Books: Early Graves By Joseph Hansen (1987)

“Dave Brandstetter's afternoon does not begin well: his ex-boyfriend picks him up at the airport, and the ride home — in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic — is one long argument between them. The insurance investigator's day gets worse when he finds a man — bloody, rain-soaked, and ice cold — lying on his porch, killed by a stab wound while Dave was out of town. There is a serial killer loose in Los Angeles, and this man is his sixth victim. Like the others, he had already been marked for death – by the unforgiving plague known as AIDS. Someone is targeting sick men in the city, and Dave's search for the killer leads him into the dark side of gay Los Angeles, where death comes without warning and life is a fearful dream.”

For the ninth book in this excellent series, Hansen folds the AIDS crisis of the 1980s into the narrative. I suppose, it was just a matter of time, considering the setting of these novels and the fact that Dave is an openly gay, yet “straight” appearing investigator. Because Hansen lived through this era, he takes a very brutal look at the epidemic, as he details the thousands of young men who are infected with HIV and growing homophobia and outright hatred gay men suffered during the period. It has a sometime unvarnished truth about it, with the squalid and sad life of those who were impacted the most, but as always, Dave remains honest, emphatic and loving.

The mystery, of course, is a bit low key in some way, as Dave’s investigation is personal. It’s also a bit of bait and switch, with your typical red herrings of the genre. Still, this books moves swiftly and you get a cast of interesting, sometimes horrible, characters, both old and new.

The only silly part –Hansen is seemly a great set-up artist and then the tales sort of go into weird, unbelievable mode towards the end- is his ongoing relationship with Cecil. I don’t think Hansen nailed down Dave’s birthday (though if I was to use Hansen’s birth year, Dave would be 63-64 in 1987), but it’s clear Dave is well into his 50s and Cecil is twenty-five. Anyways, Brandstetter's relationship with the boyfriend has hit a bump because Cecil went a little overboard by marrying a blind girl he thought he could help (those events were chronicled in the last book, The Little Dog Laughed). Here, a few months later, Dave is missing Cecil and our young cub reporter feels stuck, but because he’s honorable, he can’t see a way out. But all of this is resolved in the final pages, in a weird, deus ex machine writers (or publishers?) choice. It’s just too convenient, I guess.

But the book adds a blunt feeling of dread over these young men, adding a bleak and the sometimes horrible inaction of people and government during one of the darkest health crises of the latter half of the 20^th Century.