Private investigations: Writer tracks The Gay Male sleuth

by Mike Crawmer

For many fans of gay fiction, there’s nothing more satisfying then cozying up with a good mystery, especially if it features a handsome, resourceful, intriguing sleuth.

One such sleuth is Dr. Simon Kirby-Jones, the protagonist in a mystery series set in Snupperton-Mumsley, a quintessentially quaint English village.

Kirby-Jones, the creation of writer Dean James, supports himself by pumping out mysteries at a truly fantastical rate. But that’s not the only superhuman quirk of delightfully sketched Kirby-Jones: he’s also a vampire, who no longer needs to drink human blood to get through the night, or day.

If, on the other hand, you prefer a mystery more grounded in reality, there’s California lawyer Henry Rios, the creation of Michael Nava, who starred in a series of seven novels published from 1986 to 2001. Or, for something more up to date, and decidedly darker, there’s always self-destructive investigative reporter Benjamin Justice, introduced by author John Morgan Wilson in 1996 in the gritty Simple Justice.

What? Never heard of Ben Justice? Or Kirby-Jones? What about Jas Anderson of Glasgow? Or the campy Alex Reynolds? Surely, you remember Dave Brandstetter, the sleuth in 14 mysteries published in the ’70s and ’80s? What about PI Dick Hardesty, who once said, “As a 100-percent gay man, I tend to get extremely defensive when other gay men end up dead for whatever reason”?

Not familiar with these fascinating fellows and their cohort of defenders of truth and justice? Well, not to fear: Author Drewey Wayne Gunn introduces you to each and every one of them—several hundred, as a matter of fact—in his comprehensive, detailed and eye-opening book, The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film.

Gunn’s book, the result of decades of dedicated reading of gay fiction, shines a critical but loving light on a unique world, one populated by rogues and lovers, the closeted and the out, the brave and the fearful, the living and the dead. In other words, a world very much like the one we wake up to every day.

The genesis for GMS began while Gunn was staying with his terminally ill mother in North Carolina. He’d retired from teaching at a Texas university and, with empty hours to fill, Gunn decided to catch up on years of reading detours. His tastes ran toward mysteries, especially those featuring gay males as the lead protagonist. Eventually, he closed the covers on a hundred or so novels, realizing he had developed a storehouse of knowledge and insight that he wanted to share with others.

Gunn found a number of themes running through this subgenre of a genre (mysteries, like romances, are considered “genre” writing, a type of fiction that does not aspire to high lit but more to entertainment, with enlightenment the occasional fortunate happenstance). He also discovered a cast of characters that he brings to life within the pages of GMS, in both synopses and a lengthy, readable discourse on the history of the gay sleuth.

That history is a fascinating one, beginning—as best Gunn could discover—in 1952 England with the gay psychiatrist Tony Page. English authors laid the groundwork for this genre, which eventually grew solid roots in America, flourishing in the ’70s and ’80s with such seminal series as Joseph Hansen’s David Brandstetter and continuing to this day with new gay sleuths hitting the nation’s bookshelves every month. (Within months of turning over GMS to his publisher, Gunn compiled a list of 15 new works of gay detective fiction, proof that fictional gay sleuths continue to have legs.)

The fact that you can go into many major bookstores today and browse through several shelves of gay mysteries, or, in some cities, find an even bigger selection in gay and lesbian bookstores, illustrates just how “mainstream” t