Finished a book!

[olivermoss]

Fade Out by Joseph Hansen

"No one stays forever, you just clean up the damage when they leave."



Fade Out is a mystery novel starring a gay detective that was published in 1970. I read it partially out of curiosity about what a novel from that era featuring gay characters and themes would look like. I expected some internalized homosexuality, but at times both that and also the casual racism of certain characters caught me off guard. There is a lot of anti-Japanese racism in the book, and it takes a different form from the anti-Japanese racism I usually see. A Japanese man is hired as a house boy with heavy implications that it would be reasonable to expect a Japanese employee to sleep with his employer. He's basically given as a gift to someone.

The book has heavy themes about loneliness, disconnection between supposed loved ones and also homosexuals being with each other simply on the basis of both being homosexual.

I listened to it as an audiobook, and kinda wish I'd gotten a text version. Hansen is very good at evocative descriptions. If I had kindle edition I'd likely copy down certain passages to analyze them.

For most of the book there are two possible things that could have occurred to the man the detective is investigating. The stakes of both possibilities keep changing, but it never feels forced, it unfolds very naturally.

In a lot of ways, it's a great book and fantastic genre fiction. It's also very bleak. There are multiple gay and lesbian characters and the self-destructive and sad lives they have can be a lot. The main character refers to his now-dead husband as 'unbearably nelly' but they stuck together because 'they fit well in bed'.

The quote I put at the start is from a motel owner in the last section of the book. It seemed to sum up all the themes pretty neatly.

There are two more novels featuring the same detective. I might read them, but not right now. That was heavy.

Comments

[dine]

sadly, a lot of gay fiction in the 70s & early 80s was still pretty bleak, and happy endings not that common. finding it at all from the big publishers was a hunt - it was a miracle the Hanson books were published at all. I remember starting to find independent gay publishers like Alyson and Naiad in the mid-80s, and those did a better of of presenting balanced (and happy/content) characters in solid relationships

for something a bit brighter/more fun, you might seek out copies of Nathan Aldyne's mystery series - all the titles were colours, like Cobalt

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I was interested because they even existed, but it was bleak even by Well of Loneliness standards.

[mistressofmuses]

That's kind of an interesting time capsule to the era of writing and how queer characters were portrayed and written. (But eesh on the racism.) It does sound pretty heavy, though.