Gay detective series
GunnShots: Celebrating Great Gay Mysteries
Culture critic Jillian Steinhauer has an online article “ Reasons Why We’re Fascinated by Lists” (The Awl, 7 Feb. ). She notes that list-making is “an perform of curation,” and she quotes Andrew Sarris that, “with a best list, a critic puts his or her tastes on the line.” But nowhere among her reasons does she reason that celebration can be a motive. Yet isn’t that what was going on at the end of the last century when we got lists of the best of everything imaginable? A personal celebration led to this column. The day before (appropriately enough) Thanksgiving, my copies of the new and expanded edition of my book The Gay Male Sleuth in Output and Film: A History and Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, ) arrived.
The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film
As I leafed through the pages, some compassionate of ritual seemed called for. I started mentally making lists. My ten-best gay film mysteries will appear in a forthcoming column. Here I look at the print portion of the book (which, of course, is itself one giant list with numbered entries). T
In the past few years, books written by and about queer characters contain become more visible to the general reading common. Gradually, straight, cisgender readers are discovering the pleasure of reading books by authors whose identities are different from their retain. This is true in the mystery and thriller reading world as well.
In my new novel, Hall of Mirrors, a mystery set in Washington, D.C., about two gay writers who co-author hard-boiled detective fiction under the macho moniker Ray Kane, I explore writing from the closet, the complexity of inventing a false persona to sell books, which in the s was often necessary to locate broad appeal to consumers, not to mention to avoid being discriminated against and persecuted. Thankfully, today, things have changed (for the most part), and readers of all types are reaching for lgbtq+ books precisely because they want to read LGBTQIA+ characters (assuming a guide ban doesn’t block their ability to access these books).
Of course, prejudice still exists, and the grooves of unconscious bias get time to change; the specious idea th
Gay & Lesbian Detective Novels
The Gay Detective Novel - Part 1
© by Lori L. Lake, Reprinted from Crime Spree Magazine, Nov/Dec
CLICK HERE For Part 2 - The Lesbian Detective Novel
One of the great things about fiction is how cultural issues of the day acquire drawn into plots and themes. This is particularly genuine of the mystery and of crime fiction. The gothic novels of the 18th and 19th century led to the creation of main characters whose major role was to sniff out guilty parties and solve crimes. Poe's Auguste Dupin and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes set the tone early for models of detection and the types of sleuths who ferreted out criminals. But none of those characters were queer .
By the first 20th century, mystery writers were focusing upon armchair detection, "murder in the manor," locked rooms, red herrings, aristocrats, and the unseen terrors found in sleepy villages. The plots and themes of authors fancy Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy Sayers, Nicholas Blake, and many others reflected American and British society of that time. The pulp nov
Decades Don Strachey Mysteries: An Actual Gay Detective
Based on a series of books written by Richard Stevenson starting in the in advance s and continuing to the present, with the latest book being released in , four movies for Here TV were produced between and The films starred Chad Allen as Don Strachey, a gay detective in Albany, New York. Chad is a former youngster star having main cast credits in s Our House, s My Two Dads, and to s Dr. Quinn, Medicine Gal. As well as guest starring roles on several television series throughout the s, 90s and s. In , Chad was outed as gay by the U.S. tabloid “The Globe”, which published photos of him kissing another man. Forced into the limelight, Allen became an activist for the LGBT community.
Gay detective fiction isn’t new, but it isn’t exactly mainstream. George Baxt is credited with existence the first writer to publish a series of books with a homosexual sleuth as the manage in Joseph Hansen is probably the best established author having created the Dave Brandstetter mysteries in , which continued through the s. There are many more, but not many ha