Overview

Death Trick is the first Donald Strachey private eye novel, written in a feverish eight weeks in the winter of 1979–80. Fueled by nicotine, antihomophobic rage, and glee inspired by the sexually unshackled seventies, the book was meant as an antidote to the depiction of gays as sickos and weak wretches typical in crime fiction up until then — with the exception of Joseph Hansen’s pioneering Dave Brandstetter series a decade earlier. The book is also the only preAIDS entry in the Strachey series. It came out in the spring of 1981, around the time the first American cases of “gay cancer” were turning up. Within a year, the age of anything-goes was essentially over, and the plague years were upon us. There’s an innocence about Death Trick’s dance club and sex scenes — although the story also makes clear that not everyone back than was healthy and well-adjusted and happy all the time. As in all the Strachey books, homophobia is the biggest villain in Death Trick, both in the way it makes gay people victims and in the ways internalized homophobia — a clunky but useful term — sometimes makes gay people victimizers. The story is meant to show, too, the power of memory to shape lives — in this case, the consuming memory of a first, lost love. Part mystery, part social comedy, Death Trick is very much of its time. I hope, though, that for contemporary readers a historic, revolutionary era will be comprehensible and will come alive again in these pages.