Gay romance on the high seas: The Buccaneer by M.S. Hunter

At last, just when you thought the beast would never come along ... there it was! A novel that is at one moment an adventure, a romance, exciting, colorful, up-beat, well-written, well-researched, long enough to be a satisfying read, and ... gay!

Alyson Publications put out this volume in 1989, and I do not know why a raft of others answering the same description didn't follow it. They didn't all have to be historicals, like M.S. Hunter's The Buccaneer. They didn't have to be "gay pirate novels," like this one. So long as they delivered the goods according to the short list above, I'd have been happy to keep buying books as long as Alyson kept putting them out!

An exciting gay adventure romance that's well researched and written, at least 250pp long, and fun. What was so hard about that? Apparently it wasn't just hard, it was completely impossible. There's a handful of gay novels that I'd group in the same part of the bookshelf as The Buccaneer ... and I think most of them have been penned by Mel Keegan! I'm thinking about Fortunes of War, Dangerous Moonlight, The Swordsman, The Deceivers ...! They're all Keegans, and shelved with Keegan.

Now, MK didn't start publishing with GMP, and (you're going to shriek when you hear this) I missed the first few books entirely, they just blew by me. I used to get my books out of the Bulldog Books mailorder catalog in those days and my brain must have been out for pizza, because the first Mel Keegan book I saw, bought, read and fell in love with, was Fortunes of War -- which is a tale of gay buccaneers in the Elizabethan era, same time and location as the Errol Flynn movie, The Seahawk. (Oh ... joy of joys! Because Fortunes of War could easily have been a project written for Errol Flynn who would be playing Dermot Channon, and I still have endless fun trying to "cast the part" of Robin Armagh.)

But -- enough about Aricia and Mel and Errol Flynn.

Suffice to say, M.S. Hunter's The Buccaneer came along like a life-saver. I got this one when it was hot off the press and just arrived in Australia, late '89 or early '90 ... I remember it being hot weather, which to us means Christmas plus or minus a couple of months. It was love at first sight. First, I was enthralled by the fact that one of the characters in the main romantic pair was African.

(Do you want to "cast the part?" You couldn't go past Will Smith ... and I'm being wicked here; and I admit it; but with Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey on the big screen in a gay movie right now, I can't resist "seeing" movie versions of the really great gay novels!)

The romantic aspect is between Ozei (known as Ozzie) and Tommy Cutler (known as The Cutlass), and there are some steamy scenes as well as the romantic. The supporting cast in the novel is huge, and most of the characters are very well drawn, which is unusual in many adventure books. The novel is long, at 316pp of smallish type, and M.S. Hunter wrote extremely well.

Sadly, you'll notice the past tense there. M.S. Hunter is another loss to the art form of gay literature. He passed away some time ago, after having written only a little gay fiction ... and after a lot of digging to try to find some info on him, much less an obituary, I came up empty handed.

The Buccaneer is therefore his legacy to this art form, and I can only recommend it. The story is huge, and a bit rambling. It centers on Tommy and is told in the first person with Tommy as the narrator. It's a tough act, but Hunter makes it work superbly. You like the characters in this book, and the story of ambition, desire, derring-do, hazard and sensuality will keep you turning pages. Sometimes the plotline is a little bit easy to predict, but when you've read upwards of five hundred books, very little is going to take you totally by surprise, and that's not the writer's fault! What should amaze you is the research that went into this.

Does the novel have a downside? Well ... a little one, maybe. The author keeps butting in with short "documentary" segments, which you might find make it hard for you to keep your disbelief suspended. The first time I read this, I just skipped over them, didn't read them at all. The second time, the same -- but when I was done I went back and read the documentary parts separately. Nothing wrong with this, and you actually get two reads for the price of one here. The doco segments are set off into arial or some plain font, and are ostensibly about Hunter's personal experiences while researching the book. In fact, they're very interesting, it was just the interruption to the flow of the fiction that didn't quite work for me the first time through.

Highly recommended! AG's rating, 5 out of 5 stars. The Buccaneer is long out of print (god knows why) but you can get it from Amazon, and ... please do!



If you're into gay pitate novels don't miss Fortunes of War by Mel Keegan, and also have a look at this article: Were the Pirates Gay? by W. A. Hoffman, who's written a gay pirate novel called Raised by Wolves. I haven't read the novel, but I was impressed by the article, and will get to the novel in due course.

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Adrien English takes on The Dark Side: Josh Lanyon's The Hell You Say

I know, I know, I've been promising for weeks to get to my favorite of the Adrien English novels ... life has been "interesting" this month, which means blogging time has been hard to find. But here I am, and here's Adrien -- back in style, in the third of the novels, The Hell You Say.

Of all the series (there are four titles to date), why is The Hell... my favorite? To begin with, it has the paranormal plot line. The story involves a connection to a satanic cult, and I love this kind of thing ... the touch of the exotic, the creep-out aspect of "black magic." This installment in the series is also extremely funny, which gives the book a kind of "three pronged assault" on the reader. There's its dark occult side, its cuttingly witty side, and also the gay theme. All of which makes the novel irresistible.

As you'd expect, there's a killer on the loose, and he seems to be after a weird young man called Angus who works for Adrien at the bookstore. Angus is being threatened via the phone, and Adrien helps him get out of harm's way -- which may or may not be a good thing, because Jake Reardon (the LA cop with whom Adrien has a sometime and stormy relationship) is also being haunted by a serial killer with satanic-cult connections. Very dead bodies being found, and they are "marked" in ritualistic ways ... and now I have to be very careful what I say about the plot, or I'll be into spoilers!

This book is full of moments that are fascinating and amusing, emotional, even disturbing. Josh Lanyon writes a sparkling first-person narrative tying everything together with the personal observations and thoughts of Adrien, who is witty and smart, with a razor-sharp tongue.

And especially in this book, Adrien is a fully-developed personality. He's "off the leash" for the first time. This is actually very true in another way, because this book marks the start of Josh Lanyon self-publishing his novels -- a road he's sharing with top-name writers from Mel Keegan to Storm Constantine. (Readers need to get past the "stigma" and find out, and then admit, that great writers can publish their own work with tip-top results. The fact is, this book, The Hell You Say, was only going to be published if JL did it himself -- and it's better than the first two which went out under the GMP label! Time to get past the "vanity publishing stigma" thing, people. The industry's changed. When great writers get stuck on a sandbank, they rescue themselves and all of us profit from their courage).

During the course of a real page-turner of a plot, Josh Lanyon has Adrien interact with a cast of characters ranging right across the spectrum. There's the gorgeous detective boyfriend Jake, who is deeply "challenged" and breaking Adrien's heart. There's Adrien's mother (!) who is deliciously batty, getting married again, and presenting Adrien with not one but three step-sisters. Eegad. And there's also the Wiccan-pagan guru who appears late in the book ... and I'm so very pleased to be able to relate that this writer knows what Wicca is all about. It's such a relief when a writer possesses the facts and not the prejudices.

If you've collected all the Adrian English books, it's great to be able to watch Josh Lanyon mature, as well as his character. From the first book through to this one, the style, the storytelling, everything "fleshes out." Also, The Hell... is 230pp, a longer book with a lot more to get your teeth into.

Does the novel have a downside? Weeeeeell, maybe, if you were waiting for Jake to get his act together and figure out that he belongs with Adrien. Plot spoiler: not in this book, guys. In fact (stop reading right now if you don't want to know!!) Jake is getting married to his rather pregnant girlfriend, leaving Adrian high and dry. Hey, there's always a fourth book...

Highly recommended! AG's rating: 5 out of 5 stars. You can read this one first if you're on a tight budget, but I think Amazon will combine shipping for you -- which is especially important, if you're in the South Pacific region. Give them a try, and see...

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Gay Gothic: China House

Thank heavens Vincent Lardo wrote extensively. Under two pen names that I know of, he's done around ten books, and discovering either Vincent Lardo or Lawrence Sanders (the pen name) is a treat for a reader. According to the promos, under the byline of Sanders he has "more than 50 million books in print," which is amazing for any writer anywhere ... much less one who has four titles in the Alyson Books range.

Alyson did China House, The Prince and the Pretender, and The Mask of Narcissus, back in the 1980s, and they did it in an "edition" which offered the best-looking covers on gay books that were being done in that era. (GMP was around at the time, but they had a tradition of Really Terrible Covers ... "arty" kind of covers full of clashing colors and scribble-impressionism that didn't inspire you with much desire to order the book out of the catalog!)

China House was actually Lardo's debut novel in 1983, but you'd never have known it, because it's so polished. I don't think I'm wrong in guessing that VL had done loads of writing before getting to the "first novel" hurdle. The Mask of Narcissus was apparently the most popular novel from Alyson, but I'll be deadly honest with you ... China House is my own favorite. I like gothic novels, and China... is a very good one.

The first three thing I look for when I'm thinking about laying down good money and buying a book is, do I like the characters? (If you don't like the characters, you'll get irritated to death by a book that's 200pp long.) China... has fantastic characters. There are four that you meet in the first few chapters, that are crucial to the story -- Scott Evans and Mike Armstrong, who're friends and lovers, and Howard Roth, who's a kind of parapsychologist who's been called in to check out a creepy old house, and Howard's son, Ken.

The cover doesn't lie ... Scott and Mike are gorgeous. They're young, smart, sexy. And scared. The house, China House, is weird. You know that from the start. It's full of "atmosphere," and no secret is made of the fact that something very not-nice happened there about a generation ago.

As the story starts, Scott has just inherited the place, and rather than bulldoze it to the ground and start over (which I would be doing!) he gets in the psychic investigator (Howard) and determines to get to the bottom of what's "up" with the house.

The story is set on the east coast of the US, which has interested me since I saw Jaws in the theaters about 30 years ago. (The movie was set on a mythical island called Amity, but it was filmed in Martha's Vineyard, which is not far south of Cape Cod -- just up the road from the location of China House. So, if you've ever seen Jaws, the stage is set for the opening of the book. Then, take a swung over to Salem, MA, add in something like the creepy old house from The Changeling, and you're good to go.)

And this is the point where I have to start being careful not to give away plot spoilers. There's a dead identical twin ... and the house is seriously weird. And, is Scott haunted, or ill? Is Mike taking advantage of him? Why would be do that?!

Does the book have a downside? Not really. I kinda hoped it would turn out differently, but the ending is Vincent Lardo's prerogative, not mine! Still ... you could hope.

If you're looking for a book that's part thriller, part suspense, part ghost story, and with a great gay theme, you've found it. Marvelous reading for a winter's night, with the wood stove lit and a glass of brandy.

Still in print, with good deals available from Amazon. AG's rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Here's Vincent Lardo online: http://www.vincentlardo.com/



Keep your weather-eye open for the old editions, which are way better than the new(er) ones:

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Murder and mayhem with a gay spin: Adrien English

I read this one for the first time way back when ... in the days when it was a GMP title with a purple cover with scarlet lettering -- clashing colors that didn't do anything to make you want to buy the book! (GMP had a long track record of tacky covers. They almost made a tradition of it. I'm glad I did order the book, because if I hadn't, I'd have missed a damned good one.)

Fatal Shadows is #1 in the Adrien English series of mysteries ... meaning, it's the first in the series, not the best. This one is a very good book, but others are better -- the series gathers momentum as it goes.

I think it's Josh Lanyon's style of writing that hooked me into the series and kept me there; and his characterization. He's brave enough to take risks with his characters ... for example, our hero, Adrien, is "bookish," with a gay bookstore; he's a cute (also mature, intelligent, and funny) young gay guy, but there's more to him than all this.

JL also takes risks with other characters, such as Jake, who's gorgeous, and a detective, and isn't shy about making his homophobia known. (The only other time I recall where one of the main characters in a drama is both a homophobe and a nice guy (you'd think it was mutually exclusive) is in the Midsomer Murders series in tv, where DS Gavin Troy is both a nice guy and ... has a big problem with gays.)

I should think it's very, very hard to write this kind of characterisation well enough to pull it off, esp in a novel where you don't have the natural charm of a young actor working for you. JL does it very well indeed. The character of Jake is one you definitely remember -- which is true of many of JL's characters. Jake develops along the way ... I don't want to give the plot away, so if you hate spoilers don't read the rest of his sentence! ... and becomes intimate with Adrien. Turns out, Jake is gay and his closet door is painted shut!

The plot of Fatal Shadows is a pretty straightforward murder mystery. What makes it delightful is the gayness, the great characters and witty style of JL, and ... Adrien himself. He's a really fascinating character, what with the cardiac complaint, the bookstore, the authors' group he runs, and all. Then the murders start, and an unusual character rises to several challenges -- of which Jake is a major one.

If you get to the end of Fatal Shadows and think it seems like the start of something,you're right. It's part one of a series that has run to four books to date. The whole series (so far) is: Fatal Shadows; A Dangerous Thing; The Hell you say; Death of a Pirate King.

You can now get the first two books under one cover, which is good because the series gets better as it goes ... and it's cheaper to buy two books under one cover!

The first two books were done by GMP. The third one was done by JL himself after GMP melted down and rights reverted. In the last few years, it's been an impossible battle for gay writers to find conventional publishers (have you heard Mel Keegan on the subject?!) so JL went his own way. Bravo.

Does Fatal Shadows have a downside? Only the length. It's just 150pp, which is a very quick read. When you're used to meatier, heavier mysteries, this one comes off as a bit lightweight -- but for me this is more than made up for by the characterisations (which I loved) and the street-wise wit of the style (hits the spot).

Also, the fact the book is short is made up for by the series ... there's four now, and since they're starting to come out in anthologies, you don't get hit so hard with purchase and shipping. Every little bit helps these days.

My favorite of the series so far is The Hell You Say, but I'm not going to get into that one right now, because this is more a review of Fatal till get I around to it: http://www.who-dunnit.com/reviews/326/

Highly recommended. AG's rating: 4 out of 5 stars for this book ... 5 out of 5 for the series as a whole, because it starts well and gets better as it goes!

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A gay novel with a cricketing twist: OUT OF BOUNDS by Mike Seabrook

Summer's coming on in this country (Australia) and with the cricket on the tv and a whole cricket season in front of us, I had a hankering to read a gay cricket novel.

You think no such thing exists? Luckily, you'd be wrong if you think that! OUT OF BOUNDS by Mike Seabrook is a nice afternoon read for summer, north or south of the equator.

There's just enough cricket to make it a 'cricket novel' without the book getting so 'crickety' that a footy fan couldn't read it (or an American??). The story is also angsy ... quite rich with the paranoia about getting "found out" being gay. It was written back in the 1990s, and the edition I have is the one you see right here -- the GMP issue, with a much nicer cover (for me) than the other edition (see below).

Some readers are going to have a problem with this book because it features a school teacher of 29, and a kid just turning 18 who's fallen in love with him. Personally, I don't see a problem. At 17 or 18, people are driving cars, getting snockered, getting married, making babies, going to war and using machine guns, committing felonies, getting tried as adults, and being banged up in prisons. So what's so outrageous about a guy turning 18 having a proper love life?

And, assuming you don't believe that people should be forced into celibacy till age 21 ... and/or that it's morally bankrupt for a late-teen to fall for a guy of 29, there's nothing else in OUT OF BOUNDS to grate on your nerves. (If you have a problem with a teen falling for a guy of 30ish ... what about the 14 year olds who drooled over Han Solo? Harrison Ford was 34 when the first movie was filmed in 1976. The wicket gets a bit sticky around here!!)

OUT OF BOUNDS is about the relationship between a kid from a home controlled by religious nutters, and a teacher at his school. Cricket is their common ground at first, and when they fall in mutual lust, they find out they have a whole lot more in common! Then there's trouble with the school, and a blackmailer -- and the kid's parents turn out to be Christian above and beyond the call of intelligence ... complete morons.

The book is very romantic and not at all sexy, so if you're looking for something that's heavy on plot and sort of skirts around the tricky issue of gay sex on paper, this is a good book to start with. (Personally, I could've stood a lot more graphic treatment of the love scenes, but on the other hand the book is very romantic, and author Mike Seabrook definitely wrote what he intended to write. His love scenes are the kind you find in some romance novels where the characters slide into each other's arms, their lips meet, then there's three dots, two blank lines, and the next scene starts. Writer's prerogative, I reckon. For me, he could have jazzed it up more, but, there you go. That's just me.)

If I had any kind of a problem with OUT OF BOUNDS, it's the resolution ... and again, this is totally subjective on my part. The characters basically run away from the problem of getting caught being gay. They go to Paris -- which is fair enough. The French make a heck of a lot more sense on subjects like the Age of Consent, and being gay in general. But then you have this highly intelligent young man who's going to go to Paris to be a 'boy toy.' I don't say it doesn't happen! It does. But ... I have a slight problem with an intelligent young person letting their education go, not building a career, their own life, etc. etc.

(Why? Well, because it comes back to bite you on the ass when you're 35 or 40 ... about the time middle age sets in, your looks are past their use-by date, and maybe you're divorced or widowed, and suddenly you have to go get a job, and you can't, because you're unqualified for anything. Life is like that. It bites, if you don't stop it.)

But you can also accept OUT OF BOUNDS as a kind of fantasy in which the two handsome princes escape to the magical kingdom and live happily ever after. And if you like cricket (I do), there's a lot in this novel for you.

AG's rating: 3.5 stars out of five. Recommended.
Mike Seabrook's page at Library Thing: http://www.librarything.com/author/seabrookmike

Copies of at least one edition are available at alibris:
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=9392949466&browse=1&qwork=4926633&qsort=&page=1

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