Available for the first time in ebook, Joseph Hansen's classic mystery series starring Dave Brandstetter, a gay private eye in 70s and 80s California.
'After forty years, Hammett has a worthy successor' The Times
Dave Brandstetter stands alongside Philip Marlowe, 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.
A rundown harbour is due to be re-developed - against the wishes of those who call it home. When Mr Le, the businessman behind the project, is shot on his way to meet the residents' spokesman, the culprit seems obvious. But then Dave is persuaded to take the case, and finds much more beneath the surface: forbidden love, deadly hatred, and most toxic of all, family honour.
The most exciting and effective writer of the classic private-eye novel working today - LA Times
Hansen, one of the best practitioners of the California private-eye school... writes crisply with a lean, spare prose that echoes Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald - Washington Post
In Brandstetter, Hansen has developed a sympathetic character of depth and integrity - Chicago Sun-Times
No mystery writer is better at evoking the landscape, the light, the architecture and the ethnic diversity of Los Angeles - Time
Hansen is a strong unflinching writer and everything in his taut prose is real - Boston Globe
An exceptionally urbane literary style - New York Times Book Review
Hansen writes about Southern California with the descriptive love once given it by Raymond Chandler - Herald Examiner
An excellent craftsman, a compelling writer, he has a real gift for storytelling - for character, for scene, for pace independent of violence - New Yorker
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.