WL's Mainstream Gay Book Reviews - 60. Fadeout by Joseph Hansen (Mystery) Book 1 of 12 in Dave Brandstetter Mysteries

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/473421.Fadeout

The mystery genre is another one of my interested genres. As you may have seen, I've reviewed a few mystery stories in my collection in the past. I’ll begin again with an old classic mystery novel by Joseph Hansen. This book is quite dated in terms of material and locale, but some of its subject matter is eye-raising still. Written in 1970, Joseph Hansen was a pioneer in the gay mystery genre of his time. He portrayed gay male characters as fallible human beings with poignant depictions of love, loss, and glimmers of hope that society tries to erase. I can imagine some gay youth or college-aged males finding these books and sobbing at the tragic stories of people so like themselves decades ago. We celebrate LGBT triumphs with happy stories of boy meets boy, marriage, and family acceptance, but this was not how stories written by gay writers existed just a few decades ago as their writing reflected an uglier bigoted, and intolerant society, a harsher reality. His books are worth reading, both for the incredibly detailed mysteries and as a reminder of where the LGBT community was 50 years ago. Despite it being dark and tragic, it's not as harsh or bleak as Baldwin, pandering to appease like Vidal, or enlightened with forward-thinking as Renault's stories, Hansen created a balanced story focused on what being gay and hidden in society was back then.

Lengthwise: 187 pages and 5 hours 7 minutes on audible, this is a short afternoon read for most readers, but I do advise that you pace yourselves, especially gay male mystery readers. The subject is not that happy, nor will you get the Happy Ever After.

Plot: Fox Olson, a popular singer, is thought to have died after his car was discovered in the river. However, a body was never found. Enter Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator, who does not believe that Fox Olson had perished. Dave Brandstetter had recently lost his partner, Rob, due to cancer and has been melancholic for the last few months, but his ability to analyze situations and facts was not limited by his loss. As Dave investigates Fox Olson’s life, he learns interesting details regarding this popular singer. Fox Olson was running for Mayor of the town against a man named Chalmers, the current mayor. He was likely to win the election based on his popular support. Fox Olson ran for office due to his wife and manager, rather than his own accord. Furthermore, Fox Olson’s wife was having an affair with this manager, which Olson knew and approved. Fox Olson’s life is dissected and Dave learned through an effeminate art professor that Fox Olson used to be one of his students, Fox Olson had been involved with another boy and had taken lewd sexual pictures of each other, which the Art professor had sold to Chalmers to pay for his chemo treatment. It turns out Fox Olson was in fact a closeted gay man, who had tried desperately to hide his true nature and had recently found the lost love of his life, Douglas. As Dave thinks he has solved the mystery, including Olson’s desire to fake his death to be with his lover, several miles down the road in a town called Del Mar, Fox Olson’s body was found shot. All clues appear to point to Douglas as the culprit and he was apprehended as a result. Several days late, Chalmers is found shot dead, as well. Can Dave unravel the mysteries that led to these series of grisly deaths?

Review: Being gay in the 1970s was a state of purgatory in this book, you were shunned for being who you were, living a lie to fulfill another person’s desires, and if you try to reach for happiness, then society would slap you down. The story was well told and compelling, it gave me insights into the mindset of older gay guys and helped break some of the tedium that reading modern gay fiction, where HEA and HFN are the norms rather than the exception as was back then.

The titular character Dave Brandstetter is complex, but he’s also logical and analytical to the point of being a bit cold, despite not being uncaring. He shows his love for his dead lover, Rob, through his many monologues and soliloquies, there are wonderful anecdotes that lead readers to believe that despite not always being in agreement they loved each other deeply. As a detective, he lives up to the book’s description of being “rugged” and masculine. Women are fond of him, he’s a veteran of World War II, and the man is not a gay stereotype. This character breaks the mold of what gay males can be and if it wasn’t for the fact that he prefers the company of a male body in his bed, he’s no different than any heterosexual male detective character.

Though, the presence of an erstwhile Latino 17-year-old youth, who has made it a habit to break into Dave’s home to watch him and begs to be his bedmate, did break his stoic façade. Like most modern readers and viewers of TV from QAF onwards, the concept of a younger lover seeking out an older gay male is now a trope. However, back in the 1970s, I can imagine the stir. Plus, this plot thread was written just a few years after Loving v. Virginia made interracial relationships legal and ended miscegenation laws, banning interracial couples. Yet, Joseph Hansen unlike modern writers abandons that plot thread towards the end of the book, and it is a throwaway line. It can be explained away as Dave Brandstetter was too uneasy to continue a relationship with a younger partner, but in reading this book, I think there’s a reserve in Hansen to pursue. Due to that, I think Hansen probably should not have even added this plot thread, it seemed like either an interesting concept he could have pioneered before the others or something if he couldn’t write should have left to others with a bit more bravery a few decades later. It distracts from the mystery and plot.

As to the plot itself, Fox Olson’s sordid life and the explosive revelations may be dated, but they are quite powerful. I thought the murder and cover-up of Chalmer were both unsettling, but bittersweet realities for gay people in the 1970s. I don’t approve of what was done, but in a society where justice is perverted to suit a different moral standard based on who you love, the only thing left for some characters was to take justice into their hand. It is left unclear if Dave revealed the truth to the police at the end of the novel about who murdered Chalmers but based on what he did with the evidence of Chalmer’s blackmail, I’d suspect Dave was willing to be a co-conspirator.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5, it’s a good story with some very hard topics about society, bigotry, and life in the closet in the 1970s. I do think that Hansen made some questionable choices, and could have either omitted or expanded some elements, but for its time, he did a good job.