MURDER ON MONTE VISTA, 1st Mason Adler post-WWII mystery & MURDER IN UNION STATION, 2nd of the series

MURDER ON MONTE VISTA
DAVID S. PEDERSON (Mason Adler Mysteries #1)
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s 1946, and on a hot spring night in Phoenix, Arizona, things are only beginning to heat up at the Monte Vista Road home of flamboyant decorator Walter Waverly Wingate.

Private detective Mason T. Adler isn’t thrilled to be turning fifty, and the party Walter throws him makes him even more uncomfortable. Walter has arranged a special birthday present for Mason: a private hour with the handsome, young Henry Bowtrickle in Walter’s upstairs bedroom. But the night turns deadly when his birthday gift turns up murdered.

The room was locked, no way in or out, and only Henry and Mason were inside. Mason Adler is on the case, but he is also a suspect, along with the other assorted party guests who were all downstairs at the time of the stabbing. Or were they?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What I expect from a first-in-series mystery is simple: Let me know what this world is about; let me in to the characters' interrelatedness; and tell me what kind of crimes we're going to be dealing with.

Can't say I didn't get all those things...a little bit too much of 'em.

The story is of Mason Adler, newly fifty gay man, and his social circle: gal-pal Lydia, long-term frenemy Walter, and cop Emil. Various peripheral people step a measure before us, but no one else really matters. The main thing about a series mystery is the series, not the mystery, and that very much comes true here. By the halfway mark there's no body worth mentioning. Things are slowly unfolding, and the tensions of Mason Adler's life are lying before us prior to a murder accelerating the plot.

Possibly one of the most mean-spirited murders I've ever encountered, spite and envy fueling the circumstances that enable the murder to take place, and then the dead body comes in for a lot of muffled amusement because of how the whole plot evolved. There wasn't much to recommend the dead one, but there was little enough to recommend a lot of these people.

Phoenix, Arizona, is a place I've never, ever wanted to be the few times I've been there. I dislike deserts. I was transported to Phoenix circa 1946 with the author's major characters. It was darn near told in real-time vignettes. I got the sense of the oppressive, horrifying heat, the blasting, battering sunshine, the dreadful helplessness of life in this kind of nightmare before home air conditioning was ubiquitous in the US. (Even with air conditioning I don't want to be in Phoenix or any other desert city. Or town. Or hamlet. Or structure. Or outdoor space.)

So there was that going against the read. The pluses were the economy of the author's characterization. He needn't linger over loving descriptions because he chooses the details that actually matter and doesn't linger on them. He also doesn't clutter up my mental landscape, choosing instead to focus on the telling details. It was a way of bringing me a vivid, textured experience without using a lot of words to do it.

But at the end of the read, I was just...repelled...by the murder's cruel, appalling conception. (Murder will never not be cruel! I'm going on about the *circumstances* not the act.) The person whose life was taken didn't get, in life or after, near enough sympathy. Then there's the person whose idea erected the framework for the murder...I truly do not ever want to see that person in this series again.

I'll certainly move on to the next entry in the series. I won't be likely to revisit this one, though.

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

MURDER IN UNION STATION
DAVID S. PEDERSON (Mason Adler Mysteries #2)
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Phoenix, May 6, 1946

At close to midnight in the Union Station baggage room, the air is hot, still, and thick. The eleven forty-five Golden State Limited to Los Angeles is approaching rapidly when the baggage handler, Alfred Brody, notices a stray hound dog sniffing around one of the steamer trunks. The horrific discovery of a body inside the trunk can mean only one thing: there’s a murderer among them.

The young woman was certainly murdered, but who did it, and why? Suspects and motives abound as Private Detective Mason Adler investigates. He soon realizes that nothing, and no one, are what they seem to be as he races to uncover the truth and bring the real murderer to justice without becoming the next victim.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh damn. Walter's back. *shudder*

After the nasty stunt he pulled in the first book, I really don't want to believe it's going to go well for him vis-a-vis this series, if we're going to keep seeing Walter. But the good part is the mystery Author Pederson chose this time is one ripped from the century-old headlines! I was really curious to see what would happen next.

What happens is the requisite amount of banter, a close friendship between a straight woman and a gay guy, bitchy-queen Walter being a complete cow when he wasn't being a tedious crook, oh let's see...hm...oh, Emil the cop being bested by Mason again like Perry Mason beats Hamilton Burger in every contest...um...the murder was done in vain as no one gets away with anything in these books.

I don't think this one took quite as long as the first one, but these aren't propulsive "...and then what happened?!" reads. They're going to take you down the path the detective treads with him, and cause you to get your helper's badge on your efforts and merits. I particularly liked the detail of Mason's car being a 1939 Studebaker Champion, famously a cheap-to-run and stodgy vehicle. The kind of car Uncle Dale drives to Thanksgiving and parks in front of the house despite everyone urging him to take the bus.

By the standards of the day, a real plain-jane-mobile though I myownself would love to have one.

The unmaksing event that Mason stages is very interesting, and not something I expected. Let's just say that Lydia is a useful gal-pal indeed. I was very interested in the book from giddy-up to whoa, and will certainly seek out the next Mason Adler mystery to check in on everyone, make sure they're doing okay.

PHILIP SPARROW TELLS ALL, a long-forgotten side of a queer elder statesman's career

PHILIP SPARROW TELLS ALL: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist
SAMUEL STEWARD (author) & JEREMY MULDERIG (editor)
Foreword by Justin Spring, author of SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
University of Chicago Press
$20.00 ebook or trade paper editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Samuel Steward (1909–93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared the considerable scope of his experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer whose publications ranged from scholarly articles to gay erotica (the latter appearing under the pen name Phil Andros). Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 1944 and 1949 to the Illinois Dental Journal, an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics.

In Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward’s life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field’s (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men’s fashions, and his dread of turning forty. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. Throughout, Mulderig’s entertaining annotations explain the essays’ wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists.

The first collection of any of Samuel Steward’s writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.

I REQUESTED AND RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

There is a quality to the City of the Big Shoulders that grows on a person, like the taste of a martini, like learning to like pineapple and cottage cheese. There are so many things against it that have to be forgotten. When we first arrived we hated it—the dirty papers flying loosely on the streets, the sprawling quality it had, the "maryann" backs of the apartment houses that you see from the elevated tracks as the train groans and screeches on its way to the Loop. We loathed the dirty clothes hanging on the little wooden back porches, we suffered over the unbelievable squalor and filth of the south-side tenements, the naked babies playing in the mud of the backyards—and the incredible hypocrisy of the bright shops on Michigan Boulevard, and the white lights on the whiter Wrigley Tower.
    from "On Chicago"

Now, go read his Wikipedia page to get a sense of why this basic little twink was a Very, Very Big Deal; it explains a lot when you know he was a literary writer of merit while young, an esteemed literary scholar during middle age, and a pornographer of godlike renown in his later years. Throughout his life he was the proverbial "good time had by all," racking up over eight hundred (800!) sex partners in a Satyr-esque lifetime of over four thousand five hundred (4,500!!) sexual encounters.

He even impressed Alfred Kinsey. (You know, the one Liam Neeson played in that movie, the one you're referencing when you say someone's a "Kinsey 6" or whatever.) His journals and other related materials went to the Kinsey Institute...I'm sure they're still popping students' eyes.

Knowing what we know now of Steward's life and lifestyle, one can't but help wondering rather bemusèdly what the hell the Illinois Dentistry Journal was thinking when they asked Professor Steward to write a column for them. Reading these pieces with modern eyes, it's damned incredible what he was able to get away with saying. But in 1944, when he began this work, he was an outwardly respectable scholar...how far social media has dragged (!) us into the private lives of all the people we know! A simple Googling, had it existed in 1944, would've made the staid, stolid dentists of Illinois aware that they wouldn't want Steward's hands anywhere near their instruments.

So to speak.

Probably the most fun thing about reading this collection, for me as a gay kid who loved Phil Andros's first-person hustling tales, is the astonishing freedom to camp it up that came from invisibility! There is no single-edged sword, is there. It delighted me to spend time with Uncle Philip (Auntie Philip?) as we went behind the scenes at the Opera...a thing one should really never do with the performing arts, go look behind the curtain, it utterly ruins the illusions and one can not ever recover them.

I showed up at seven, trembling a little. I heard my name called, and within moments was being whisked up the elevator to the fifth floor...where the men dressed. ... The costume master handed me a mustard-colored costume: a pair of breeches, a short bolero jacket, a string of red cheesecloth for a necktie, and a salmon-colored cummerbund to wrap around my manly form. ... Within a short while I discovered that the breeches were size 46, which is a little large for my svelte thirty-inch waist. I was soon madly fumbling at my rear, trying to pull in the straps and pin myself together. ... At last a kind old gentleman saw my troubles. "Come here," he said. He applied two safety pins, took an extra-long cummerbund, and twirled me into it. Then he took two three-inch folds in my rear, and warned me not to turn my backside to the audience. And we went down to the stage, where a little man rubbed our cheeks briefly with bright rouge, and with a black eyebrow pencil gave us romantic sideburns, and let us go.
    from "On Operas and Operating"

It's like being backstage again...the bit about the cummerbund, for the uninitiated, is precisely accurate. One cannot put on a real cummerbund solo. One needs a deft companion to hold the long cloth at precise and varying angles while one (gracelessly, in my case) twirls and the cummer does its bunding of your trousers. Excellent practice for diapering a toddler, I note for those who might benefit from this knowledge.

One of my mother's cultural touchstones, and thus mine by osmosis, was the inimitable food writer M.F.K. Fisher. She introduced the concept of Dining to many an aspiring flyover-country lassie like Mama. If you have never encountered her lapidary prose, and her conoisseur's eye for what makes a meal A Feast, please do not read the rest of this review until you've procured and at least sampled The Measure of Her Powers or The Art of Eating, which last title is free to read for Amazon Prime members! Oh, don't just take my word for it; read Philip Sparrow's "On How to Cook a Wolf" to get the arch, exquisite Friend-of-Dorothy look at the medieval table's, ermmm, pleasures. There is a recipe to cook a wolf! Fisher quotes it, so does Auntie; and then, in the dropping-of-hairpins to end them all, says this:

For my part, I cannot rest until I find a wolf to try it. Unfortunately, there is in these parts a scarcity of the four-legged kind, so I have a notion to call up "Esquire Escorts" [Bonded Male and Female Escorts for All Occasions] and ask them to send me out an unbonded one, a tall, husky, grey-eyed blond of the two-legged variety. Then, clutching my trusty cudgel, I'll lay him flat as he enters the door, and set to work.
    from "On How to Cook a Wolf"

Whoa, Nelly! (or nelly, I suppose) That's pretty darned Out for that day and time...and his audience wouldn't've known that a "wolf" in the time's gay argot was a studly muffin who did boys on the side, like the current term "trade" covers. Sam Steward was a twink, thin and blond and very much a bottom in today's parlance. He was also a genuine masochist, he liked the leathers and the games of dominance and submission too...but mostly, in his own time, he was invisible as a gay man because there wasn't a large group of people aware of such beings existing among them...and it shows, as we say now.

What I think you might wonder, you poor benighted straight person who happened across my blog, is how the hell you're supposed to be in on the joke when I might as well be speaking Croatian to you right now. Editor Mulderig to the rescue! Everything I've just told you is on the page with the article I'm quoting. It's not called out in a footnote...it's just printed at the bottom of the page and references to the place in the text are in italics to call your attention, eg:

a wolf to try it. In the urban parlance of the early twentieth century, ...

This is, after all, an academic press's book; one must expect the resident academicians have worked their magic on the obscure points in the text. It's hugely helpful; it's unobtrusive; and in the end it added immeasurably to my pleasure in the read.

That said, the pleasure was one I felt inclined to prolong. One, sometimes two, pieces back-to-back; selected on whim, or mood, not in chronological order; thus it took about four times as long to read the whole text as it would have had it been a novel or other form of narrative. The articles, their subjects, the gestalt of the pieces being written for dentists who almost certainly were innocent of any knowledge of what Auntie Philip was really saying, the biographical detail that the author had serious hotness for the editor he was working for; all of it makes this 256-page slenderness of a treat so much more delicious than most summer reads you can buy.

Just spread the pleasure out over more time and savor the spicy scent of cakes long since baked and tea long since served.

THE FALLS OF THE WYONA, a coming-of-age novel about last midcentury set in beautiful Appalachia

THE FALLS OF THE WYONA
DAVID BRENDAN HOPES
Red Hen Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after WWII discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts. Seen through the eyes of his best friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. They have no context for their feelings, and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment. The winner of Red Hen’s Quill Prize, The Falls of the Wyona is the first of three achieved (and several more projected) novels by this author imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM RED HEN PRESS VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The thing about historical novels, ones set in a past deep enough to have lost its currency, is that they might as well be fantasy novels. On the other hand, historical novels that take place when one's parents were getting married and having their first children are in a peculiar place between contemporary and stuffy-old-fashioned nostalgia fests.

I went on this journey, to be sure, knowing where I was headed. The historical part wasn't that historical to my frame of reference; the queer part contained my frame of reference; so what was I doing here, exactly? Touristing a bygone age's homophobia, knowing it would end badly? Or listening to the gift of a story told by a person whose life was more firmly rooted in that time and place than mine? In the end, it's a matter of semantics, distinction without difference. I went to the Wyona River and I saw the Falls, felt the way it broke the people of its town into parts. Boys and girls led very separate lives when I was growing up, too, but the river being so exclusively (in the narrator, Alden's, mind) male rang me like a bell. The funny thing for me was seeing how open Vince, the coach's only child, was about his love for Glen...but only by the maleness of the Wyona.

Arden's narration of the moments that small-town Southern football-playin' boys shared then and now, if Friday Night Lights et alii are to be believed, came close to wearing my armor thin. I didn't like those guys, they didn't like me, and I was right back there in those awful, ugly hallways. Arden, a jock, and Tilden the smart jock, both orbit Vince or Vinny (depending on some weird social cue I never worked out, the nicknames interchanged) in a way that I saw clearly as a former high-school nobody. Glen finds them, and improbably gets to hang with them; many are the jealous glances the four received, I'm sure. Vince falls in love with Glen. Arden knows, but doesn't really care, because the knowledge doesn't touch his love for Vince or fondness for Glen. Tilden starts to figure it out, a little, but can't quite contextualize it.

High-school loves are always hotly urgently NEW and DEEP!! A parent as doting as Vince's former football-star father is begins to dread this reality...it's the 1940s, that was inevitable...and horrible, wicked, cruel things begin to happen. Poor Glen...a gloriously romantic tableau ends in as awful a passage as any I've read. The most poignant, delightful scene I read was when Glen's father visits Arden at his home, admits he knows that Glen was in love with Vince and says in effect, "I wouldn't have changed what I told Glen to do to win over his true love even if I'd known then what I do now." Arden doesn't know what this means, kid that he is, and Glen's dad asks him just to be Glen's friend. It was a heartbreaking, lovely moment, deeply felt and viscerally real. It gave me the true tragic heart of the story, and it is the best reason I can give you, straight or gay, parent or not, to read this story.

The ending of the book, of necessity I think, is crowded and over-wrought. People come to accommodations that are not adequately explained, the sudden realizations and restorations aren't very realistic, and the theme of Love Conquering All feels fragile and thin. I don't think there was a better way off this horse, though. The need to end the story at this point and in this specific gestalt really could not be gainsaid.

But that troubled my readerly gravity, pushing me out of the gravity well when I expected to be reeled in and landed. Author Hopes has a lot of storytelling behind him. It shows in every beat he counts. It is always agreeable to be guided by a steady, firm hand. In the end, this tour was ended abruptly and I left the read wishing, regretting ever so slightly, wondering how, or if, the ending could've been more rooted in the story told.

I can't answer that, and it is that fact which left me with a three-plus star rating instead of the four-plus I'd expected to leave.