From Gimmicks to Characters: Queerness in Crime Fiction

How many times have you picked up a mystery novel like this? A tough, wise-cracking, hyper-masculine hero who drinks scotch, smokes cigars, is a boxer, loves fast cars, guns, and helpless, beautiful women. Par for the course for a lot of mysteries, right? A trope is a trope, which is not to say tropes don’t work. But this particular hero, you see, is woke.

He’s got a gay associate who is not like other gay men—read as: the only thing gay about him is the fact that he is described as such—and is pals with a butch lesbian who’s like “one of the guys” and is “tougher” than he is. (He probably also is friends with a stern veteran cop with a black sense of humor and a penchant for making prison-rape jokes, and a femme fatale who has him all figured out—but a discussion of those particular tropes is for another day.)

No, that’s not a description of a specific book or a specific author’s work. But it could be, right? We’ve all read minor variations of this, because crime fiction has a problem when it comes to well-written queer characters.

Much of the time, LGBTQ+ characters are inserted into crime fiction mainly so the wise-cracking, hyper-masculine hero can appear worldly and open-minded—just look at how okay he is with queer people!—while otherwise letting him act as crude or sexist as he wants.

The problem is bigger than that, though. Like harmful stereotypes: the soft-spoken, effeminate, gay serial killer (note the not-so-subtle “deviant” coding here); the duplicitous bisexual who can’t be trusted (you never know who she’ll fuck next!); the transgender woman who winds up being the subject of endless chicks with dicks jokes.

These stereotypes are often dressed in clunky literary devices—sexual orientation as plot twist, as negative characterization—or, the phenomenon where queer characters are only given storylines that relate to being queer. It’s like straight writers think LGBTQ+ people go about our lives in a queerness bubble (if only!) that makes us incapable of having a conversation or experience about anything else. Then, some stories take the opposite approach: announce that a certain character is queer, but fail to do any work to characterize their experience. Remember our hero’s butch lesbian pal? She’s written as, essentially, a man with lady parts, to crib a phrase on the subject from Christopher Rice.

We also have the category of queer characters who die horribly, in what I can only imagine as a holdover from the pulp fiction days (cf. another annoying trope—bury your gays), or, perhaps the most common role of all for LGBTQ+ characters in the genre, which is to say, a nonexistent one.

It sucks. As a queer person who has loved reading crime fiction since I was a kid, it really sucks to see bad representation like this. It doesn’t represent the world we live in, at all. In many cases, I think authors who write these types of characters are well-meaning—that is, they don’t intend to perpetuate harmful stereotypes or sell queer audiences short with one-dimensional cardboard cutouts—but they just haven’t done the heavy lifting required to represent LGBTQ+ identities well. (Pro-tip: if you’re writing outside your own sexual identity, consider a sensitivity reader to make sure you aren’t doing this unintentionally.)

So is the news all bad? Definitely not. The first crime novel I ever read that featured a queer protagonist was Catherine Lewis’s Dry Fire. Abby, the young police cadet at the heart of it, was smart, sympathetic, and gay, and when I read this book in the late 90s as a baby queer myself, I was so thrilled at the discovery—a character whose queerness wasn’t a plot device, a gimmick, or a lazy characterization. It showed me that crime stories could speak to the reader on a deeply personal level, and it still stands out to me as one of the most influential books I ever read. A few years ago, I wrote Ms. Lewis a gushy fangirl email about it after finally finding a copy of the book (which was then out of print) at a used bookstore. It was that big of a deal to me.

In honor of Pride month, let’s celebrate all the writers who handle queer characters well. This is by no means an all-encompassing list, but it’s a start. If you’re a straight reader of mysteries, I hope that some of these titles will introduce you to a new corner of the genre, and if you’re a queer reader, I hope you haven’t already read them all.

• Dave Brandstetter mysteries (Joseph Hansen): this series started way back in 1970, when Hansen was blazing a real trail in terms of representation—but his writing is so sharp and sardonic that it holds up against the finest voices in the mystery genre.
• Kate Delafield mysteries (Katherine V. Forrest): the first lesbian cop main character in the genre, Kate is a former Marine and current LAPD homicide detective in this series that started in 1984.
• Henry Rios mysteries (Michael Nava): Henry’s a gay, Latino, Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer who debuted in 1986.
• Jane Lawless mysteries (Ellen Hart): this series featuring a Minneapolis private eye/entrepreneur got going in 1989 and is still going strong today (proof that readers do want queer crime novels the aren’t set in California!)
• Kate Martinelli mysteries (Laurie R. King): another notable Kate, also in California (San Francisco this time), whose appearance on the scene in 1993 was definitely ahead of her time.

Examples from the present:

• Bobbi Logan mysteries (Renee James): This groundbreaking series features a trans woman protagonist with a witty, relatable voice.
• Chanse MacLeod mysteries (Greg Herren): Long-running series starring a New Orleans ex-cop-turned-PI
• The Acquittal by Anne Laughlin: a stand-out stand-alone PI novel by Laughlin, whose other novels (mysteries and thrillers) are worth checking out as well
• Luce Hansen thrillers (Meredith Doench): Luce is an investigator with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, so you’ll find a lot of rural creepiness to enjoy here
• Dan Sharp mysteries (Jeffrey Round): Queer crime fiction goes International with this PI series set in Toronto.

I’d be remiss in my authorial marketing duties if I didn’t mention my own series, which features bisexual PI Roxane Weary, too.

Going forward, let’s see queer characters up and down the mystery section—as heroes and heroines, as supporting characters, as suspects, as cops, lawyers, PIs, hackers (there’s another trope to discuss—the hero’s hacker friend!), good people, bad people, and everywhere in between—which is what the world is actually like. Because let’s face it: crime fiction has always taken its influence heavily from social issues, so it’s about time for the fictional streets of the mystery world to start mirroring our own.