The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

The Iniquitous Investigator (Nick William Mystery #8)
By Frank W. Butterfield
By the author, 2017
Four stars

Having recently read Steve Neil Johnson’s wonderful “The Yellow Canary,” set in Los Angeles in 1956, I was reminded of Frank Butterfield’s distinctive approach to the dark side of gay life in the bad old days. Both of these novels focus on the lives of gay men and women in 1950s America, and how deep-rooted, but unjust, prejudice produced grossly illegal actions against gay folk at nearly every level of law and politics in the nation. In light of early 21st-century civil rights attitudes (which I suppose might be imperiled by today’s political atmosphere), the way people of color and gay people were treated is almost unbelievable. Both Johnson and Butterfield are trying to bring those injustices to life. Johnson’s book is darker and (I’m afraid) more realistic, in spite of its ultimate optimism. Frank Butterfield’s Nick Williams is—as I say every time I review one of this series—a sort of gay superhero. Nick’s vast fortune is his superpower, and he uses it for the good of all oppressed people, but especially for those men and women “in the life,” whom he embraces as his people.

There’s a kind of “aw shucks” sweetness to the Nick Williams stories that makes them feel rather like a television series of the period (and indeed, Perry Mason was one of Butterfield’s inspirations). Nick and his longtime partner Carter Jones call each other “husband,” much to the amusement of their friends and family.

But book 8 in the series takes Nick and Carter to a darker place: they are arrested for vagrancy in Sausalito, when they try to report being accosted by a group of young men intent on gay-bashing them. The jaw-dropping injustice—unconstitutionality—of the whole procedure is hard to grasp in light of modern law, and yet it falls well within the kind of action that both politicians and police were inclined toward in the years before gay liberation really began to take off.

As always, there is a sub-plot that involves Carter’s family; and another one that requires flying around in one of their private planes—because what’s a superhero without his toys, right? The richness of the story is amplified by all of the various characters who swirl around Nick and Carter’s world.

I love these books, but they are fairy tales. There is rich truth in them, historical truth that we need to keep in mind; but their sunny atmosphere belies the real fear that gay folk felt (and black people and any minority subject to the whim of those in power) in the years after McCarthy’s fall, when conformity was the only safe path to the American dream.

Book 9 is already on my Kindle. I suppose I’ll get bored someday, but today is not that day.