Best gay mystery books
GunnShots: Celebrating Great Gay Mysteries
Culture critic Jillian Steinhauer has an online article “ Reasons Why We’re Fascinated by Lists” (The Awl, 7 Feb. ). She notes that list-making is “an act of curation,” and she quotes Andrew Sarris that, “with a best list, a critic puts his or her tastes on the line.” But nowhere among her reasons does she debate that celebration can be a motive. Yet isn’t that what was going on at the conclude of the last century when we got lists of the best of everything imaginable? A personal celebration led to this column. The day before (appropriately enough) Thanksgiving, my copies of the recent and expanded edition of my book The Same-sex attracted Male Sleuth in Reproduce and Film: A History and Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, ) arrived.
The Homosexual Male Sleuth in Publish and Film
As I leafed through the pages, some kind of ritual seemed called for. I started mentally making lists. My ten-best gay film mysteries will appear in a forthcoming column. Here I look at the type portion of the novel (which, of course, is itself one giant list with numbered entries). T
9 of the Top LGBTQ+ Mystery Books You Won't Be Able to Place Down
Before The Bell in the Fog, Lev Ac Rosen’s Lavender House was Andy Mills’ first mystery to solve as a private investigator, a case rife with old-money secrets, queer soap-making heiresses, and murder.
It’s the s, and there are not many places in the queer community where one can proceed and be unapologetically themselves. Lavender Dwelling and its matriarch are the exception.
The estate’s staff and residents are free to live their truth within the elegant walls, but when a mysterious death occurs on the property, and there are no outsiders to criticize, suspicions arise about a murderer in their midst.
With historically accurate depictions of queer culture in the s, Rosen dives into a world of cash, love, and dominance hidden within the walls of Lavender House, and the ugly fates that await its residents outside the gates.
In the past few years, books written by and about lgbtq+ characters have become more observable to the general reading universal. Gradually, straight, cisgender readers are discovering the pleasure of reading books by authors whose identities are different from their control . This is true in the mystery and thriller reading planet as well.
In my new novel, Hall of Mirrors, a mystery set in Washington, D.C., about two gay writers who co-author hard-boiled detective fiction under the macho moniker Ray Kane, I explore writing from the closet, the complexity of inventing a false persona to sell books, which in the s was often necessary to find broad appeal to consumers, not to mention to avoid being discriminated against and persecuted. Thankfully, today, things have changed (for the most part), and readers of all types are reaching for queer books precisely because they want to read LGBTQIA+ characters (assuming a book ban doesn’t block their ability to access these books).
Of course, prejudice still exists, and the grooves of unconscious bias take time to change; the specious idea th
Task #3 of the Peruse Harder Challenge is “read a lgbtq+ mystery” and I am happy to report that I had to labor to narrow this list down. Finding LGBTQ rep in mystery—or any other genre—shouldn’t require intense sleuthing, but it wasn’t that long ago that the mystery genre lacked diversity on every level. While we still have a long way to move towards parity in gender non-conforming representation, it is really nice to have several titles to recommend in a list like this and not have it be the same handful of titles recommended over and over again.
I have several series starters and a few standalones to recommend for this Read Harder task, all by and about gay people. Most of the titles are from the last few years, and a couple are releases. In historical mysteries, we’ll travel to Georgian London,s Harlem, and 19th Century Chicago. In contemporary mysteries, we’ll head to Salt Lake City game shop, an exclusive boarding university, the London drag scene, and more. Get ready to chase down clues, map out theories, and figure out whodunit. That’s right, folks: be lgbtq+, solve crimes.
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