Joseph Hansen

• Born: July 19, 1923
• Birthplace: Aberdeen, South Dakota
• Died: November 24, 2004
• Place of death: Laguna Beach, California

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; private investigator

Principal Series: David Brandstetter, 1970-1991

Contribution

Joseph Hansen’s novels featuring David Brandstetter, the sympathetic and wary insurance claims investigator who happens to be gay, are unusual in a genre in which machismo is an essential element. Writing in the tradition of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, Hansen is clinical, unsentimental, and compelling. Over the years, Brandstetter finds a lover and learns more about himself. As Hansen moves his private investigator about, he provides a sense of the ordinariness of gay life. His intelligent and sensitive style draws readers to the plot and characters, stressing the universal characteristics of his hero’s homosexual lifestyle. Although his novels fit into the Sam Spade-Philip Marlowe-Lew Archer mold—aging detective, sunny California, a society rife with corruption—Hansen provides fresh angles, third-person narrative, coolly realistic locales, and flawless dialogue to demonstrate the ways in which people juggle their morals to suit their needs. In the process, Hansen creates complex human experiences and enriches the mystery and detective genre.

Though Hansen was not the first to depict a gay detective—George Baxt preceded him by several years with novels featuring flamboyant black homosexual detective Pharoah Love—Hansen was recognized for his skillful and sensitive treatment of gays as human beings. Hansen’s Gravedigger (1982) was nominated for the 1983 Shamus Award as best novel, and he received an Edgar nomination in 1984 for “The Anderson Boy” and a Shamus nomination in 1987 for “Merely Players.” The Out/Look Foundation in 1991 honored Hansen for outstanding contributions to the lesbian and gay communities, and he won Lambda Literary Awards in 1992 for Country of Old Men (1991) and in 1994 for Living Upstairs (1993). He received the Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992.

Biography

Joseph Hansen was born on July 19, 1923, in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the son of shoe shop operator Henry Harold Hansen and Alma Rosebrock Hansen. The Hansens moved often during the Great Depression, and Joseph’s education was divided among public schools in Aberdeen, South Dakota; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Pasadena, California, as his family drifted from the Midwest to the West Coast in search of work. Hansen, who identified himself as a homosexual in his late teens, was more interested in writing for the school newspaper and acting in school plays than in languishing in classrooms and never attended college. Despite his sexual orientation, in 1943 he fell in love with and married lesbian Jane Bancroft, who in 1944 bore one daughter, Barbara Bancroft—who later underwent gender reassignment—during their marriage, which lasted more than fifty years (Jane died in 1994).

In 1944, Hansen received an encouraging option contract in 1944 from Houghton Mifflin Company on the basis of a few pages of a first novel. However, that novel was never published, nor were four other novels, several plays, and numerous short stories written during the 1940’s. Hansen struggled to keep food on the table while working in bookshops, as an assistant to the literary agent Stanley Rose, and for ten years as a billing clerk in a Hollywood film-processing plant.

Professional recognition came slowly, but by the late 1950’s several of Hansen’s poems had been published in mainstream magazines: Saturday Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. In 1962, he tried his hand at editing as well as at writing short stories for One, a small, pioneering magazine for homosexuals. When editorial difficulties arose, in 1965 he helped found a similar magazine, Tangents, which he edited until 1970. In 1969, he also produced a radio show, Homosexuality Today, on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.

Beginning with his work at One, Hansen adopted the pseudonym James Colton and wrote several novels—including his first full-length work, Lost on Twilight Road (1964) and his first short-fiction collection, The Corruptor, and Other Stories (1968)—under that name between 1964 and 1971. Most were paperback originals, intended for sale in sex-oriented bookstores. In writing these books, Hansen honed his fiction-writing skills, discovered his writer’s voice, and learned what he wanted to say. He intended to write honestly and unapologetically about homosexuality in a manner interesting and acceptable to all kinds of readers. Under the Colton pseudonym (later Coulton), Hansen published his first mystery, Known Homosexual (1968), a forerunner of the Brandstetter mysteries.

In 1969, Harper and Row contracted with Hansen to publish the first Dave Brandstetter mystery, Fadeout, which appeared in 1970. During his career, Hansen published more than forty books, including mystery novels, gothic novels (under the pseudonym Rose Brock), collections of poetry, and several collections of short stories. In addition, he taught fiction writing at the University of California, Los Angeles (1977-1986), and at the Beyond Baroque Foundation, Venice, California (1975-1976). In 1974, Hansen received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the following year he received a grant from the British Arts Council for a lecture tour of Northumberland.

In his later years, after ending the Brandstetter series, Hansen continued to write, concentrating on short stories primarily concerning his straight private eye and horse ranch owner Hack Bohannon, for such collections as Bohannon’s Country: Mystery Stories (1993) and Bohannon’s Women: Mystery Stories (2002). He also began—with Living Upstairs (1993)—a series set in the 1940’s and 1950’s about young, aspiring gay writer Nathan Reed that was planned for twelve novels but ended after only three entries on the author’s death. Hansen died November 24, 2004, at the age of eighty-one.

Analysis

In the article “The Mystery Novel as Serious Business,” Joseph Hansen sketched his ideas on a writer’s responsibility and the serious purpose of the detective genre. In his view, the mystery novel, treated as serious business, has a unique capacity to work the “kind of magic” that any fine writer possesses. “A good and honest novel lets us experience for a brief while what it is like to be another human being, someone with a different background and a different set of problems,” writes Hansen. The Brandstetter novels are, therefore, aimed at a general audience, not a gay audience. Hansen maintains that the mystery of death, in which lives unfold within the framework of a compelling story, will illuminate some aspect of the mystery of life.

Naturally, one aspect of human life that Hansen consistently demystifies is homosexuality. Brandstetter is ordinary but always human, with expectations, jealousies, and occasionally a lovers’ quarrel, all carefully crafted by Hansen. A variety of homosexual and bisexual characters appear in the Brandstetter novels, none stereotyped or unbelievable. Gay subculture is encountered but never dominates. Troublemaker (1975) centers on the murder of an owner of a gay bar and Early Graves (1987) on the serial murders of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) victims, but the sexual preference of victims or their friends is never sensationalized. It is simply an aspect of their lives, although they or others may feel secretive or uncomfortable about it.

While demystifying homosexuality, Hansen renders human sexuality a complex phenomenon and the enterprise of categorizing individuals a risky business. The unhappiest people are those who hide or do not accept who they are. Sex or sexual preference is not portrayed as the problem—the absence of self-acceptance is. In A Smile in His Lifetime (1981), a novel outside the Brandstetter series, the emotional landscape of Whit Miller is very bleak. Miller is a bisexual who is growing apart from his wife and toward a largely homosexual existence, something he has been struggling with since the day he was married. Gender confusion is an idea consistently raised by Hansen. Brandstetter frequently catches fleeting glimpses of a fleeing felon or someone who has struck him from behind that may have been a young man or may “have been a her.” It is always “too dark.”

In addition to demystifying homosexuality, Hansen draws parallels between the personal issues and love relationships of his detective and those of the characters he is investigating. In Fadeout, Brandstetter’s lover has just died of cancer. While investigating a murder, Brandstetter clears one young man of the crime, and the young man later becomes his new lover. One love fades out; another fades in. In Death Claims (1973), Brandstetter and the new lover are drifting apart. Each lays claim to the memory of a dead lover. Brandstetter investigates the death of a female bookseller who struggled to survive through skin graft surgery, nurtured by the love of a younger woman. Finding the murderer, he restores the young woman’s belief in herself and her strength to survive. Brandstetter and his lover bury the past and restore their relationship. Plot, theme, and title run parallel. Troublemaker involves a pair of interlopers. One tries to break up Brandstetter’s relationship with his lover, and another is the killer of a bar owner. Brandstetter locates the murderer, one of the victim’s associates, and the other interloper, saving his relationship.

Brandstetter is in the business of reconstructing people’s lives and discovering their meaning, both personal and social. Hansen, the writer, parallels the detective he created. He believes that the mystery novel “ought to look straight at the real world . . . concern itself with real problems that face real people.” Early Graves, the ninth Brandstetter novel, exemplifies this stand. It opens with Brandstetter returning home from a business trip to find an unknown dead man on his doorstep. The victim appears to be the latest casualty of a serial killer of young gay men who are all dying of AIDS. Someone left the body for Brandstetter to find, and he wants to know why, a desire that leads him on a search through lives filled with grief, as families and lovers face the hard truth about AIDS. At the same time, Brandstetter is grieving about the premature end of his live-in relationship with Cecil Harris. Cecil, a young black reporter, in an act of misplaced pity, married an underage blind girl (in The Little Dog Laughed, 1986) to save her from her abusive, gold-digging mother. Eventually, the serial murderer meets an early grave—and Cecil’s marriage does also.

Many critics attribute Hansen’s success to the subtlety and sensitivity with which he confronts contemporary social issues through Brandstetter’s actions and opinions as the character ages. Critics point out that some social evil or problem—AIDS, political graft, secret military operations in Central America, toxic-waste dumping, religious fraud—often lies at the heart of Brandstetter’s cases. Through the fast-paced detective genre, Hansen can illustrate some aspect of human nature or societal ill without making shrill value judgments. Critics agree that Skinflick (1979) is more about the methods people use to rationalize unethical actions than about catching the murderer of a hypocritical religious fundamentalist. Gravedigger is a nonsensational treatment of evil in the form of a Charles Manson-type mass murderer. Nightwork (1984), which involves murder in the cover-up of illegal toxic-waste dumping, was written to expose a problem that, in Hansen’s words, “no one, not on any level of government, no one in the world, is effectively doing anything about.” In that novel, one villain is caught, but the real killer of untold numbers by slow poisoning remains at large. Questions remain unanswered, but the book’s message is that people must treat one another with respect and decency.

Hansen’s concern for how individuals treat their fellow humans is elaborated in several novels outside the Brandstetter series. In Backtrack (1982), a mystery featuring an eighteen-year-old protagonist who discovers aspects of his dead father’s life that lead him to await his own killer, Hansen shows what happens when parents do not care; it is a story that seeks to explain why children become runaways and has been called brilliant.

The Brandstetter mysteries are keenly linked through symbol, incident, and character so that they are best read in chronological order. In a real sense they form a single multivolume novel, one in which it is possible to learn much about being a gay male in the United States at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the series is a study of the social and political issues confronting American society in the same time period. The social consciousness of the Brandstetter novels increases with each succeeding volume.

Certain characters and Brandstetter activities serve to link each volume: Brandstetter’s ninth stepmother, Amanda; Barker, the police chief; Leppard, the police detective; Romano, the restaurateur; Brandstetter’s father in the early novels; Owens, his lifelong buddy; and various lovers who come and go. Settings of the novels are quite detailed, and that of Brandstetter’s home in particular roots him and the story in a specific time and place. Brandstetter’s habits—a glass of Glenlivet before dinner and longing for a good meal either cooked at home or at Romano’s restaurant—are part of the Brandstetter formula. His character appears more interested in a good meal than good sex.

Like Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Brandstetter is ever the questioner trying to make sense out of things that do not fit. When asked what he knows by the police or a friend, Brandstetter always replies, “I only ask questions.” In Skinflick, when asked if he, the claims investigator, will not pay the insurance to the beneficiaries, Brandstetter replies, “I don’t want to hold it back . . . but a couple of things are wrong and I have to find out why.”

Hansen, like Macdonald, saw the writer as private investigator. In discussing fiction writing, he singled out Gertrude Stein as a writer to the last breath because of her dying words, a “final beautiful sentence”: “Very well then—what is the question?” Hansen’s Brandstetter asks not only who had reason to murder but also why, and then why they do what they do in everyday life. The answers to Brandstetter’s questions reveal individuals’ actions and motives, but Hansen refrained from having anyone answer bigger questions about graft, toxic-waste dumping, or AIDS; he confines his craft to meticulously describing things the way they are. The reader may leave a Hansen novel outraged, cynical, or simply more knowledgeable. His stories are not mere social tracts but compelling tales that move one to sympathy, wonder, and amusement.

Fadeout

With Fadeout, Hansen not only introduced Dave Brandstetter but also found his own voice within the mystery genre. Written in the Ross Macdonald style of hard-boiled Southern California detective fiction, it established Hansen as a mature mystery writer. In this action-filled novel, Hansen reveals people and their complex interests through what they do rather than what they say. With Fadeout, he fundamentally changed the way gays are portrayed in detective fiction. There are no pitiable gay blackmail victims or flighty dancer types, as in the work of Ngaio Marsh, for example, but a gay, macho detective hero. Thus Hansen succeeded in further humanizing the form he inherited from the classic hard-boiled writers.

According to Hansen, the writer of fiction has a responsibility to deal honestly with important aspects of contemporary life. He intended to portray a decent, tough-minded, caring kind of man who was contentedly homosexual and, in so doing, to contradict conventional social ideas about homosexuals. Thus, as Brandstetter is introduced in Fadeout, his twenty-year relationship with an interior decorator named Rod Fleming has just ended with Rod’s death from cancer. In contrast, Brandstetter’s father, Carl Brandstetter, has recently remarried for the ninth time. Just as the myth that gays do not have long-term, stable relationships is exploded, so is the social image of the middle-aged male homosexual as obsessed with seducing young men or boys. In Brandstetter’s relationships with Anselmo, a young Latino in Fadeout, and Cecil Harris, a young black reporter in The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (1978), the young men are the pursuers and seducers of the middle-aged investigator, not vice versa. Brandstetter yearns for, rather than actively searches for, a lover when he is without one.

A Country of Old Men

A Country of Old Men is the insurance investigator’s final bow. Retired from his profession, feeling his age, and living comfortably with young African American television journalist-producer Cecil Harris, Brandstetter—now the owner of a favorite restaurant that he patronized for thirty years—responds to a call from old friend Madge Dunston. While walking on the beach, she found a young abused boy who apparently was kidnapped after witnessing the murder of Howard “Cricket” Shales, a musician, former convict, and drug dealer who a woman named Rachel Klein may have shot.

In the course of his investigation, Brandstetter bumps into many old friends and acquaintances who figure in the story. Mystery writer Jack Helmers, whom Brandstetter has known from high school, is rumored to be working on a roman à clef novel depicting youthful shenanigans from fifty years ago that could be embarrassing to the now grown-up pranksters, such as Charlie Norton and Morse Campbell, who visit Brandstetter after long absences to pump him for information about the forthcoming book. A powerful political figure, Alejandro Hernandez, reappears in an attempt to make a bargain with Brandstetter. The investigator seeks the assistance of longtime gay friend Ray Lollard, who has lived for years with another of Brandstetter’s friends, Kovacs, an artist who is dying of AIDS. Amanda, the ninth wife of Brandstetter’s father, and widow of record, stops by to announce she is remarrying, to actor Cliff Callahan. Los Angeles Police Department homicide lieutenant Jeff Leppard, with whom Brandstetter has crossed paths before, cooperates with the investigator in unraveling the events leading up to the murder.

Although the investigator, through his usual dogged persistence and thoroughness in examining every lead, does eventually expose the real killer and the motive behind the crime, A Country of Old Men is more than simply a complex, well-plotted mystery. It is also an examination of the different forms of abuse to which humans fall prey, a compassionate exploration of the inevitability of aging, and an affectionate swan song to a popular and unique character, Dave Brandstetter.

Principal Series Character:

• David Brandstetter , a claims investigator for an insurance company in the Los Angeles area, is a middle-aged, tough, rather humorless hero. When he first appears, Brandstetter is a homosexual whose longtime partner has recently died. Otherwise a typical man, Brandstetter has a unique perspective on human motivation that helps him spot deception in voice, manner, and explanation.

Bibliography

Breen, Jon L. Introduction to The Fine Art of Murder: The Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, and Larry Segriff with Jon L Breen. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993. Cites Hansen as creator of the first realistic gay detective and provides a brief history of homosexuality in mystery fiction.

Callendar, Newgate. “Criminals at Large.” Review of Death Claims, by Joseph Hansen. The New York Times Book Review, January 21, 1973, p. 26. Praises Hansen—labeled of “the Ross Macdonald school”—for managing to avoid clichés while engaging the reader in the emotional problems of his gay hero and notes his smooth handling of crime elements and his plausible denouement.

Clemons, Walter. “The New Stellar Sleuths.” Review of Gravedigger, by Joseph Hansen. Newsweek 99, no. 23 (June 7, 1982): 71-72. Favorable review focuses especially on the writing in the story in which Brandstetter investigates a claim made by a financially and sexually unstable father concerning his missing daughter, who is possibly a victim of a cult.

DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994. Brief entries on Hansen and on his gay detective, Dave Brandstetter.

Geherin, David. “Dave Brandstetter.” In The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1985. A discussion of Hansen’s popular detective as a unique creation: an investigator who because he works for insurance companies, unlike other private eyes, looks into only deaths, usually murders. The chapter also shows how Hansen, without proselytizing, helped advance gay rights through his fiction by portraying homosexuals as real individuals rather than stereotypes—while simultaneously providing outstanding, well-written mysteries.

Hansen, Joseph. “The Mystery Novel as Serious Business.” The Armchair Detective (Summer, 1984). Hansen describes his theories of writing mysteries. Sheds light on his published works.

Hansen, Joseph. “PW Interviews: Joseph Hansen.” Interview by Barbara A. Bannon. Publishers Weekly 227, no. 24 (December 17, 1982): 14-15. The interview includes biographical information, and Hansen comments on his writing techniques and working habits.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller, eds. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York: Arbor House, 1986. Muller reviews several of Hansen’s works, including the collection Brandstetter and Others (1984), which contains two short stories featuring the investigator, “Election Day” and “Surf.” Other works reviewed include Fadeout, Nightwork, and Troublemaker—all of which Muller praises for their rich characterizations, memorable settings, explorations of various aspects of gay life, and well-constructed plots.

Publishers Weekly. Review of Brandstetter and Others, by Joseph Hansen. 226, no. 20 (November 16, 1984): 55. Review of Hansen’s short-story collection, which is praised for its well-crafted tales that focus primarily on murder and “twisted love”; it is noted that several of the stories appeared previously in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Teachout, Terry. Review of Gravedigger, by Joseph Hansen. The National Review 34, no. 10 (May 28, 1982): 645-647. A highly favorable review that points out Hansen’s particular strengths: few flashy similes, detached third-person narration, and a quiet, unassuming protagonist who happens to be gay, death investigator Dave Brandstetter. Teachout considers Hansen a worthy successor to Ross Macdonald, though without that author’s thoughtfulness or overall scope of story.

Zubro, Mark Richard. “The Gay and Lesbian Mystery.” In The Fine Art of Murder: The Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, and Larry Segriff with Jon L Breen. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993. Provides a few paragraphs about Hansen as a trendsetter for making Dave Brandstetter a real, three-dimensional character.