He’s openly gay, or homosexual (Hansen apparently hated the term gay), and though he feels no need to announce it to everyone he meets, he’s not ashamed of it either. In Fadeout (1970) he investigates the disappearance of a local radio personality whilst struggling to get over the death of his long-term lover from cancer. I find it almost inconceivable that there was one gay character at the helm of a mystery series for over twenty years, and I only very recently discovered him! Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter is an old-school hero, brash, sardonic, happy to use his fists to solve the problem if a quiet word won’t suffice. He’s far from sympathetic, yet Highsmith manages an incredible feat-to have you rooting for him anyway. He explicitly states that he isn’t homosexual, but his obsession with Dickie Greenleaf, and his tendency towards unreliable narration more than suggest otherwise.
Ripley’s sexuality, in the novels at least, is understated: the sex scenes go no further than the suggestive lighting of a cigarette, or a lingering gaze over a cocktail. But despite his morally dubious persona, he is at least the star of the show.
He’s a conman, a thief, and eventually a serial killer. As protagonists go they don’t come much more disreputable than Ripley. Patricia Highsmith’s eponymous anti-hero first appeared in The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). Here, for what it’s worth, is my top ten list of the most memorable queer protagonists of crime fiction: I’m sure there are some I’ve omitted (if so, please do let me know so that I can catch up). Some were big influences on my writing and some I’ve only discovered more recently. I’d like to think that I’m now helping to redress the balance but I wanted to pay homage to those pioneers who were there long before me. In all the many years I’d been reading, and more importantly through those formative years when I was struggling to understand who I was, I’d failed to stumble across, in this genre I loved so much, anyone in a starring role who represented me. That’s not to say there weren’t any, there are some right here in this list, but just that they’d never reached me. There were gay protagonists (rare, but they did exist), and there were gay police officers (often second or third tier in the hierarchy of characters), but I could not think of a single queer protagonist. That sounds pretty low bar as far as ambitions go but when I’d set about trying to think of previous examples I really had struggled. When I created DS Adam Tyler for Firewatching, I did so partly because I wanted to create a fictional detective who was gay.
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