I know I just talked about mysteries a couple of days ago, but it occurred to me as I did so that two of my favourite mystery series both took place in New Orleans, and so why not get specific today on my trek through Pride Month recommendations, and head to the Crescent City?
I love New Orleans, and I loved every trip I’ve taken there—and specifically, my visits to the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival—and I’ve always thought that the best stories that take place in New Orleans seem to understand the location is as much a character as the individuals in the narrative itself.
These two authors did that so well with their mystery series I re-read them whenever I need a hit of that wonderful city.
Queer New Orleans of then and now…
Let’s start with Micky Knight. Now, if you haven’t heard of J.M. Redmann’s Death by the Riverside, ohmigosh do you have a journey ahead of you. Micky Knight is freaking phenomenal, and a hard-boiled queer detective in Louisiana, and doing so with smarts, edge, and passion in equal parts. She’s flawed, understand me. Micky Knight is by no means perfect, and honestly she’s all the more alluring for it.
This was her first adventure, and while when I re-read this one, I have to paused here and there to chuckle to myself (Micky hunting for a payphone, using paper maps to try and locate people, etc.), other than the technology the book holds up so well it could still be now—including the elements working against Knight.
It’s one of my deeply fervent wishes to someday see an adaption of Micky Knight on the small (or large!) screen, but until then, I’ve got eleven books to love…
Among the moss-covered trees and wrought-iron balustrades of southern Louisiana, Detective Michele Knight (Micky to her friends) takes on the seemingly simple job of shooting a few photos for a client, but the going gets rough as Micky finds herself slugging through thugs and slogging through swamps in an attempt to expose a dangerous drug ring. The trail leads to the Hundred Oaks Plantation, a transvestite named Eddie, a beautiful doctor named Cordelia, and memories Micky thought she had buried twenty years ago.
Hard-hitting prose in the style of Sam Spade and Mike Hammer with a lesbian twist.
The first time I read the next book I’m going to talk about I gobbled it down in a day, which used to make me feel guilty because authors take months to write books and there was me, boom, done in a day. Now I know that for the compliment it is, of course. Greg Herren’s Murder in the Rue Dauphine starts off his Chanse MacLeod mystery series, with said PI trying to figure out a blackmail case, and having it all go very wrong, very quickly.
Just like the Micky Knight series, location is character-level important in the Chanse books, and New Orleans has rarely been captured as well as it has here. Also, the cast of characters around Chanse are fascinating, and you get to see them grow and shift throughout the series as well (did I mention this is also a series of seven books?)
For gay New Orleans private eye Chanse MacLeod, it seemed like a simple case: find out who was blackmailing his pretty-boy client’s rich, closeted boyfriend, collect a nice check, and take some time off. But then the pretty boy turns up dead in what looks like a hate crime and the gay community of New Orleans is up in arms, demanding justice.
In the stifling heat of a New Orleans summer, Chanse searches for an extremely clever killer on a trail leading to a gay rights organization, boys for hire, and New Orleans society, knowing he has to find the killer before the entire city explodes.
How about you? Ever been to New Orleans? Or do you have a location that you love to visit in a literary way whenever can?
'Nathan Burgoine 