IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, shortly after I joined the Gay Alliance for Equality in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I was a graduate student at Dalhousie University, a friend came back from a trip to New York with a copy of Joseph Hansen’s novel Fadeout and told me that I absolutely had to read it, because its protagonist, Dave Brandstetter, a death claims investigator for a Los Angeles insurance company, was gay. There were few gay novels in those years—E. M. Forster’s long-suppressed Maurice had been published the previous year—and even fewer gay detective stories. George Baxt’s A Queer Kind of Death, which featured the gay—and Black—New York police officer Pharaoh Love, who’s “60s hip and calls everybody ‘cat,’” had appeared in 1966. Remarkable for the time, it was highly praised by the influential New York Times reviewer of mysteries, Anthony Boucher, who also wrote detective stories and science fiction: “This is a detective story, and unlike any other you have read.”
That is exactly how I reacted to Fadeout, which, while following the well-established conventions of the genre, was unlike any detective story I’d read—and not only because it had a gay detective who acted as if being gay were perfectly normal. For the mystery of the disappearance and later the murder of Fox Olsen was only a nominal mystery. The real mystery was that of Olsen’s life before he was murdered. There was in this novel a subtly subversive political subtext that’s much easier to detect today than it would have been in 1970, when detective stories were dismissed as pulp fiction that was apolitical and irrelevant.
Despite the enduring popularity of the Brandstetter mysteries—they are currently being reprinted by Syndicate Books—and also because of that popularity, Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) has not received the literary recognition that I believe he deserves. He is conspicuously absent from Les Brookes’ Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall (2009). In part this may be because in many ways Hansen was a pre-Stonewall writer, even though most of his major novels came out after 1969. He was in his mid-forties when he wrote Fadeout, the first Brandstetter novel, in 1967, and it took him nearly three years to find a publisher who would accept it. He had already written a few novels under the pseudonym James Colton: Lost on Twilight Road (1964), Strange Marriage (1965), and Known Homosexual (1968)—the latter revised and republished as Pretty Boy Dead (1984), the title he originally wanted. When Hansen turned to the detective story, he was not aiming only for commercial success; he had artistic—and political—aims as well. As he later told an interviewer for the St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996): “Homosexuals have commonly been treated shabbily in detective fiction—vilified, pitied, at best patronized. This was neither fair nor honest. When I sat down to write Fadeout in 1967, I wanted to write a good, compelling whodunit, but I also wanted to right some wrongs. Almost all that folk say about homosexuals is false. So I had some fun turning clichés and stereotypes on their heads in that book. It was easy.”
One of the reasons that Hansen “wanted to right some wrongs” was that, in 1967—two years before Stonewall—he had been active for several years in the gay rights movement. Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on July 19, 1923, Joseph Hansen moved with his family to Altadena, California. After World War II, he settled in Los Angeles, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the early 1960s, he became one of the editors of ONE magazine. He went on to co-found, with Don Slater, the gay magazine Tangents in 1965, produced a radio program for KPFK-FM called Homosexuality Today in 1969, and helped to organize the first gay pride parade in Hollywood in 1970, the year Fadeout was published. However, he did not fit comfortably into the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation culture. Hansen was more of an assimilationist than a liberationist. “Way back before Stonewall,” he recalled, “I was saying in the tiny gay magazines of those times [like Tangents and ONE]that what we should strive for was inclusion in a society that had long shut us out. ‘Us and them’ is a lousy way to build a world. And I’m still not big on the idea of gay this, gay that, and gay the other.”
Nearly two decades after Stonewall, he said in an interview that his purpose in writing about gay men was “to deal with homosexuals and homosexuality [Hansen didn’t like the word ‘gay’ and rarely used it] as an integral part of contemporary life, rather than something bizarre and alien.” Although openly homosexual, Hansen was also married—to a lesbian, with whom he fathered a daughter—a fact that was not likely to endear him to the newly “liberated” gay people of the post-Stonewall generation. “Here was this remarkable woman who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. So something was right about it, however bizarre it may seem to the rest of the world.”
The main reason Hansen’s novels have not received the recognition they deserve is that the author became typecast as a mystery writer. After the first novel in the Brandstetter series, his publisher, capitalizing on the popularity of the genre, began to market each new novel as “A Dave Brandstetter Mystery.” This automatically made it impossible to judge a “Brandstetter mystery” as anything other than genre fiction, albeit with a gay twist. (When this magazine reviewed reprints of the first two Brandstetter novels in 2005, the reviewer showed little interest in their literary value.) To overcome this obstacle, readers need to recognize that Hansen is using—and subverting—the familiar conventions of the genre to do considerably more than entertain the reader with a puzzling mystery and a brilliant detective to solve it. One of the few critics to recognize this achievement is James Sherrman, a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, who points out: “The Brandstetter series can be read as one long chronicle of gay lives in California in the 1970’s and 1980’s as well as the general social concerns of those decades.”
What was liberating about these novels to me in the 1970s and early 1980s was the fact that the diverse lives of gay men and lesbians are simply taken for granted and never represented as much different from the diverse lives of the straight characters. Indeed, Brandstetter is the epitome of middle-class normality compared to his aging father, who discards his young wives—he’s on his ninth when the series begins—faster than gay men discard last season’s jeans. Brandstetter, in contrast, has been in a monogamous relationship (with an interior decorator!) since the late 1940s, shortly after getting out of the army.
Since we clearly cannot cover all 24 of Hanson’s novels, let us focus on Fadeout as representative of his work. Hansen’s artistic strategy throughout the series—reliance on the detective story’s conventions to do something unconventional—is all there in Fadeout, which was written first and without any thought of a sequel, much less a twelve-part series. The title, unlike that of most conventional mysteries, gives no indication that it is in fact a “mystery.” Also unorthodox is that the obligatory murder does not come until the end of Chapter 14 of a 22-chapter novel. What’s more important is the story of Fox Olsen’s life before his murder, which Brandstetter slowly uncovers. The investigation of his unexplained disappearance (his body is not found after his empty Ford Thunderbird turns up in an arroyo after a flash flood) leads Brandstetter to uncover more and more clues about his hidden past. Gay readers may be likely to pick up on the clues pointing to Olsen’s sexuality, but it’s not until the end of the novel that we learn why Olsen really got married, and the price he has paid for not being true to himself. (In contrast, the motive of the murderer is transparent.)
While Olsen is at the center of the novel, we know him only through secondhand reports as Brandstetter slowly uncovers what Olsen has spent 25 years concealing. Just as there are two mysteries in this detective story, there are also two crimes: the murder of Olsen for purely pecuniary motives (insurance money), and the “crime” perpetrated by Olsen on himself, namely the repression of his true sexual nature out of his misguided loyalty to his wife. It was she who supported his unsuccessful efforts to become a writer as well as his recent, short-lived success as the host of a small-town radio show. Clues to the mystery and history of Fox Olsen’s repressed homosexuality reappear when his first and only lover, believed to have been killed in World War II, suddenly resurfaces.
In the decade after Stonewall and the publication of Fadeout, the most popular and important subgenres of gay fiction were the coming-out and the coming-of-age novel. Fadeout can be read as the inverse of the coming-out novel: a “staying-in” novel with a moral about the tragic consequences of not coming out. Had Olsen lived his life as a gay man instead of marrying a woman, it would surely have been very different, and he would not have been murdered, since he and his murderer would never have crossed paths. A convention of the pre-Stonewall gay novel was that the “perverted” protagonist must be punished, either by being killed or committing suicide. Olsen’s murder is not a punishment for being gay but a consequence of suppressing his true sexuality.
Fadeout does, then, have a liberationist message, however understated. Hansen, as a homosexual novelist with a mission to “right some wrongs,” leaves the reader with the understanding that Olsen’s life did not have to follow the path it did. Hansen carefully and deliberately sets up an ironic parallel between the very different lives of Brandstetter and Olsen, who are both middle-aged gay men. Brandstetter, in contrast to Olsen, has been in a long-term, loving relationship with a man whose recent death from cancer he is mourning as the novel opens. There may be an echo here of a similar death and the mourning of a long-time partner in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, also set in L.A. and published in 1964, just three years before Hansen began writing Fadeout. The L. A. Times reported (April 19, 1990) “how moved he [Hansen] was by Christopher Isherwood’s courage in publishing his candidly homosexual novel, A Single Man, in 1964.” He added: “I wanted to write books that were honest about this subject [homosexuality]and matter of fact about it.” Another thing the protagonists of both Fadeout and A Single Man share is a complete acceptance of their sexuality.
In the early 1960s, Hansen argued that magazines like ONE and Tangents should be aimed primarily at heterosexuals, not homosexuals. The same could be said of his novels, which are written as much for straight readers as for gay ones. Let’s hope that the new edition of the Brandstetter novels wins for them the wider readership they deserve. Hansen’s carefully crafted novels deserve permanent currency both as mysteries and within the canon of gay fiction.
Nils Clausson is emeritus professor of English at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada.
