Only one year after the Stonewall riots, it was a risky time to write about such a character. All states except Illinois still criminalized homosexuality. Not until 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association stop classifying it as a mental disorder. After writing other books whose gay themes forced him to use a pseudonym for an illicit press, it took Hansen three years to find a publisher before Joan Kahn, the legendary crime fiction editor at Harper & Row, accepted “Fadeout.”
George Baxt had published his first campy novels about Pharoah Love, a Black gay detective in theatrical Greenwich Village, but while they received encouraging reviews (and some abuse), the books were not written with the same talent or ambition as Hansen’s. Baxt portrayed gay characters in what reviewers and readers seemed to regard as a safely “gay” environment. Hansen wrote about “ordinary” Americans who happened to be gay.
Although not as famous as he ought to be, Hansen has long been acclaimed. In 1992, the Private Eye Writers of America awarded him The Eye, the group’s lifetime achievement award. That same year he received the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Mystery for the last Brandstetter novel, “A Country of Old Men.”
The Brandstetter series is now in development for Netflix, and the entire canon is being reprinted by Syndicate Books (distributed by Soho Press). The publisher, Paul Oliver, sums up why he is excited to publish them: “They’re soulful, poetic books that manage the neat trick of coolly delivering West Coast noir combined with a tender portrait of a community struggling for basic rights.” The struggle lives on, and so does the talent of Joseph Hansen.
“He was going to be a nice man,” Hansen said about his protagonist, “a good man, and he was going to do his job well.” Instead of a cynical ex-cop turned tough-talking private eye, Brandstetter is respected and professional, a death claims investigator for an insurance company. He never blusters.
A century ago, on July 19, 1923, Joseph Hansen was born in Aberdeen, S.D. When he was 13, his family moved to California. This lush habitat had already begun to evolve a unique literary genus by 1936: the Southern California private eye. Dashiell Hammett had written the single Sam Spade novel, “The Maltese Falcon,” and other books. Raymond Chandler was busily typing the pulp stories that he would weave together into the first Philip Marlowe novel, “The Big Sleep,” in 1939.
Unlike Spade, Brandstetter is trustworthy and articulate. Unlike Marlowe, he doesn’t regard women with fear and disgust, that antonym of chivalry running through pulp fiction. Unlike Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Brandstetter has a past and a rounded identity. Unlike Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, he is surrounded by nourishing human connections — friends, family, colleagues, even former stepmothers.
Hansen, who died in 2004, didn’t like categories and didn’t fit into many. His work was not overtly autobiographical, although he used some of his own experiences from activism and journalism, says his former agent, Stuart Krichevsky. Brandstetter drives a beloved Jaguar, for example, but his creator didn’t drive. When Krichevsky visited L.A., he had to pick up Hansen at home. “Joe liked to ride out to Marina del Rey and look at the water while we ate and talked about books.” Brandstetter attends to his clothing and grooming and notices details of other people’s, but Hansen “dressed in an ordinary, rather unassuming way,” says Krichevsky.
When Krichevsky arrived in his driveway, Hansen seldom referred to the world beyond the door that he closed behind him. Gay himself, he had an open marriage with a lesbian, Jane Bancroft. “Here was this remarkable person who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with,” Hansen said later. “We were married 51 years. So something was right about it, however bizarre it may seem to the rest of the world.”
Not for Hansen the first-person mask of Chandler and Macdonald. He wrote about Brandstetter in a close, informal third person. Hansen was unpredictable — old-fashioned in some ways, even as an activist. He didn’t like the term “gay” and preferred to describe himself as “homosexual.” He regarded some of the activists of his era with admiration, some with scorn.
Gradually Hansen overcame more barriers. In 1973, he submitted a Brandstetter story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, where the editor replied that its readers were “not ready for homosexuality.” A full 16 years later, the magazine finally published a Hansen story about a different gay character. “I was pleased,” Hansen said later, “because it meant I had broken down a literary barrier against me and my kind.”
Among the many virtues of his books is how they capture a time — the 1970s and ’80s. The clothes are worthy of “The Mod Squad,” and the theater seats have those little metal ashtrays in the arm. When Brandstetter visits a TV studio for evidence, he notices that the news stories are all “typed down half the page in capital letters.” A woman has “television teeth.” He “crossed the uneven bricks of the courtyard under a dark, spreading oak whose dry leaves crackled beneath his shoes.” Even the bricks are given an adjective that helps us feel them beneath our feet.
Hansen anchors characters in convincing surroundings and has their consciousness arise from a body experiencing ordinary life — hunger, sexuality, fear, but also tired feet or too-cold air conditioning in a car. Thus he conjures a suspenseful story not with thriller gimmicks but through our sense that a truly embodied character can get hurt.
Perhaps the most autobiographical aspect of Hansen’s writing is his caressing of the details of everyday life. Despite opposition and trauma, he seems to have enjoyed being alive. Like Dickens, he imbues characters with some of his own vitality, which was not about to be smothered by anti-gay bias.
This may be one way Hansen helped inspire some of the contemporary gay novelists who proudly claim him as an ancestor. Of course mystery writers offer clues, writes Michael Nava, creator of the acclaimed Henry Rios mystery series, “but the masters also plant clues about the greater mysteries of all human motivation that, in the end, create morally complex and ambiguous stories in which murder is only the tip of the iceberg. This is what Hansen does.”
Michael Sims has written extensively about the history of crime fiction. His recent books include “Arthur and Sherlock” and “The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries.”
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