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"The Grimmest Reversal We Have Ever Faced": Aids And The Hard-Boiled Detective Genre In Joseph Hansen's Early Graves, Seamus Coon
"The Grimmest Reversal We Have Ever Faced": Aids And The Hard-Boiled Detective Genre In Joseph Hansen's Early Graves, Seamus Coon
Honors Projects
Published from 1970–1991, Joseph Hansen’s “Dave Brandstetter” series consists of twelve novels written in the hard-boiled detective style, featuring a relatively-out gay insurance detective as the titular protagonist. Many novels discuss then-contemporary social issues, including the ninth novel, Early Graves (1987), which attempts to address the AIDS crisis. The “Brandstetter” series has not been the subject of much scholarship, let alone individual novels in the series. This project attends to how the “Brandstetter” series typically embodies the hard-boiled genre more than it subverts it, as well as how Early Graves is forced to become subversive as the limitations of the …