters in addition to the protagonist, they also portray the shifting nature of twentieth-century police work: departmental administrators come and go, technologies and legal constraints change, and new social stresses arise. In addition, relationships among partners alter as their personal lives and attitudes are shaped by experiences on or off the job.

To mirror the texture and actuality of the exterior world, Burns ties many of Wager’s cases to other fairly closed subcultures. The world of rodeo in Ground Money (1986), nude dancers in Strip Search (1984), fundamentalist Mormonism in The Avenging Angel, and small-time modeling agencies in Speak for the Dead (1978) are given verisimilitude through concrete details. Only after the detective acquires insider knowledge and appreciates the subculture’s characteristic values and mental habits can he understand the patterns and motives that point to a solution.

The Avenging Angel

The Gabe Wager novels' techniques, characterization, and moral focus are evident in The Avenging Angel. The book opens with a police routine, as Wager and his partner examine the body of a person found shot dead on a roadside. While the photographers, forensic teams, and uniformed patrol units do their jobs, Wager “let his mind play over the scene again, trying to see it from the angle of the victim. Then from that of the killer.” The detective uses his imagination to visualize the scene and grope for the essence of its details, while the novelist economically uses the detective’s visualization to create mood and atmosphere:

The rigor told Wager that the man was probably shot right here. Probably the killer or killers walked the victim straight down the embankment and stood just there while he turned to face them. Wind. Almost always a night wind out here on the prairie east of Denver and its bright glow. Maybe a step or two closer for a good shot. . . . Perhaps the victim’s arms were already held out—don’t shoot me, I don’t have anything; perhaps they flew up as the bullet hit his chest like a baseball bat and knocked him flat and numb with shock and dead before he hit the ground. . . . Then he—or they—went through the pockets very quickly, not needing a light because of the sky glow of Denver. . . . Then that note, which was to tell someone why the man was shot, if not who pulled the trigger. Wager guessed that the note had been folded and resting in the killer’s pocket, ready for use. Folded precisely into a rectangle whose edges were flush all around. When you’re in the dark, and in a hurry, and you’ve just killed a man, you don’t take time to align the edges of a folded slip of paper. That’s something you do when you’re carefully planning ahead.

The folded slip of paper is a photocopied drawing of an angel holding a sword. When a second such drawing turns up on a corpse in Pueblo and a third on a body in remote Grant County on the western slope, Wager is sent to look for connections. He discovers a rugged, thinly populated region of benchland and desert that retains a small-town openness and a frontier tolerance for individual differences—including the presence of unreconstructed Mormon polygamists. Because of his nonjudgmental attitude, Wager can gain insight into the religious and political schisms among the Mormon groups and link the drawing to the nineteenth-century religious vigilantes known as “avenging angels.”

The information leads him back to Denver to a house full of massacred women and children. He returns to Grant County to join the sheriff’s office and one of the Mormon tribes to trap the murdering fanatics. The plan is endangered, however, by leaks from within; Wager realizes only at the last moment that two of the murders had been committed not for religious reasons but by a deputy sheriff who thereby secured water rights to develop land that he owned. Wager’s solo expedition to a distant part of the state and the isolation of the physical setting and the society reinforce the essential isolation of his own character, and the knowledge that some law officers are corrupted by greed demonstrates the necessity for Wager’s independence and self-reliance.

A passage in The Avenging Angel defines Gabe Wager’s attitude toward crime:

A cop accepted the importance of the rules that tried to order the randomness of life and death, and his job was to go after those who did not accept the rules. Usually they were merely the careless ones; on rare occasions they were the ones who were neither careless nor blind to the rules, but who knew them and chose to stay outside them. . . . They reasoned what they did and they struck like feeding sharks at those penned in by the rules; they were the ones who crossed the line between order and chaos, and who brought to their victims not only a fear of death but a terror of the soul.

In this passage, Burns presents his own intellectual analysis of the source of evil in plain language suited to a working detective. The police officer, furthermore, deals with people and the immediate consequences that harm individual victims; the morality that matters, in that context, is sometimes not contained in legal and social policies. In The Alvarez Journal, a criminal is caught, but the crime continues; in Angle of Attack (1979), Wager drops information that motivates the mob to eliminate a criminal against whom the police cannot build a case. He measures himself by his scrupulous concept of duty: “He knew when he did a good job or a poor one; nobody else’s blame, nobody else’s satisfaction really counted.” The inside leaks and the existence of law enforcement officers who use their positions for private ends justify Wager’s self-sufficiency and the necessity of creating his standard of ethics.

The Killing Zone

In The Killing Zone (1988), the murder victim is a black politician, and the book’s sophisticated exploration of urban political and racial relations is as interesting as the solution to the crime. Equally impressive is the sensitive portrayal of the people whose lives are shaped by their role in a particular social context. Most realistic novelists presumably make characters convincing by learning to put themselves inside other people and to see the world through their eyes. Burns creates a detective using the same method to understand criminals and victims.

The Gabe Wager series established Burns as a writer of detective novels with believable characters solidly embedded in a realistic social milieu. Suicide Season (1987) introduced the more upscale, glitzy, high-tech side of Denver life with private investigator Devlin Kirk, Stanford graduate, law school dropout, and former Secret Service agent who is a partner with former police detective Homer Bunchcroft in a firm that specializes in company security and executive protection. Although the Kirk series provided Burns with a new focus, he continues to write Gabe Wager novels. He has written that the Gabe Wager novels are single chapters in “a larger work that has its own architecture.” The series concludes with Parts Unknown (1990) and Body Guard (1991).

Principal Series Character:

• Gabe Wager is a detective sergeant on the Denver police force, assigned initially to Organized Crime (narcotics) and subsequently to Homicide. A “coyote” of mixed Hispanic-Anglo background, Wager is personally reserved, dedicated to his work, essentially isolated, and driven by his own demanding standards of honesty and duty.

Bibliography

Burns, Rex. “Characterization.” The Writer 101, no. 5 (May, 1988): 11-14.

Burns, Rex. Crude Carrier. Head of Zeus, 2014. 

Gulddal, Jesper, et al. The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Hartsell, Chase, "Rex and Root: An Original Documentary" Honors Theses, 2024, scholarlycommons.obu.edu/honors‗theses/940. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Kelleher, Harry. “In the Dry, Dusty Distance, Gabe Wager Rides Again.” Review of The Leaning Land, by Rex Burns. Denver Post, 19 Oct. 1997, p. E05.

Library Journal. Review of The Avenging Angel, by Rex Burns. 108, no. 3 (1 Feb. 1983): 223.

Library Journal. Review of Suicide Season, by Rex Burns. 110, no. 12 (June 1987): 131.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Winks, Robin, ed. Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work. New York: Scribner, 1986.