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?

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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.

ARCADIA, rare intersex representation & THE WASTELAND, London life of gay poet/literary ikon T.S. Eliot

THE WASTELAND
HARPER JAMESON
Level 4 Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The extraordinary career and devastating life of T.S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot is a hollow man trapped in a dreary world. He works at a bank, a slave to the clock, the same routine, day after day. While London’s elite enjoy a Great Gatsby lifestyle and poets like Robert Frost are rock stars, attracting thousands of fans to each reading, Mr. Eliot walks past life, peering at it through cracks or around corners. Only in his imagination does the world drip with color.

Then one day he comes across Jack, an out and proud gay man being badly beaten, and something compels him to intervene. Life will never be the same.

Jack introduces Mr. Eliot to the gay underground of early twentieth-century London and to feelings Mr. Eliot had crammed down and locked away. And with freedom comes poetry. Extraordinary poetry that takes London by storm. But as Mr. Eliot’s fame increases, pressure for conformity does as well. Religious intolerance, fascism’s increasingly popular message of traditional values, and the allure of untold success present him with a decision that could have devastating consequences.

The Wasteland is the untold story of T.S. Eliot, his secret struggle with being gay, the people left in the wake of his meteoric career trajectory, and the madness that helped produce his greatest work.

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My Review: Sadness. Grey, enveloping sadness. That's the take-away I had from this technically adept reinvention of poet T.S Eliot's early-1920s life in London.

Even if there were no light on the bank, Mr. Eliot would still know it was there. It's always there, waiting to welcome him with open arms, more than willing to take more tocks from his clock.

–and–

"We return you now to our regular broadcast," the announcer drones.

"Clair de Lune." Claude Debussy. Relaxation. Baloney.

Baloney indeed, and more than just that in a penitential dry sandwich consumed in a lonely penitentiary. With the aplomb of a dab hand at this fantastical-reimaging stuff, Eliot's life is peopled with the souls embodied and conjured on a magical-realist visit with the great poet. We even see him conjuring Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock (whose peaches are uneaten and coffee spoons resolutely empty) on the day he learns his new crush, Jack, is no longer with the bank. But Mr. Eliot is in for a major surprise in this case....

...as are the readers of this historical fantasia on themes of gay men's circumscribed lives. Mr. Eliot, for I cannot bear to call him Tom, is a creative and passionate soul in the body of a Puritan. He is deformed and damaged by a world he despises as he obeys it. Mr. Eliot will get his revenge. He blares forth a trumpet of poetic passion that has stood its ground atop English-language poetry. Its creator is given, here, by Author Jameson, a life that commingles reality and fantasy as only a poet could merit, warrant, summon forth from beyond the grave's creative silence.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCADIA
EMMANUELLE BAYAMACK-TAM (tr. Ruth Diver)
Seven Stories Press
$13.96 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

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The Publisher Says: An English-language debut that reveals and subverts contemporary conceptions of normative sexuality, capitalist culture, and environmental degradation.

Winner, Prix du Livre Inter, 2019

Farah moves into Liberty House–an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature–at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune’s spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, looks, or ability. On her fifteenth birthday, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to question the confines of gender, and the hypocritical principles those within and outside the confraternity live by. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What is it to be part of a community? What is the endgame for a utopia that exists alongside refugees seeking shelter by the millions and in a society moving ever farther away from nature and its protections. As Liberty House devolves into a dystopia amidst charges of sexual abuse, it starts to look a lot like the larger world, confused in its fears and selfish hedonism.

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam delivers a magisterial novel, a scathing critique of innocence in the contemporary world.

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My Review: Really, really squicked out by what I see as a borderline-coercive sexual relationship between a fifteen-year-old who's just discovered they're intersex and the much-older leader of the cult that they and their family now belong to. I took a long break from the read because I was not sure I wanted to finish this entire story. It brought up my mother's sexually abusive power-plays against me. That was not comfortable at all.

So I'm unusually alert to sexual undertones in relationships between kids and adults. I felt Arcady, the cult/commune leader, was less grooming Farah than responding to Farah's burgeoning sense of themself as a sexual, intersex person. While that doesn't lessen my personal discomfort with Arcady's power imbalance with Farah, it does show that Author Bayamack-Tam possesses a clear sense of the need to keep the power dynamic in balance. Add to that Farah's rare and possibly genetically-heritable anatomical anomaly resulting in an indeterminate sex and gender presentation.

Prime candidate for a charismatic cult leader's sexual manipulation. Which, it must be said, is present; but the clear and repeated caveat from older Arcady is that they reach maturity before he will sexually engage with them. Farah, quite understandably, is not willing to wait some indeterminate amount of time for someone not her to decide they're capable of offering informed consent and, mirabile dictu, pushes the schedule to meet their burgeoning sexual desires.

Totally understand that. But great-grandfather does not think with a teen's hormones, and holds Arcady to a higher standard. But anyway, this was not anything Farah regrets or has doubts about; and again, the stage was set for this to be as unrevolting as possible because we know what Farah is thinking and feeling.

I've gone on about the subject and left out the nudist free-spirit grandmother, the cypher parents who really are affectless, the communards whose existence is merely suggested not explored in even the slightest depth...in general, this is a decent novel by a hippie-wannabe, a French-lady Brautigan, with an agenda and an axe being ground noisily in the background. Also a fun story to read.