Early Graves - (Dave Brandstetter Mystery) by Joseph Hansen (Paperback)

About the Book

Hansen presents the ninth thrilling mystery featuring homosexual insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter. This time, Dave tracks down a serial killer whose last victim was left on his doorstep. "Well plotted and well written".--New York Times Book Review.

Book Synopsis

The brutality of the AIDS epidemic and a nation's growing homophobia set the stage for a serial killer targeting gay men in Los Angeles--and Dave Brandstetter finds himself in the killer's path.

Dave Brandstetter's afternoon does not begin well: his ex-boyfriend picks him up at the airport, and the ride home -- in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic -- is one long argument between them. The insurance investigator's day gets worse when he finds a man -- bloody, rain-soaked, and ice cold -- lying on his porch, killed by a stab wound while Dave was out of town.

There is a serial killer loose in Los Angeles, and this man is his sixth victim. Like the others, he had already been marked for death - by the unforgiving plague known as AIDS. Someone is targeting sick men in the city, and Dave's search for the killer leads him into the dark side of gay Los Angeles, where death comes without warning and life is a fearful dream.

Decades after its original publication in 1987, Early Graves remains an important literary achievement. The exigence of Joseph Hansen's frontline reportage of the AIDS epidemic is as powerful as his prose craft and mystery plot are clever.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR THE DAVE BRANDSTETTER NOVELS

"In Brandstetter, Hansen has created a hero worthy of such predecessors as Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Macdonald's Lew Archer... Book after book, we're happy to walk down the mean streets in his company."
--John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air

"In an auspicious event for mystery readers, Syndicate is reprinting all 12 of Joseph Hansen's pioneering Dave Brandstetter novels over 12 months. Fadeout, the first in the series featuring the comfortably gay World War II vet and L.A. insurance investigator, was published in 1970. As Michael Nava points out in his insightful new introduction, that's when gay sex was a criminal act in 49 of the 50 states. Through grit and sheer talent, Hansen found a wide audience... Crime fiction fans who don't know Hansen's work are in for a treat."
--The Washington Post

"Joseph Hansen is not only one of America's best mystery writers, he is a great American writer. Period. Full stop."
--Michael Nava

"I can only applaud the republication of Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter books. I've increasingly come to regard the phrase 'an important writer of crime fiction' as oxymoronic, but if one's going to use the label, Hansen's not an unreasonable bearer of it."
--Lawrence Block

"Incredible books, much overlooked."
--Jeff Abbott

"The Brandstetter books are classics of the private eye genre... It's great to see them available again."
--Peter Robinson

"First published over fifty years ago now, Hansen's novels are not just clever and compelling stories, but to my mind they are also a feat of incredible bravery. I wish I'd discovered him sooner."
--Russ Thomas, CrimeReads

"Hansen is one of the best we have... [He] knows how to tell a tough, unsentimental, fast-moving story in an exceptionally urbane literary style."
--New York Times Book Review

"After forty years, Hammett has a worthy successor."
--The Times (London)

"Mr. Hansen is an excellent craftsman, a compelling writer."
--The New Yorker

"Apart from its virtues as fiction, Hansen's Early Graves is a field correspondent's breathtaking dispatch from a community in the midst of disaster."
--Time

"Read in the order written, [the Brandstetter mysteries] are remarkably linked through symbol, incident, and character, to the point that one sees them as a single, multi-volume novel, by which one may learn a great deal about what it means to be homosexual and male in modern America."
--The New Republic

"Hansen is quite simply the most exciting and effective writer of the classic California private-eye novel working today."
--Los Angeles Times

"No one in the history of the detective novel has had the daring to do what Joseph Hansen has done: make his private eye a homosexual...who is both a first-rate investigator and one of the most interest series characters in the history of the genre."
--David Geherin, The American Private Eye

"The first thing I ever read by Joseph Hansen was Fadeout (1970). It's the seminal novel in a mystery series about a smart, tough, uncompromising insurance investigator by the name of David Brandstetter. He is a Korean War vet and ruggedly masculine. He's educated, principled, compassionate -- but willing and able to use violence when nothing else works. He represents the (then) new breed of PI -- the post-World War II private investigator. There are no bottles of rye in Dave's desk, there are no sleazy secrets in his past, and the dames don't much tend to throw themselves at him. He is neither tarnished nor afraid. Oh, and one other thing. He's gay.... He was not the first gay detective to hit mainstream crime fiction, but he was the first normal gay detective, and that -- as the poet said -- has made all the difference."
--Josh Lanyon, from The Golden Age of Gay Fiction

About the Author

Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) was the author of more than twenty-five novels, including the twelve groundbreaking Dave Brandstetter mystery novels. The winner of the 1992 Lifetime AchievementAward from the Private Eye Writers of America, Hansen was also the author of A Smile in His Lifetime, Living Upstairs, Job's Year, and Bohannon's Country. He was a two-time Lambda LiteraryAward-winner.