To affirm that
Lambda-Award winner Jeffrey Round writes quick-paced gay pulp fiction is not
to denigrate either the genre or this talented writer. It is merely to
recognize the character of his writing in which the central figures are gay
detectives or private investigators, where some of the other fictional
characters are also gay, and where some of the themes advanced by the
fiction pertain to gay issues. However, it is necessary to point out that
the gay quotient, while a central component, is not necessarily the driving
force. In the Bradford Fairfax novels (such as The P-Town Murders,
Death in Key West, or Vanished in Vallarta), the fact that
Fairfax is a handsome gay secret agent, upholder of justice, and sexy hunk
is crucial to some of the dramatic and satiric allure of the tales—as are
the gay ambience of Provincetown (Massachusetts), Key West, or Puerto
Vallarta, for instance, where the reader is apt to meet such camp characters
as a transvestite ghost; fluttery, a flamboyant female-impersonator named
Cinder Lindquist; lesbian café owner Big Ruby; cosmetically and surgically
enhanced Jarod Scythes; half-blood Cherokee Little Wing; blue-haired “twink”
Zach; the exotic Aztec Drag Queen Esmeralda; and various raunchy, romping
characters in gay resorts where pheromones permeate the settings and where
sex can be a thing of great acrobatic agility and virtuosity. Camp wit is
writ large in these tales, and though the permutations of plot can sometimes
seem inordinately high, the exaggerations can be put aside because of the
compelling ambience and dialogue. Moreover, the principal themes are always
connected to contemporary reality: sexual identity, drug use, desire,
relationships, love, generation gaps, political chicanery, and existential
authenticity.
The Dan Sharp mysteries
are less flamboyant and less camp in characterization, though the sense of
place and wit as large as ever. In The Jade Butterfly, that begins
with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and massacre and moves swiftly to
Toronto and more briefly to Hamilton, Round creates a firm sense of place
with his quick evocation of the Forbidden City and the Square, Toronto’s gay
district, Leslieville, and the Bridle Path, and Hamilton (with its
“smoke-belching chimneys and flame-throwing up-thrust”). But what’s a
setting without a plot and interesting characters? In what is his third Dan
Sharp mystery (following Lake on the Mountain and Pumpkin Eater),
the gay private investigator (father of a teenage son out of a one-night
stand) finds himself hired by a mysterious but strikingly handsome young
Chinese man named Ren (who represents himself as a cultural ambassador for
trade and tourism) to find his long-lost sister, Ling, whom he believes
survived the Tiananmen massacre and is somewhere in Canada. Ren and Dan are
sexually attracted to each other, and this is where the personal and the
political, the sexual and the criminal get entangled. If Ling is alive, Ren
would like her to return the jade butterfly, a family heirloom. But before
you can remember the plot of The Maltese Falcon, Round raises the
ante, showing how Dan’s certitude of certain things gets shaken to the core.
The closer Dan gets to finding Ling, the more confused he becomes about the
brother, sister, politics, and his own self. Warned by his friend Donny that
relationships can be dangerous, Dan is forced to agree by a concatenation of
intense plot complications.
The way Round evokes Dan
Sharp in this page-turner is admirable in its psychological tremors,
representing the man’s self-doubt about his ability to be an effective
parent to a son going through his own issues of adolescence, as well as the
man’s painful acknowledgement that he may not know how to love another man.
Blending the private man with the single gay dad reality, the strong
detective with the emotionally vulnerable sufferer of chronic PTSD, Round
creates a very credible character, who is not simply a puppet on a writer’s
strings. Dan is, of course, is a sober character who is only occasionally
reckless; flamboyant ambiguity enters through Ren and Ling. And mystery
suspense builds and holds till the inevitable denouement where the reader
discovers how Dan has been unwittingly exploited by CSIS, the real
relationship between Ren and Ling, and the real significance of the jade
butterfly.
