Book Review: "Rough Pages"
Lev AC Rosen delivers another fantastic noir featuring his gay protagonist Evander Mills, in the process showcasing strategies of queer survival in Cold War America.
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Warning: Spoilers for the book follow
I’ve been a fan of Lev AC Rosen since I saw him give a talk at a book festival a few years ago, which led me to pick up both Lavender House, the first of his novels focusing on gay private investigator Evander “Andy” Mills. This led me to the sequel, The Bell and the Fog and now, the third, Rough Pages, which keeps the story moving forward.
When the novel begins, Andy has found a bit of a haven, living above Elsie’s bar and working as a de facto PI for queer clients (as well as having a little side hustle where he pairs of gay men and women and gives them a story so that they can masquerade as straight to the outside world). He’s also managed to find a bit of love, too, with his boyfriend Gene. However, it’s not long before things start to get complicated for Andy, particularly once Pat, the butler to the family he helped to save in the first book, has jeopardized them due to his participation in a gay book club. To make matters even more treacherous, one of the booksellers has come up missing. This leads Andy down a treacherous road, one that’s paved with a nosy reporter, organized crime and, perhaps most sinisterly of all, his own past as a member of the San Francisco Police Department.
As with the previous entries in the series, one can see Rosen’s indebtedness to the noir fiction of yore. Andy may not be quite as cynical or world-weary as figures like Sam Spade–indeed, he’s often refreshingly sensitive and kind–but like other noir heroes he still bears the scars of his past. In particular, he can’t quite escape the shadow of his former job as a cop, especially once his chief gets word that he’s been in contact with a reporter. The chief’s repeated threats of violence are another potent and terrifying reminder of just how precarious life was for gay men and women in the 1950s. It wasn’t just that they had to fear the government; they also had to fear their own former friends and colleagues, for whom being friends or co-workers with a homosexual was nearly unthinkable.
The ending of the book is particularly noirish. One of the ongoing subplots in the novel revolves around Merle, a very fey (and rather tragic) singer who just happens to have been born into a mafia family and who has been carrying on an affair with the doomed bookseller, Howard. Even though Andy offers him a chance to escape from this life, he ultimately turns it down. He’s come to believe that it’s better to stay with his blood family–and stay in the closet–than to pursue a more authentic life with other queer people. It’s not a particularly happy ending for this character but, then again, it’s not a particularly sad one, either. He’s not dead, after all, and his family will seemingly always be there to support him, just so long as he doesn’t make his sexuality too obvious. Thus is the double bind of being a gay man and a member of a crime family at one and the same time.
Other aspects of the book are more positive and encouraging. Andy’s romance with Gene continues to be one of the highlights of his story, and if anyone deserves to find at least a little bit of love and joy, it would be Evander Mills. After all, he’s put himself at significant risk for members of the gay community of San Francisco at several points in the past, even if doing so is also his effort to make good on the fact that he was once part of the persecuting apparatus of the police. It’s also worth pointing out that Gene isn’t a maiden waiting for rescue, as he points out to Andy several times. Andy might be willing to put his life on the line for others, but Gene is no shrinking violet.
Of the three Andy Mills novels I’ve read, this one is arguably the most self-reflexive, focusing as it does on both queer fiction and the necessity of creating fake straight relationships in order to remain unseen. Thus, the novel calls attention not just to the fictions that queer people had to construct for themselves in order to remain out of the public eye. This whole plot also reveals the extent to which queer people have long been used to performing sexuality, in the process revealing just how performative all gender and sexuality really are, whether or not straights want to accept this fact or not.
One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about these novels is their historical richness. Rosen has a knack for crafting stories that are heavy on both the mystery and the atmosphere, keeping both in a delicate balance that allows us to feel as if we are really part of this world without feeling overwhelmed. He also doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to making it clear just how homophobic postwar America really was. It may come as a shock to many younger readers, but it really was that bad in the McCarthy era (we get glimmers of this in the very popular series Fellow Travelers). It’s a world that feels mostly foreign to us now, given the extent to which queer people have gained acceptance, but it’s a history that’s worth remembering.
Fortunately, Rosen is a savvy rider, and he is a blessedly optimistic one. As ugly as the world is in his books, he also makes it clear that queer people–including Andy, but also the various homos with whom he comes into contact–were remarkably adept at making lives and safe havens for themselves. The institutions of government might have been firmly against them and they might have been prey for the cops and others who wanted to take advantage of their relative weakness, but queers are survivors. In the world that Rosen has created, there’s always a bit of shelter for queer folk, whether at Elsie’s bar or at Lavender House.
And, as Rosen points out in his author’s note, this is a book that has a lot of relevance for the present. As so often in American history, it’s the subalterns and their presence in the public square that arouses anger, fury, and hatred. Thus it is that we’re once again in a period where queer books of all sorts are coming under fire from those who don’t think that queer stories should be disseminated and who, indeed, seem to see the public existence of queer people at all as a grave threat to their own lives and peace of mind. Rough Pages, however, shows us that queer people have a knack for surviving and even thriving, and that such repression is never as enduring as those who enact it like to think. No matter how strenuously the powers-that-be try to wipe away queer fictions, we’ll always be there, whether in bookshops or book clubs, whether in brick-and-mortar stories or, as in Rough Pages, through the post.
Overall, this is yet another triumph for both Rosen and his fictional detective. It’s a must-read for everyone with an interest in queer history, queer reading practices, and queer life in the dark days of the Cold War. I’m very happy that there’s at least one more book in the series lined up for this year, because I cannot wait to devour it.