Beginning in January of 2022 with the republication of the first three Dave Bradstetter novels (Fadeout, Death Claims, and Troublemaker) Syndicate Books begins a year-long reissue project that will see back into print this important and criminally overlooked author.
Who is Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter? Tall, handsome, smart and successful is a good place to start. A native Californian, Dave is a World War II vet and the kind of serious, ruggedly independent, and above all decent man people like to celebrate when they talk about the “Greatest Generation.” He is a death claims investigator for Medallion Life Insurance and he’s damned good at his job.
These are books that are fun to read, with fully rendered characters and short, meticulous plots that are often centered around LGBTQ themes that sit comfortably between “whodunnit” and hard boiled. Hansen, a two-time Lambda Literary Prize-winner and Private Eye Writer's of America Grandmaster, was also a poet, as capable of conjuring the pastoral beauty of a lush arroyo as he is at delivering a blistering movie-ready one-liner. It's not hard to figure out why these one-liners never made their way to film but nonetheless these books hum with language and dialogue.
Fadeout, the first Dave Brandstetter novel, was published in 1970, when, as the award-winning novelist Michael Nava notes in his Introduction to this edition, homosexuality was illegal in 49 out of 50 states. This is why the word “landmark” is so apropos. Much like Chester Himes, Joseph Hansen challenged the conventional wisdom about who “mainstream” crime fiction could be written about. And he did so with panache. These books, with all the impressive world-building and character development within, are sheer delights to live in.
The twelve novels that comprise the Dave Brandstetter Mysteries take place from 1965 to the late 1980s. As each installment was written contemporaneously to the plots, the series as a whole has taken on an impressive air of social history. The slow economic decline of the United States, AIDS, and the rise of reactionary religion and politics are all grappled with in real time. There is of course also the steady antagonizing presence of homophobia, which changes too little with the times and never sits a book out.
