Books: Backtrack By Joseph Hansen (1982)

"Did handsome, charming Eric Tarr, small-time actor, really kill himself? He left behind a lot of wreckage broken promises, broken hearts, broken lives. Backtracking through his father's past, young Alan, another of the betrayed, begins to see how many men and women might have been bitter enough to murder Eric Tarr. By the time Alan learns the truth, it becomes his own personal tragedy and, both legs in casts, he waits helpless in a storm-shaken deserted house on the beach for his father's killer to find and kill him too.”

While published in 1982, Backtrack feels like more like a tale set in the 1950s, with reminders of Hansen’s scathing look at Hollywood, Los Angeles, and gay life. Like his Dave Brandsetter tales, young Alan Tarr is smarter than everyone else when he decides to venture to Los Angeles for his father’s funeral –a father that left him and his mother at 6 months and never returned. It’s a nebulous reason, but for Alan, he needs to find some tangible reason to get there. But Alan arrives to late (a misadventure involving hitchhiking -a very 60’s and 70s thing- and a boy-ish looking girl named Gus prevents it. But soon, after talking to a few people, including the cops, Alan becomes convinced his father’s death was more than it seemed, and Alan ventures around the dark underbelly of Los Angeles to find a truth –one he’s disgusted to learn, but none the less seems attracted to as well.

There are some memorable characters here, fully realized, with Hansen’s patent prose style of not letting words go to waste. These books may be short, but there are not many writers who can evoke mood and setting with without filler –so every word does count. But like a few of his Brandstetter tales, the plot is a bit over the top, and melodramatic for no good reason, along with a few characters that flip-flop on their sexuality like they’re turning on a light switch.

Like a lot of books of this genre, it also comes off as dated and I sometimes cringed at causal racist and homophobic language. I understand this was what Hansen grew up with, but it’s also a reminder that while he can laser focus his eye on the lurid aspect of Hollywood, he could not give up the internal homophobia he might’ve had (after all, he was gay, but was married to a woman –who was a lesbian- from 1943 until her death in 1994. They also had a child).

In the end, it was a page turner. But your mileage will vary.