Arf! (Not To Be Confused With Woof!)

Originally published in Gay Community News, April 1981.

The Dog, and Other Stories
by Joseph Hansen
Santa Monica CA: Momentum Press
64 pp
$3.50 paper

If you’ve enjoyed Joseph Hansen’s mystery novels, you will probably be interested in this collection of his short stories. All but one were published before 1970, the year Fadeout, the first Dave Brandstetter novel, was published, and none in my opinion is in the same league with his longer fiction, but they do share some of its virtues.

“The Dog,” the latest of the stories, is hurt by Hansen’s new sense of vocation as a crime writer. A fortyish man meets a twentyish man with whom he’d been unrequitedly in love some years before. The boy becomes responsive suddenly in an attempt to manipulate the older man into protecting him from an elderly former business partner who is also in love with him. The story lacks focus: Hansen’s sharp eye for detail gets in the way in a short story, where every word must be relevant, so his descriptions distracted rather than informed me. There is not enough room to develop the characters, and the boy in particular remains annoyingly ambiguous: exactly what does he want from the older man? On the other hand, the setting is well-observed, and Howard, the older man, is a character I’d like to know better.

Most of the earlier stories are less mature work. “Enking,” set in the late 1960s, tells of an encounter between a middle-aged English professor and a stylish young poet with an Allen-Ginsberglike penchant for taking off his clothes but an un-Ginsberglike seductive beauty. Nothing of note occurs. This story is the most dated one here. “The Bee” is about an again, perhaps elderly, woman stirred by a chance encounter to think of her lesbian daughter, whom she has not seen in many years. In “Getting Rid of Mr. Grainger” a young lesbian drives a possible fortune-hunter away from her wheelchair-bound mother, then has second thoughts. “The Legacy” is savagely tragicomic: the theme is the desolation of a young man whose older lover has died, inadvertently leaving him only a brutally inappropriate “legacy.” “The Mourner” would be an unremarkable story in any other context, but it takes on added meaning here: a young boy growing up during the Great Depression, whose mother has died, begins to study American Indian lore obsessively, and quixotically frees from a small-town jail cell a young Indian. The possibility that the boy will grow up to gay, raised by the fact that all the preceding stories have been about gay characters, adds poignancy to the overtones of confinement and alienation in the story.

The Dog and Other Stories would have been more useful had it been published in the early Seventies, when it would have stood out more. It will now I think be of interest mainly to fans of Hansen’s other work, though his talent for description, his sympathy for children and the aging, and the direct unapologetic way (in the later stories) he writes about gay characters, are still virtues and make this collection worth reading.