My Take in Brief: Confronting my prejudices has never been more enjoyable.

pirate_king

Series? Yes. this is the fourth Adrien English mystery. It was the first I read, and while the mystery stands alone, the romance/s began in a previous book. If I had a do-over, I would not read this first.

Heroes: Adrien English is the owner of an independent L.A. book store and a mystery writer who tends to get involved, Miss Marple style, in solving real life mysteries. He has a chronic heart condition, not just medically but also emotionally, thanks to his troubled relationships with his current partner, tweedy professor Guy, and the ex who broke his heart, tough, closeted and married cop, Jake.

Plot: In the opening pages, the man who is financing a film version of one of Adrien’s books is poisoned. When Adrien gets involved in solving the case, he reenters Jake’s orbit, creating concerns and jealousy on the part of his wary partner, Guy.

Fun factoid: Lanyon fans are sometimes called “fanyons”, although not all of them like it, and Lanyon was a guest blogger recently at Jessewave.

Word on the Web:

Book Utopia, 44 out of 50

Reviewing the Evidence, positive

Jessewave, positive

Teddypig, positive

Amazon.com, 5 stars after 20 reviews

The Racy Romance Review:

I got the idea that this was erotic romance, maybe because the print publisher, ManLoveRomance refers to itself as a publisher of Gay Erotic Fiction.  But there was no sex until page 155 in a 234 page book, and only one brief and pretty nonexplicit sex scene after that (switch the gender and it could have been in a historical romance).  This book made me ask myself what counts as erotica:  Is it based on amount and/or explicitness of the sex? Is any romance between two men, regardless of level of explicitness, considered erotica? Or does it depend not in the text but on the organizational context: i.e. the publishers themselves are erotica publishers? I have no idea, but either way, this is not a good choice if you are looking for lots of explicit sex.

I decided I wanted to read some m/m romance, and erotica is what seems to be most readily available. Is there a nonexplicit subgenre of romance between men? Again, more questions raised for me than answered.

This book worked well for me as both a mystery and a romance. One of my gripes about contemporary romance is that they could be set anywhere. They give me the feeling I get when I enter any big box store: total disconnection from recognizable human life. Not so in Pirate King, which is set in a very recognizable L.A.. The fringe Hollywood scene is one I have rarely encountered in contemporary romance, and it was like a breath of fresh air.

Pirate King was very heavy on dialogue and action, and since it was written in the first person point of view of Adrien, who is not particularly observant of non-human features of his environment, we did not get a ton of environmental detail. Still Lanyon manages to convey a lot about the feeling of a place with a few words. Here’s one example:

We talked a little more, I finished my lemonade, and then I left her lush suburban paradise with the lawn birds and pool generator filling the silence.

And another:

I drank my juice and stared down at the empty street. It was a warm, dry June evening. The summer night smelled of fog and distant  dinners cooked in restaurants on the o side of town. A kid with a guitar sat on the stoop of the closed boutique across the street singing — practicing apparently — an old Beatles song. The bald and featureless mannequins in the brightly illuminated boutique windows modeled their finery and gestured elegantly into space.

The characterization of Adrien was very interesting to me. I felt like I got to know him mainly through the reactions he reported from the people around him. He did do some reflection, but his internal monologues were often cut short. Is that a guy thing? For example, in a subplot, Adrien’s boyfriend, Guy, is defending his continued acquaintance with an ex-lover who has fallen on hard times. Here’s Adrien’s response:

I had this sudden Ebenezer Scrooge moment. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Maybe Lisa was right. Maybe I had grown hard, bitter. In any case, I seemed fresh out of the milk of human kindness.

This is another sense in which reading this book first was not the best idea: so many times Adrien’s present self is compared unfavorably with his past self. To me, he seemed a bit aimless, unconnected, mopey — not his best. His heart condition helped generate sympathy in me for him, and added a nice dimension of tension and risk to his increasingly dangerous investigation. I did develop a sense of wanting to protect Adrien. I believe that I would have been more invested in his character if I had read the other books.

I thought the mystery was quite compelling, if straightforward in an old fashioned way (no CSI stuff here). The suspects Adrien interviews were all interesting and believably potentially guilty. You do have to bracket the implausibility of the idea that wealthy people whose reputation and life are on the line would willingly talk, without legal counsel, to this random book seller about their involvement with a murder.  I never watched Miss Marple, but I am guessing it’s kind of like the suspension of disbelief required to believe she could be intimately involved in so many murder investigations.

The best scenes for me were Adrien’s scenes with Jake. Lanyon does an amazing job of creating sexual tension, and of having it pay off.  The intimate scenes were hot, romantic, tender, and really a joy to read.

Now, on to the prejudices and/or stereotypes that reading this made me realize I still harbored, on some level, about gay men. I’m not proud of any of this, but I want to be honest here:

1. There was one question I had, which I probably can’t answer without reading the other books: It’s clear that several factors contributed to the ending of Jake and Adrien’s affair. One of them was Jake’s participation in BDSM activities with other lovers. My question is whether Adrien objected to the BDSM itself, or objected to sharing Jake, or both. Reading Pirate King, I picked up several times on the sense that BDSM, for Adrien, was inherently immoral. [Teddypig discusses this in a review of a prior Adrien English mystery.] Now, the stereotype I have to admit to was that I found myself thinking “Why would Adrien be bothered by BDSM?” and I’m pretty sure I would not have asked that question that if Adrien was a heterosexual man. In other words, I realized at some point in reading Pirate King that I assumed, on some level, that if you’re gay, you’re more open to other kinds of non-majority sexual practices.

2. Adrien is basically celibate for a large part of the book. At one point, he and Guy just cuddle in their bed. I definitely had a moment when I caught myself feeling surprised about that. Again, ridiculous, and based on some stereotype about the sex drive of gay men.

3. Jake’s internal conflict is that he is closeted and married. As a cop, he fears that homophobia will cost him a career which means everything to him. We don’t learn much about his relationship with his wife in this book, but she had been pregnant in a prior book, so they are definitely sexually active. I have had a certain way of looking at closeted married men, mainly from the point of view of the women in those marriages, and it has not been with much sympathy. My view has been that such men want to enjoy all the benefits of heterosexual male privilege and yet secretly enjoy the companionship and love of other gay men.  Articles like this one, “When the Beard is Too Painful to Remove” in the New York Times (2006), or “Married Man Seeks Same for Discreet Play in NY Mag (2007), have confirmed my uncharitable view.  Reading Pirate King generated a lot of sympathy in me for Jake, who was hands down the most compelling character in this book. I saw clearly how complicated it all was for him, and how much he had to lose. I had to ask myself why it is so easy for me to defend female victims of domestic violence or female (often pregnant) drug abusers despite their unwise choices, but I had been so hard on these men.

In all three cases, if you walked in to my living room or office and asked me point blank if I believed that gay men are more sexually adventurous than heterosexual men, or that gay men are always horny, or that closeted gay married men do not deserve understanding and support, I would have told you — truthfully –  that I do not believe those things. But prejudice and stereotypes do not often live at the level of conscious awareness, which is one reason they are so hard to identify and root out. They nest in crystallized images, in fragments of thoughts, in the echo of memories, in emotional footprints, in the irrational and secret places in our minds.

One of the reasons I think fiction is so important in ethics is that it goes places that rational discourse cannot reach. Fiction speaks to us on so many levels, drawing on all of our cognitive resources, our imagination, our creativity, our emotions, and those unconscious places where we do not even know our true selves, or where our many slivers of self are at war with each other.

Despite the heaviness of my last few comments, I really enjoyed this one, and can say that Death of a Pirate King had me by the ovaries on line one, and did not let me go until the very end. I hope to read more from Josh Lanyon.


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