His first Brandstetter story appeared the same year as Tony Hillerman's debut with an American Indian detective. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well." My joke was to take the true hard-boiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He recalled that he admired the mysteries of Ross Macdonald, "but it bothered me that his detective never had any personal life, and he never changed. Altogether he published 40 books, some of them poetry, and was popular in Britain. His homosexual themes had forced him to adopt pen names previously, and he wrote five novels and two collections of short stories as James Colton and other works as Rose Brock. The first Brandstetter book, Fadeout, was published in 1970, and was also the first to bear Hansen's real name.
However, their marriage remained "a highly sexual event - bang, crash, wow!" as he told astounded friends in the gay community of southern California, where he lived most of his life. In a reflection on the medical tone of discussion about homosexuality in the 1950s, Hansen has a doctor explain homosexuality to Hale's wife, and the couple's compromise "strange marriage" continues.Īlthough this may look autobiographical, his explanation for his lifelong activism in the gay movement and his known gay affairs while a committed husband was simply that Jane was a lesbian and they agreed to tolerate affairs. An early Hansen novel, Strange Marriage (1965), related the story of a gay man, Randy Hale, who married to lead a "normal" life, but is persuaded to resume gay sex by a sensitive young man.
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