Q&A with Josh Lanyon discussion
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August 2013: Fadeout
Yes! Thank you for setting the topic! :-)
Johanna wrote: "We usually start BOM discussion during the weekend before the last complete week of the month. In August the discussion on Fadeout by Joseph Hansen starts already on Saturday, July 17th...."Typo - Saturday 17th August, I think.
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Oops! Thank you, Hj. :-)
It seems that I don't want it to be August just yet... LOL.
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Johanna wrote: "We usually start BOM discussion during the weekend before the last complete week of the month. In August the discussion on Fadeout by Joseph Hansen starts already on Saturday, August 17th.Enjoy, ..."
Thanks for setting up the topic, dear Johanna! (I seem to be a bit behind my mod duty these days...)
I'm going to try and set up a challenge for the whole Brandstetter series. Just to try it out. If it's not helpful for the process just say so and I'll delete it.
Thank you, dear Johanna! In fact I've started the book and I've already seen it will be difficult: it is so good that the tendency to jump forward and see what's happening gets overwhelming.
Challenge: it looks scary to me!
And I forgot to comment that the magnifying glass running joke is exaggerated: the small writing is ok if one has enough light and doesn't want to read the whole story in one session.
Antonella wrote: "And I forgot to comment that the magnifying glass running joke is exaggerated: the small writing is ok if one has enough light and doesn't want to read the whole story in one session."I think I'd have a problem reading the edition which I own of the collected stories. It's in a box somewhere so I've ordered a used copy of Fadeout in a separate book which will be more legible (I hope).
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I'm going to try and set up a challenge for the whole Brandstetter series. Just to try it out. If it's not helpful for the process just say so and I'll delete it."
The Brandstetter Challenge looks cool! I think it helps us to organize the challenge, doesn't it? How fun to try something like that with you all. :-) Thank you so much setting it up, love!
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Yay! I'm looking forward to Fadeout and then the challenge. I've already read the first two and have the third one ready to go.
Incidentally, magnifying glasses are now optional for the Brandstetter Challenge. Open Road Media released all 12 Brandstetter novels in electronic form this past May. http://www.openroadmedia.com/joseph-h... for more info. It doesn't appear as though these editions can be purchased outside the USA. Buying options point to the usual retail sites, and in the case of Amazon, at least, the .co.uk and .de sites don't offer it.
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Hey, John! I won't give up my magnifying glass that easily... ;-)
Thank you for the info! :-) And you are more than welcome to join us and our mission
Johanna wrote: "Am I the only one who hasn't start reading them yet? "Nope, you're not, Johanna. I've been poised on the edge of the Brandstetter pool for a while now, toes curled around the lip... just... about.... to.... dive.
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Nope, you're not, Johanna. I've been poised on the edge of the Brandstetter pool for a while now, toes curled around the lip..."
:-) I'll bring my life ring...
Johanna wrote: "You can't say "no" to a challenge like this, now can you. *grin* "No, I'm afraid I can't. Not when it comes from this assembled company, my eager guides on the path to perdition.
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No, I'm afraid I can't. Not when it comes from this assembled company, my eager guides on the path to perdition."
LOL. Maybe the life ring isn't enough... Have a Martini, perhaps?
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Shortly before he died at age eighty-one, Joseph Hansen started a blog called Lastwords. I'd found it once, surfing the 'Net. Three posts filled with the loneliness of having outlived pretty much everyone and everything that mattered. Three posts and about as many replies.
If Hansen was that forsaken at the end, what chance did the rest of us have, especially those who had never quite managed to find someone to share their life? I tried to cheer myself by reflecting that with my heart there was no way I'd make it to eighty anyway. The problem was, I couldn't imagine feeling much more alone than I did right then.
If you are interested, here is a link to Joseph Hansen: Lastwords blog. He writes about politics, literature and overall... life. There are also some very touching posts where he looks back in his life and shares his memories of his childhood and his family.
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Shortly before he died at..."
Oh, Johanna, those lines break my heart every time I read them, more so because they have the feeling of a Josh RL experience.
Johanna wrote: "Here is something related to our topic... Do you guys remember Adrien mentioning (thinking about) Joseph Hansen in The Hell You Say? This is in the end of the chapter 22:Shortly before he died at..."
Thank you so much for the link, Johanna.
Thank you, Johanna! I remembered distinctly that bit, because it is heartbreaking, but for sure I wouldn't have known where to find it.
It would be nice if someone could take away all the spam underneath the last post, leaving only the fans' comments there...
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You are welcome. :-)
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I know. Sadly there are lots of those spam comments and the one that felt the most heartbreaking to me was the one and only comment to the post "Was" (where Hansen tells about the tragic story of his Norwegian grandfather).
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Shortly b..."
*nod nod*
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Thanks for posting the link!
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Thanks for posting the link!"
That's exactly what happened to me. :-) I wouldn't have remembered it (or at least I wouldn't have found it) if I hadn't listened to THYS last week.
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Yeah, I think it's probably safe to say that the schedule is too tight. Let's do some more planning during August, when we'll see how much time it takes to read Fadeout. Reading a 12 book series is a huge "job" — I think we'll need loose enough schedule to take some breaks in between the books once in a while anyway. :-)
Blimey, these aren't easily available in the UK. But managed to order Fadeout from a second hand bookseller via Amazon. Doubt I'll be able to get all 12 to do the challenge though.
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Becky wrote: "Blimey, these aren't easily available in the UK. But managed to order Fadeout from a second hand bookseller via Amazon. Doubt I'll be able to get all 12 to do the challenge though."This seller has sold Adobe Digital editions to International customers.
http://www.betterworldbooks.com/josep...
I bought Fadeout for Kindle, Amazon (USA). It is a wonderfully formatted edition. I let the electronic voice read it to me as I was driving (through very tedious traffic). It is so well done, the characters come through even with the electronic voice. Loved It!!!
The following segment is the Preface in the edition put out by U of Wisconsin.
PrefaceWhen 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 mid-sixties 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 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 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 know how long it had already taken.
I had finished writing it at the end of 1967 and felt it was the best work I’d ever done. Of course, it had no sex scenes in it. But oddly, my usual editors didn’t cite this as their excuse for turning it down. One of them, Earl Kemp of Green-leaf Classics, told me it was “too good” for his list. Yvonne McManus at Brandon House, who had published my first venture into crime fiction, Known Homosexual, said Fadeout “deserved better.” Every place I took it to shied away. It was a book many praised but none would publish.
West Coast literary agents are a rag-tag lot, not good for much. A friend of mine acting in a Broadway show found me an East Coast agent with a famous name but who turned out to be old and ailing, stowing manuscripts under her bed at Martha’s Vineyard, and sending them nowhere. So I took a deep breath and settled down to the dreary routine of mailing the manuscript out to publishers, waiting weeks for a rejection, bundling it up and toting it back to the post office for another futile round-trip.
This ate up eighteen months, during which with John Harris I ran a walk-in poetry workshop in Venice Beach, put together with Don Slater a new gay magazine, Tangents, demonstrated against the Vietnam war, taught myself guitar, painted pictures, and kept on writing novels because I didn’t know how to stop, and because though the pulp peddlers paid badly, they did pay. Whenever one of us sold a book, a Falstaffian friend John Kimbro and I would celebrate with martinis, lobster, brandy, and cigars at a rambling old sea-cliff restaurant called The Point. Kimbro picked up the check more often than I. It was his own fault. He wrote faster.
I don’t remember now how long I waited to hear from Oscar Collier about Fadeout, no more than a few weeks, I think. But I’m sure it seemed longer. Agents hate for writers to pester them. And I tried to act grownup and reasonable. It wasn’t easy. Then one Monday morning when I was the only one at home, the phone rang in the sunny kitchen. It was Oscar with the good news. I had hit the big time at last. I wasn’t just a porno hack with delusions, after all. This book, Oscar said strictly, I must publish under my own name. Grinning like an idiot, hands shaking with excitement, one after another I dialed the numbers of everyone I knew. No one answered. They were all someplace else.
The whole world seemed to be someplace else when the book came out. The New Yorker gave it a good review, and I suppose there were others. Though a butterfly was part of the cover art, the book did not wing its way out of the shops. When I had sat down to write it, an old awareness was nagging me, that gay men already knew what I had to tell them. How could I reach straight readers, introduce them to those strangers they’d crossed the street to avoid meeting all their lives? By putting them into the kind of story that keeps readers turning pages. And nothing does that better than a detective novel. And that’s what I wrote.
But mystery readers don’t take to change. They crave the mixture as before. They trust that. Anything new they have to mull over for a long time. When Bantam issued its mass market paperback edition, it sold no better than had the hardcover. I thought my experiment had failed, and hunkered down at my typewriter to rattle out books for the market I knew and that knew me. High hopes were for dreamers, kids. To avoid grief and penury, in future I would stick to what I could count on. This was only buck fever. Panic. After I’d written three more James Colton books, I worked up my nerve to take another grab at the brass ring. Death Claims sold better than Fadeout had. Troublemaker, in its turn, attracted a British publisher for all three Dave Brandstetter books. French, Dutch, German, Italian, even Japanese translations followed.
What was wrong with this picture was that while my income was now inching above the poverty line, and my un-apologetic look at homosexuals was out there, the booming U.S. paperback industry had taken against mystery novels. Agatha Christie and Erie Stanley Gardner were at your corner drugstore, but almost no one else. It’s a different story today, when mysteries climb the bestseller lists like kudzu vines. Thirty years ago, hardcover sales were modest and the sums they earned meager. Without paperback reprints and, for a lucky few, sales to movies and television, the writer of detective fiction had to find a day job or live on peanut butter sandwiches. I’d had enough of both, thanks. I’d also had enough of reaching so few readers. I needed a miracle. It was a long time coming.
Then, among the endless gaudy aisles of the 1979 American Booksellers Association pow-wow in the sprawling Los Angeles Convention Center, when I finally stumbled upon the booth of my then publisher, Holt, a bright and eager youngster called Steve Dorsky shook my hand and said he’d just come on board as marketing director, and would I please get the rights to all the Brandstetter books back, now, yesterday if possible. Holt wanted to publish them in paperback. Right away.
For the next twelve years, Fadeout and the rest of the Dave Brandstetter mysteries sold steadily in paperback, new ones added as I wrote them, and no title slipping out of print. Not only did this mean new readers every day were turning my pages to find out whodunit, but that along the way they were getting my message that homosexuals were pretty much like everyone else in this world, living as best they could, with their share of joy and sorrow, success and failure, love and loss. It doesn’t sound like a startling message, does it? Yet no other mystery writer had passed it along before me. Gradually times changed. At my back, a line began to form of new writers with gay detectives, male and female.
However, perhaps typically for a man of eighty, I’m doubtful about the future. Have books got one? Because (and this began some years back) when fans at public gatherings ask me if any of my work has been made into movies, and I tell them no, their smiles fade, and they wander off in search of a real writer to talk to. Americans don’t take you seriously if your work hasn’t made it to the Cineplex and then on to TV. I have had my brushes with showbiz. Option money from time to time. Promises. Like the camel in the adage, CBS television once put its head into my tent, then came into the tent, so I had to get out. A French film producer in the 1980s optioned Fadeout three times for bigger and bigger sums: alas, her business manager then embezzled all her money and ran off with her secretary. No movie.
But as a book, Fadeout has proved durable. Not that dismal artifact a classic, which Mark Twain defined as a book no one reads. These days, if no one is reading it, chances are a book goes out of print and stays that way. How many publishers has Fadeout had? I’ve lost count. In its thirty-four years, it has always been in print somewhere. People keep reading it. The old standard German translation was recently recrafted for a new edition. In France, when Gallimard first published Fadeout in 1971, they timidly cut four chapters in fear of the censors. In 2001, came a new translation with the cuts restored, an event judged by Le Monde as meriting a front-page review.
Most writers hope their work will outlast them. I’m no different.
So it is gratifying that the University of Wisconsin Press has decided to give Fadeout a place on its list. Universities have a solidity few other American institutions enjoy, certainly not book publishers. And I now have the luxury of dreaming that, once my little life is rounded with a sleep, Dave Brandstetter will go on engaging the imagination of new generations of readers, long after his once-startling sexual bent has ceased to unsettle anyone.
Joseph Hansen
Laguna Beach, California
February 2004
Thank you for posting this, Reggie. Sadly, he died in November that year.
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Yay, it's on its way to me already! :)
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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 ..."
Thank you so much for sharing this preface with us, Reggie. What a great introduction into Fadeout and the whole Dave Brandstetter series.
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Cool. :-) I had similar problems with buying the series about a year ago (maybe?) and after a while I decided to invest in buying a second hand copy of The Complete Brandstetter via Amazon.co.uk (Better World Books, UK).
Reggie wrote: "The following segment is the Preface in the edition put out by U of Wisconsin."Thank you so much, dear Reggie! This was wonderful to read and gives an insight into Hansen's life and ideas.
I went to check if I could find the review by Le Monde. I didn't, but I got a bit lost, finding out other interesting things.
- The first title of Fadeout in French was Un blond évaporé = A Missing Blond Man, but it is also a wordplay: An empty-headed Blond Man. The title of the second translation, IMO much nicer, Le Poids du monde = The Weight of the World. See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H...
- A fellow writer publishes an interview in French with Hansen from the year 1981/1982, where he also quotes his favorite books: first of all The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury. Then Death in Venice, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair. Plus some mistery writers, among them Ross Macdonald.
- I also found the obituary from ''The Guardian'': http://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/...
- Here http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H...
I read that the first translations of Brandstetter's misteries in German didn't always happen on the ground of the original text [Die Übersetzungen erfolgten jedoch nicht immer auf unmittelbarer Grundlage des Original-Textes]. Uh?
Then in 2000 a small publishing house started to republish all the books with new translations. The title of Fadeout always stayed like in English
- Here http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H...
I found out that the Italian title of Fadeout is ''Scomparso'' [Disappeared/Missing]
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Thanks Antonella!! Glad you all enjoyed the preface as much as I did. It was a happy surprise.
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If things go really well with the rest of my summer reading and other two books this month, I might be able to read two of his this month. *crosses fingers* If not, one extra book won't be a big deal to slot in somewhere.
Book arrived. Excellent service! I'll start tomorrow.
I own the Wisconsin print edition, so I had read the preface when I first read the book. As I re-read it, it made me both happy and sad again. Happy that Hansen finally got to see others enjoy his writing. Happy that Fadeout was always in print somewhere in its 34 years up until then.But I was sad that he didn't feel truly "successful" since none of his books had been made into a movie. Surely much of this feeling had to come because Hansen lived in LA, where so many lives revolved around the entertainment industry, especially back in the 60's-80's. I can't help but wonder if he'd lived in New York or even somewhere in the middle of the country, would he have not felt this lack so deeply.
Q&A with Josh Lanyon
Books mentioned in this topic
Death Claims (other topics)Troublemaker (other topics)
In Plain Sight (other topics)
In the Best Families (other topics)
Death Claims (other topics)
More...
Enjoy, everyone! See you here soon! :-)
ETA: Some of us are interested in reading the whole Brandstetter series as a special challenge during the autumn (and winter?!). Let's start with the Fadeout discussion in August and continue with the Brandstetter Challenge Calathea has set up for us!
ETA2: Posting here the overview screenshot of the Brandstetter Challenge after it finished in the end of March 2014. (click on the image to get a larger version)