Jospeh Hansen, 1923-2004

Joseph Hansen died on November 24th at the age of eighty-one. Poet, editor, biographer, and many other things, Hansen is best known as the creator of the Dave Brandstetter series. Brandstetter is an insurance investigator (a private eye in all but name) operating in Southern California. Hansen's innovation: Brandstetter, like Hansen himself, is gay.

Now, mystery fiction is not known as especially progressive, and the private eye field in particular generally asks the reader to identify closely with the main character, so the odds were against the series. Its success owes a great deal to Hansen's talent as a writer and the fact that in most other areas, the series was rather conservative. The Brandstetter books are for the most part conventional whodunits, for example, and though Hansen was a fine stylist, he didn't push the envelope beyond the borders laid down by Chandler and Macdonald.

The upshot is that the books sold well due to their value as entertainment, not as social documents. It helped that Hansen avoided the pratfalls that have tripped up other mystery writers when they tried to write Important Books; such attempts at social moralizing are generally both heavy-handed and superficial.

While Hansen did introduce such themes (AIDS, for example), the main vehicle for whatever social impact the books had was Brandstetter himself. He was openly gay, but free of stereotype to a degree that was almost unknown when Fadeout was released in 1970, and is still less than common today. While his sexual identity permeates the books, his gay-ness is most often less pronounced than, say, Mike Hammer's aggressive heterosexuality. Still, there's no doubt he was breaking a taboo. I'm too young, and it's been too long, to accurately assess how they were received, but as any middle-schooler can tell you, "that's so gay" is still an insult.

I didn't know much about Hansen's life before I started this essay, and in a way that's my whole point: I know his work. I know Dave Brandstetter. And if that's all I know, then Hansen accomplished what he set out to do.

Other Resources
lastwords - Joseph Hansen's blog. The archives are still online and worth reading for a view of Hansen through his own eyes. Warning: strongly expressed polical views ahead.
The Thrilling Detective - Profile of Hansen and Dave Brandstetter by the inimitable Kevin Burton Smith. Includes Hansen's letter setting the record straight (ahem) about his orientation.
Roger L. Simon - Roger's memories of a fellow Angeleno.