Lipez was a freelance reviewer of mysteries for The Washington Post for three decades - he was irked that crime novels generally gave a lopsided view of gay characters, portraying them as misfits and villains who often met an unpleasant demise. There, stitched into the quilt, they see the name of a man who they know is not dead.Īn aficionado of detective fiction - Mr. “Strachey’s Folly” (1998) opens with the sleuth and his lover, Timmy, in Washington, D.C., at a display of the AIDS quilt, a vast memorial to people who have died of the disease. In “Shock to the System” (1995), Strachey goes undercover to investigate a gay conversion therapy group. Lipez’s themes, settings and plots revolve around gay issues. “Death Trick” takes place in 1979, before the AIDS crisis, and it includes a fair amount of carefree exuberance. Donna Summer’s disco anthems reverberate in his head. Rather, he’s reading The Gay Community News. When his phone rings, he isn’t swilling rye from a bottle in his desk drawer or fending off dames. Five weeks after Labor Day and already winter was sliding across the state from Buffalo like a new ice age.”īut Strachey is no Philip Marlowe. “The sky over Jimmy’s Lounge was slate gray, and a cold wind chewed at the crumbling caulking around the windowpane next to me. He opened his first book in the series, “Death Trick” (1981), with Strachey observing his seamy patch of Albany:
