The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

'After forty years Hammett has a worthy successor' The Times Dave Brandstetter stands alongside Philip Marlow Sam Spade and Lew Archer as one of the best fictional PIs in the business. Like them he was tough determined and ruthless when the case demanded it. Unlike them he was gay. Joseph Hansen's groundbreaking novels follow Brandstetter as he investigates cases in which motives are murky passions run high and nothing is ever as simple as it looks. Set in 1970s and 80s California the series is a fascinating portrait of a time and a place with mysteries to match Chandler and Macdonald. Police Chief Ben Orton swore he'd keep 'big city vice' out of his town. So no one is too surprised when he turns up dead - but Dave thinks pinning his murder on gay activist Cliff Kerlee is just a bit too convenient. His investigation uncovers a community cowed by one man and a police force with its own ideas of law and order.

Joseph Hansen wrote nearly forty novels in the course of a long career, but is best known for the groundbreaking series of twelve Dave Brandstetter crime novels. Brandstetter was a pioneering character: a tough private eye and happily uncloseted gay man. Hansen was an active campaigner for equal rights (though he disliked the word 'gay' and always described himself as 'homosexual'). He founded the pioneering gay journal Tangents in 1965, hosted a radio show called Homosexuality Today, and was involved in setting up the first Gay Pride parade in Hollywood in 1970, the same year that the first Brandstetter novel was published. In 1992, he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. He died in 2004.