Bullets . . .

Like Ralph Ashworth’s Killer of Orchids last year, this novel with its tongue-twisting title seemingly came out of nowhere to land squarely on my list of favorites for this year.

That’s not to imply that the two mysteries resemble each other, though one could apply similar adjectives to both: brash, quirky, unconventional, in your face, humorous, audacious. (How about that cover for willfully misleading buyers!) [Read the review]

Romance mysteries often work with one of the oldest literary themes: the paradox that you must learn to trust your heart, despite appearances to the contrary about a person, while at the same time you must remain aware that villains can present the most trustworthy of facades. [Read the review]

Here we have, once again, the closeted police officer. We also have the old device of the detective being emotionally and sexually attracted to one of the chief suspects. What lifts this novel out of the ordinary is that we also have the first work to take a long, hard look at a gay alcoholic cop. [Read the review]

. . . Tracers . . .

If an openly gay novel with a few explicit sex scenes could have been published in 1948, it might have looked something like this. The author pays loving homage to the hard-boiled American detective tradition while gaying it up: “My name is Grey Randall, and I’m a private dick.” But given the times, he acknowledges: “It wasn’t good business to get known as a private dick with an interest in dick.” [Read the review]

Part mystery, part “fictionalized autobiography,” part fulmination against Mormons, part reinterpretation of Jesus’s mission as gay, this novel was for me above all a nostalgic revisit to an important stage in my own sexual development. [Read the review]

The eleventh Don Strachey, Albany, New York, P.I., novel is not so much a mystery as it is a meditation on what the gay movement has gained and, even more, what it has lost in the process of its struggle for equality.

True, a mother does disappear from her nursing home, and there is suspicion of foul play: but there is no real sense of menace. [Read the review]

. . . Slugs . . .

Why do the British seem to be so much better than Americans at depicting gay criminals? I’m thinking of Jake Arnott, Jack Dickson, among several others. Has it something to do with the British culture’s apparently ambivalent attitude about the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt and the racketeer Ronnie Kray as contrasted with our more puritanical, judgmental mentality? [Read the review]

Despite its title, this is not a mystery, not even an inverted mystery. It is a crime novel, only the second gay crime novel that I know of to come from a South African writer (the first being L.J. Harris’s Revival, a detective novel published in South Africa in 2006). [Read the review]

. . . and a Pair of Silver Bullets

The author, the editor-in-chief of theComixtreme website, has created an intriguing supernatural world in which some humans have been infected by a virus that creates five strains of werecats. The hero, Roan McKichan, has been a werelion from birth, but his lover, Paris Lehane, was infected as an adult and is a weretiger. Though AIDS furnishes the basic template, the conceit allows the author to explore difference without all the baggage that the gay vampire novel has accumulated. [Read the review]