GLR July-August 2023

literary value.) To overcome this obstacle, readers need to rec ognize that Hansen is using—and subverting—the familiar con ventions 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 charac ters. Indeed, Brandstetter is the epitome of middle-class normal ity 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. on the detective story’s conven tions to do something unconven tional—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 in vestigation of his unexplained disappear ance (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 him self. (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 mis guided loyalty to his wife. It was she who supported his unsuc Brandstetter, in contrast, has been in a monog amous relationship (with an interior deco rator!) 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

cessful 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 homosexual ity 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 Fade out , 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 com ing out. Had Olsen lived his life as a gay man instead of mar rying 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 lib erationist message, however under stated. 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 differ ent 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 sim ilar death and the mourning of a long-time partner in Christopher Ish erwood’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 Isher wood’s courage in publishing his candidly homo

sexual novel, A Single Man , in 1964.” He added: “I wanted to write books that were honest about this subject [homosexu ality] and matter of fact about it.” Another thing the protago nists 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.

July–August 2023

29