Abstract
Gay crime writers have become a significant presence in shaping, changing and challenging the genre over the past 20 years. The American writer John Morgan Wilson has taken the idea of the gay hero as outsider to extremes with his creation of the HIV+ disgraced journalist Benjamin Justice. I shall discuss how Justice breaks the boundaries of gay crime fiction heroes with a lead character verging on the anti-hero. I shall put the Justice series in a historical context and argue that without MorganWilson’s adventurous and pioneering series, the present day writers are indanger of being subsumed into cosies (lightweight crime fiction wherebloodshed happens off-stage and the investigator is generally an amateur) and pastiche, and undoing all the trailblazing work by the likes of Joseph Hansen, Michael Nava and Richard Stevenson that has gone before.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Questions of identity in detective fiction |
| Editors | L. Martz, A. Higgie |
| Place of Publication | Cambridge |
| Publisher | Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
| Pages | 7-18 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781847183439 |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |
