5 Books by Joseph Hansen
Requirements: MOBI / ePUB reader, 652 kb, 802 kb, 776 kb, 594 kb
Overview: Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) was an American author of mysteries. The son of a South Dakota shoemaker, he moved to a California citrus farm with his family in 1936. He began publishing poetry in the New Yorker in the 1950s, and joined the editorial teams of gay magazines ONE and Tangents in the 1960s. Using the pseudonyms Rose Brock and James Colton, Hansen published five novels and a collection of short stories before the appearance of Fadeout (1970), the first novel published under his own name.
The book introduced street-smart insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, a complex, openly gay hero who grew and changed over the series’s twelve novels. By the time Hansen concluded the series with A Country of Old Men (1990), Brandstetter was older, melancholy, and ready for retirement. The 1992 recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Hansen published several more novels before his death in 2004.
Genre: MM Crime Fiction, General fiction
Backtrack (first published 1982)
Smart, intelligent, naive seventeen year old Alan Tarr never knew his father, a bit-part actor who deserted him and his mother when he was six months old. When Eric Tarr is found dead, however, Alan, traces his fathers footsteps through the tawdry Hollywood underworld to find the story behind his death. Was Eric’s fall from a balcony suicide—or murder? And who would murder Eric? Did one of his many betrayed lovers commit a desperate act of revenge? Was it the rising young actress whose career Eric destroyed? Could it have been one of the beautiful men Eric brought home for an evening? As Alan becomes enmeshed in a web of passion and deceit, he uncovers the unpleasant truth about his father and comes face to face with some surprising truths about himself.
Jack Of Hearts (1996)( Nathan Reed series #0.5)
Readers and reviewers revelled in Living Upstairs, the Lambda Award-winning novel by Joseph Hansen about young Nathan Reed. People magazine called it "glorious." "Near perfection," said the Boston Globe. "Superb," echoed the Detroit Free Press. Now, in Jack of Hearts, Joseph Hansen brings Nathan back for a second tender, funny, achingly truthful coming-of-age novel. The year is 1941, the place a small California foothill town. Nathan, at age seventeen, bewildered by sex but sure he wants to be a writer, falls in among a little-theater crowd he hopes will stage his first play, and learns from them painful lessons in growing up. From Nathan’s ineffectual parents, Alma the fortune-teller and Frank the out-of-work musician, to Kate McCracken, the raffish cook at Moon’s cafe, where the journalism and theater students gather for breakfast; from Kenneth Stone, the lonely teacher whispered to be a Nazi spy, to wealthy Desmond Foley, in whose sunlit swimming pool it is rumored handsome boys swim naked on weekends, Jack of Hearts teems with lively characters, seen against a lovingly detailed background of times long past. "A sweet read," the Baltimore Alternative called Living Upstairs. "Nathan is a perfect, whole character…a remarkable achievement." In Jack of Hearts, you will come to know Nathan even better. As a good many readers already have, you just may fall in love with him.
Living Upstairs by Joseph Hansen (1996) ( Nathan Reed series #1)
The year is 1943. When Hoyt Stubblefield ambles into the cavernous bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard where nineteen-year-old Nathan Reed works, his good looks and wry Texas charm hold the boy spellbound. Within a week, Nathan has packed up his few belongings and moved in with Hoyt—into his upstairs rooms in a rickety old house, and into his bed. And so Nathan embarks on the happiest adventure of his young life, and the most ominous. For Hoyt inhabits not just the world of ideas, books, music, and paintings, which Nathan eagerly shares with him, but a secret world as well, a world of danger Hoyt forbids the young man to enter. Against the vividly evoked background of shabby side-street Hollywood in the 1940s. Joseph Hansen draws on his own real-life memories to people Living Upstairs with a large cast of colorful, outrageous, tragic, and hilarious characters from those far-off times. On a deeper level, this is a love story about lies, dangerous acquaintances, and the betrayal of innocence. Its often sunny hours are shadowed by masks, mirror images, and merged identities, by murky politics and paintings so dark their naked sexuality is almost hidden. Last, and first, it is haunted by an unsolved murder. Living Upstairs resoundingly confirms the Minneapolis Tribune’s judgment: “The reason to read Hansen is simply because he’s an awfully good novelist.”
Pretty Boy Dead (1984)
Scorned by his family, defeated by society, Steve was at a major crossroads in his life. His marriage had gone sour, his hopes as a playwright dashed. Confused and friendless, Steve turned to pretty boy Coy Randol for love and support. But then Coy was found brutally murdered and there was only one person the police suspected: Steve.
Originally published as KNOWN HOMOSEXUAL, then STRANGER TO HIMSELF, PRETTY BOY DEAD was Hansen’s first mystery novel, written under the pseudonym of James Colton. This is everything a mystery novel should be. Briefly, this is the story of Steve who is young, bright and black. Steve’s family has all but disowned him, in part due to his marriage (now cracking apart), and partly due to a play Steve wrote. With Steve’s future as a playwright indefinitely on hold, Steve has only his love — Coy Randol — to keep him warm (which is the equivilent of saying the only good thing is one’s life is one’s addiction to heroin). Then Coy gets his cute little self murdered, and Steve is the main suspect. This might sound a little dreary, but it’s not. For one thing the plot is a classic, and the characters are believable and fresh, not those painfully familiar stereotypes that people most mystery novels (Hansen is like the zen master of characterization: a sentence or two and you swear you know this person). For another thing, PRETTY BOY DEAD is hypnotic, baked in that old Angeleno atmosphere, that Chandleresque ambiance. Every detail–well, I just wish everybody in this genre wrote this marvellously.
Job’s Year (first published 1983)
Oliver Jewett, fifty seven, an actor who never quite made it to the top, has reached the point in his life when he considers what he has achieved though his career; and he is not particularly proud of what he finds. He is a strikingly handsome man, and the years have taken nothing away from that, and while he blames part of his failure on his good looks he also acknowledges the fact that he just is not a great actor. He lives with his lover of ten years, the now thirty two year old Billy, but their relationship is reaching a crisis point, Billy is perhaps more in love with Oliver the actor than Oliver the private person. This year he also reconnects with his sister, five years his senior and crippled since childhood, now an internationality renowned artist; she is terminally ill. But Oliver’s dream is to quit acting and buy a local bakery, the bakery owned by the Pfeffer family, now run by the son of Joey Pfeffer who when they were nineteen was one of Jewett’s first intimate loves of his youth. Oliver is an easy going, self-effacing and caring man; a fact which causes others at times to take advantage of him. He is a most appealing character, and while he make mistakes, these are not the frustrating sort that some authors seem to delight in leading their main characters into, but they are mistake with which one can empathise. Job’s Year is a leisurely and melancholy tale, but not without its occasional dramas. As we follow Jewett through the year we also gradually piece together his past, his early struggles, his lovers both male and female. Told in twelve chapters, one for each month of the year, in typical Hansen fashion, it has all the Hansen trademarks: set in his beloved California, references to changes not always for the better that time has wrought, handsome older man sought by younger lovers, a main protagonist who loves the finer things of life, and is rich in detail which yet never gets in the way of the story. It is a most absorbing story, poignant and very moving. While one might feel terribly sad for Jewett’s lot, and while he himself perhaps is happily resigned to the whatever might be the outcome, surely only a hard hearted reader will be left unaffected by Job’s Year.
Download Instructions:
Backtrack
http://destyy.com/wLKzCx
http://destyy.com/wLKzCb
Jack Of Hearts (Nathan Reed # 0.5)
http://destyy.com/wLKzCR
http://destyy.com/wLKzCU
Living Upstairs (Nathan Reed # 1.0)
http://destyy.com/wLKzCP
http://destyy.com/wLKzCH
Pretty Boy Dead
http://destyy.com/wLKzCL
http://destyy.com/wLKzCN
Job’s Year
http://destyy.com/wLKzC2
http://destyy.com/wLKzC5
Download all 5 novels:
http://destyy.com/wLKzVu
Mirror:
http://destyy.com/wLKzVp
All 5 books converted to ebook from book page images, using AbbyyFineReader and Sigil.
