Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery

Preface

Preface When the late Joan Kahn, magisterial mystery editor at Harper and Row, accepted this novel for publication, she wrote my agent, “Where has this writer been hiding?” I had to laugh to keep from crying. Hiding was the last thing I’d wanted to do. The year was 1969. I was forty-six years old, and I’d been writing all my life. The New Yorker and other good magazines had printed a few of my poems, but that was it so far as big-time publishing went. The tattered typescript of a gay novel I called Valley Boy, after years of traveling had ended up in 1964 with a dodgy paperback publisher in Fresno, crept into back-street bookshops as Lost on Twilight Road and earned me, as I recollect , two hundred dollars. After years of struggle, the law courts had by the midsixties decided the First Amendment gave writers the freedom to write, printers to print, booksellers to sell, and readers to read pretty much whatever could be put into words. And as blind chance would have it, this meant my time had come. Not that I wrote or wanted to write pornography . But in the best American tradition, shady operators v all over the country saw the chance to make a fast buck, and became publishers. And since these dimwits saw homosexuality as in and of itself pornographic, I was, ironically , in luck. In my own bailiwick, the San Fernando Valley and San Diego, once stodgy old printing plants began churning out erotica by the ton. They couldn’t find fodder enough to feed the hoppers. I’m not a fast worker, but I did my best, gamely adding the sex scenes the editors insisted on. I had serious things to say about what it meant to be homosexual in our world and time, but if this was the only way I could get them into print, then so be it. Before Joan Kahn plucked me out of hiding, the porn peddlers had published six of my novels and a book of short stories. She was a redoubtable lady, but I can’t really imagine her marching into trashy Times Square bookstores to comb the shelves for undiscovered writing talent. Anyway, I’d called myself James Colton then. When Don Slater, who edited One, America’s first openly sold gay magazine, started printing my stories in the prudish 1950s, he had insisted I use a pen name for my own protection. James Colton stories kept appearing in the magazine, and when it came time for my novels, it seemed good sense to keep the name. In time, I became an editor at One, and one bright morning, I tore open an envelope from New York that held a poem “One Sunday,” which was far better than the stuff commonly sent to us. The writer was Leo Skir, and after we joyfully accepted his poem, he sent us more wonderful stuff—wistful, funny verses, stories, reports of gay life on Fire Island. Leo vi and I began writing letters back and forth. He read my work. And changed my life. This he did by schlepping my books to the office of Seligman and Collier, his New York agents, dumping them on Oscar Collier’s desk, and urging him excitedly to read them. Excitedly was Leo’s style. I knew nothing about his visit until Oscar rang my phone from three thousand miles away, introduced himself in a gentle southern drawl, and asked if I had anything he could sell for me. I sent him three typescripts: a period romantic thriller (a genre called gothic at that time, and crowding the supermarket paperback racks); a half-finished story of an unhappy seaside summer affair between a male illustrator of children’s books and a teenage neighbor boy; and the book you hold in your hand. Oscar sold the gothic, Tarn House, to Avon Books the day he got my package, and within a week nailed down a contract for Gard, the book I was working on. This was dizzying. I’d mailed Tarn House to half a dozen publishers, and they’d all rejected it. As for Gard, none of the schlock publishers who did my stuff would advance money on an unfinished novel. But when I queried Oscar about Fadeout, he counseled patience: that one would take a little longer. I sighed. He didn’t...