Fadeout by joseph hansen
REVIEW: Fadeout, Death Claims, and Troublemaker by Joseph Hansen
SunitaA- Reviews / B+ Reviews / Book Reviews / Recommended Readss / s / Brandstetter / California / Gay / LGBTQIAP+ / mystery / Series30 Comments
Dear Readers,
I&#;ve been reading mysteries for about as long as I&#;ve been reading romance, but until I started reading m/m romance I&#;d never heard of the late Joseph Hansen&#;s Brandstetter series, or at least not that I retain. That tells you something, because I&#;ve read some pretty obscure mystery series and I hold various anthologies and critiques of the genre on my shelves. Better late than never, though, because the Brandstetter mysteries are terrific. They&#;ve haven&#;t gone entirely out of print, but the paperbacks are expensive and/or challenging to come by, and only the first two were even digitized (at similarly expensive prices and in a reader-unfriendly PDF format). However, Open Road Media acquired the ebook rights to subsequent installments, and when I saw #3, Troublemaker, on Netgalley I snapped it up. I thought it might be useful to provide an ove
Mysteries Ahoy!
Originally published in
Dave Brandstetter #1
Followed by Death Claims
Set in the mids, Fadeout centers on the disappearance of a southern California radio personality named Fox Olson. A failed writer, Olson finally set up success as a beloved folksinger and wholesome country raconteur with a growing national audience. The community is therefore shocked when Olson’s car is found wrecked, having been driven off a bridge and swept away in a fast-moving arroyo on a rainy night. A life insurance claim is filed by Olson’s widow and the company holding the policy sends their adj man to investigate. The noun is that Olson’s body was never found. Not in the car. Not further down the river. As Dave Brandstetter begins his investigation he quickly finds that none of it adds up.
Fadeout was something of a landmark title within the mystery genre. This hardboiled mystery was one of the first to feature a gay protagonist &#; the handsome insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter cut from the matching sort of tough-guy mold as the detectives of Macdonald, Hammett
Author: Joseph Hansen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Pages/Word Count: Pages
At a Glance: An absolute classic in Gay Fiction
Blurb: Fadeout is the first of Joseph Hansen&#;s twelve classic mysteries featuring rugged Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who is contentedly gay. When entertainer Fox Olson&#;s car plunges off a bridge in a storm, a death claim is filed, but where is Olson&#;s body? As Brandstetter questions family, fans, and detractors, he grows certain Olson is still alive and that Dave must find him before the would-be killer does. Suspenseful and wry, shrewd and deeply felt, Fadeout remains as fresh today as when it startled readers more than thirty years ago.
Review: There is a serious lack, or at least it seems so, of noir fiction in the M/M genre, so getting a nudge from a friend (one who happens to write great mysteries) toward Joseph Hansen&#;s Dave Brandstetter series was like finding a treasure that wasn&#;t necessarily lost, just obscured by the abundance of romance novels in the genre that have
Sam Wiebe
On a night of rain and darkness, Fox Olson’s adj Thunderbird might have hit the top of that slope too fast. It had certainly punch the bottom too fast.
More than plot, character, setting or theme, the PI novel is about voice. Style. From Raymond Chandler to Samantha Jayne Allen, what draws me in more than anything is a writer’s language, tone, dialogue, jargon, cadence. Those words don’t often come up in discussions of thrillers or locked room mysteries, but they’re central to PI fiction. To paraphrase William Goldman, all you really have is your main character and their view of the world, expressed through the language they use.
As I verb older and pickier about what to read, it comes down to voice. How does this character and this author approach the world?
Crumley, Mosley, Grafton, Parker, Paretsky and Burke are all careful stylists. As is Joseph Hansen. Fadeout, the first of Hansen’s novels featuring insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, is a PI novel with nary a adj note. Hansen’s descriptions are superb: there’s a world-weariness to them that’s bot