Richard Stevenson's Donald Strachey mystery series had been unavailable since The Haworth Press was acquired by Taylor and Francis, a publisher of academic books and journals with no interest in Gay Men's fiction.
MLR Press, a small independent publisher started in 2006 by Laura Baumbach, has been bringing the novels back to life, one every month, since July.
And this month Don Strachey is back in a new mystery, Death Vows (Albion, MLR Press, 2008, 198 pp.).
Richard Stevenson was at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, in Manhattan, last Tuesday, signing copies of his new book. A tall, skinny, man in his sixties, he looks much better than in the picture printed on the back cover of The Haworth Press edition of the series. Harboring a quiet smile, sparkling eyes, maybe a little shy, with a soft voice, he doesn't look like his gay detective, although he says about Stratchey and his partner Timmy: 'There's a bit of me in both of them - the good-boy Richard in Timmy, the bad-boy Richard in Strachey.' In the same interview posted on MLR Press website, he explains how he started the series:
I wrote it because it was what I deeply wanted to write. I wrote the first page of Death Trick [the first book in the series, 1981], and I felt as if my whole life as a writer had been leading up to that moment, and I had found my voice and my mission. And that mission was to advance the cause of gay liberation through entertainment. Joseph Hansen, with his Dave Brandstetter novels in the early '70s, had been the first creator of mysteries where the gay characters were decent and sane, and not pathetic wretches or serial killers. I wanted to do that too, but with a lighter tone and a protagonist who wasn't so sad. The biggest risk in all this was using the book for my own belated coming out. I was still married at the time. I showed the book to a grizzled old newspaper guy I knew, and he said, "Lipez, I think you were smart to use a pseudonym on this. Otherwise people would think you were queer." So I had to explain a few things.
Richard Stevenson is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez. Not bad?
Death Vows is in line with the previous eight novels in the series. A fast pace story, driven by the dialogues, often tense, filled with humor and irony, anchored in the contemporary gay community, it takes us to the Berkshires in the 'Gay Peoples Republic of Massachusetts,' where gay marriage has become a 'fine institution - except when it leads to murder...'
As Michael Nava, the author of the Henry Rios mystery series, puts it in a quote printed in the first pages of the book: 'Richard Stevenson is the most underrated of gay mystery writers.'
If you are tired of the drama being played between Wall Street and Washington, DC, book a flight to London and lose yourself in the Bacon (Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain) and Rothko (Rothko at the Tate Modern) exhibitions...
2008.09.28