A QUEER CASE: The Selby Bigge Mysteries #1, debut mystery in a queer-centered 1920s series

A QUEER CASE: The Selby Bigge Mysteries #1
ROBERT HOLTOM
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping 1920s-set whodunnit, this debut features a queer sleuth who must solve a murder in a mansion on London’s Hampstead Heath without revealing his sexuality, lest he be arrested as a criminal.

The Selby Bigge mysteries series debut, it will leave readers eager for the next installment. Perfect for fans of Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey novels.

London, 1929.

Selby Bigge is a bank clerk by day and a denizen of the capital’s queer underworld by night, but he yearns for a life that will take him away from his ledgers, loveless trysts and dreary bedsit in in which his every move is scrutinised by a nosy landlady. So when he meets Patrick, son of knight of the realm and banking millionaire Sir Lionel Duker, he is delighted to find himself catapulted into a world of dinners at The Ritz and birthday parties at his new friend’s family mansion on Hampstead Heath.

But money, it seems, can’t buy happiness. Sir Lionel is being slandered in the press, his new young wife Lucinda is being harassed by an embittered journalist and Patrick is worried he’ll lose his inheritance to his gold-digging stepmother. And when someone is found strangled on the billiards room floor after a party it doesn’t take long for Selby to realise everyone has a motive for murder.

Can Selby uncover the truth while keeping his own secrets buried?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Snobbery is its own worst enemy. Think Saltburn or The Line of Beauty. It never works for long, this charade. You inevitably out yourself one way or another, just like trying to pass as straight when you're not.

"Perverts are prone to all sorts of criminality, especially homicidal mania."
Quite right, I didn't say. There was nothing I enjoyed more after a nice bit of sodomy than a spot of killing.

I felt very squicked out by the period-appropriate homophobia. I expect I was supposed to; but I never quite cottoned on to whether the story was aware of its snobbery in a positive or negative social light. I can see a young gay man delighting in his beauty's ability to open doors of privilege, but few enough are the cases where that works out to the long-term benefit of the youth...think of Jed Johnson and Joe Dallesandro versus Scott Thorson and (for a straight example) Kato Kaelin. Is Selby one of the former two, or among the legions represented by the latter two?

I don't know, but more to the point I don't think Author Holtom knows. If I was meant to pick up on intentional ambiguity, I didn't; it felt more like simple not having thought it through. (A very snobby side note: "me" and "I" are not interchangeable unless the point is to make the character misusing them sound...out of their depth.)

So, kudos for research: the atmo is great, and very much matches what I, a seasoned reader of "Golden Age" (how fraught is that term!) mysteries expect; the snarky little cameo by Dame Agatha in her best self-puncturing Ariadne Oliver vein; Theo/Theodora's delightfully spiky trans rep in this Magnus Hirschfeld-informed era and milieu.

Fewer plaudits for not deciding, then going all in on, an idea of Selby's aims by trying to join this bunch of dreadful snobs, he said snobbishly. There are pacing decisions I didn't entirely vibe with, some scenes of country-house life that overstayed my patience; that's just my taste, though, as others might batten on it. I want to be very clear with modern M/M readers: no joy for y'all here. Period-appropriate zipper-welded-shut longing.

And if Theo/dora does not feature more prominently in the next one, I am firing up my voodoo-dolly creation skills and coming after all y'all who made this series. Individually.