Items

• A brother's touch
  Angus Rivers, a young Vietnam veteran from upstate New York, ventures to the city to discover the truth about his teenage brother’s death. Earl, a gay sex worker, has been found dead of a heroin overdose on the West Side piers (a notorious cruising ground), his body “stuffed into a rusty oil drum”. This mass-market crime paperback depicts the New York gay scene as a sleazy underworld of addicts, hustlers, self-serving politicians and corrupt priests. But it also introduces gay politics and campaigning, through the activities of the ‘GLP’ or Gay Liberation Party. Positively reviewed in the ‘New York Times’ on publication, Owen Levy’s debut went on to sell very well. His second novel, ‘Goodbye Heiko, Goodbye Berlin’, was published in 2015.
• Death claims
  Following ‘Fadeout’ (1970), this is the second book in Joseph Hansen’s Brandstetter series, featuring gay private investigator David ‘Dave’ Brandstetter. Set in Los Angeles, it moves through the worlds of rare books, community theatre and television. Hansen eventually published twelve books in the series and can be credited with inventing the ‘gay detective’ genre. Gay themes are woven throughout – in book nine, Brandstetter must track down a serial killer who is targeting gay men with AIDS. Hansen, born in 1923, was also a poet and journalist. Under the pen name James Colton, he published several gay novels in the pre-Stonewall era, including ‘Strange Marriage’ (1965) and ‘Known Homosexual’ (1968). He received a Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, writing several more books before his death in 2004.
• Death trick
  Written by journalist and author Richard Lipez (1938-2022), using the name Stevenson, this is the first novel in a series of sixteen to feature the private investigator, Donald Strachey. The story follows Strachey as he investigates a murder in Albany, New York, where the victim and prime suspect are both gay men. Strachey is also gay so can explore the otherwise closed ranks of the gay community. The back cover blurb includes a quote from author Armistead Maupin which makes the perhaps unavoidable comment, “At last a private dick who really earns the title”. Some other books in the Donald Strachey series were filmed for television. Stevenson’s series is often considered alongside books by Joseph Hansen featuring gay detective Dave Brandstetter, who first appeared in print in 1970. One of these books, ‘Death Claims’, was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’.
• The rose exterminator : a novel
  This gay sado-masochistic mystery novel was the third and final work of fiction by William Carney (1922-1987), after ‘The Real Thing’ (1968) and ‘A Year in a Closet’ (1974). If it seems a niche subgenre, it was one Carney carved out for himself successfully, alongside employment as a university teacher of French – ‘The Real Thing’ was influenced by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century epistolary novel ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ – and as a restorer of Victorian and Edwardian houses. As well as being a guide to the S/M lifestyle and the first generation of West Coast ‘leathermen’, Carney’s books provide an insight into late 1960s and 1970s gay life in San Francisco more generally. Carney’s papers are now held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
• The winged dancer
  A “grown-up lesbian adventure story”, according to New Zealand’s feminist magazine ‘Broadsheet’. Part murder mystery, part tale of psychological development, part love story, it describes lesbian feminist Kat Rogan’s journey from Chicago to the fictional Latin American country of Marigua. Rogan spends time in prison, solves the case and also comes to terms with the dominant and submissive sides of her personality. The book was criticised by some reviewers for exoticising South America and failing to engage with the politics of the region. Camarin Grae (1941-), author of ‘Paz’ (1984) and ‘Soul Snatcher’ (1985), among other works, was the owner of Blazon Books – this was their first title.