See that chalk outline? It is not a good sign. Someone has murdered the gay mystery … again.

Why does this keep happening? How did the genre devolve so far from the intensity of Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter novels or the style of George Baxt's Pharaoh Love books? Even Michael Nava can’t save this genre all alone. What have queer mystery fans done to deserve Fred Hunter or, worse, Randy Boyd? Mainstream mysteries have long since headed in more elevated directions. After all, P. D. James, Elizabeth George and Jonathan Kellerman may be writing pop fiction, but their works are deliciously intelligent. With such a rich tradition to draw on, why are so many of the new gay entries not so much whodunits as whybothers?

This is a far more puzzling question than anything posed by "Thai Died," the second novel by William Maltese to feature his Stud Draqual character, underwear couturier and amateur sleuth. All too typically, Maltese (author of "California Creamin'") appears to envision a readership uncomfortable with anything more challenging than pornography. Comic books also come to mind, and there may be a reason for this. Stud Draqual does not really spring from mystery fiction at all, gay or otherwise. His roots lie elsewhere and in another time.

Over the course of a couple of weeks in the late 1940s, Mickey Spillane churned out the first in a series of egregious potboilers about a character he developed from his Mike Danger comics. This “new” hero, with the name changed to Mike Hammer, waved the flag at every opportunity. He also slaughtered commies and mobsters with glee and always bagged the babe, frequently just before shooting her. Though ineptly written, these novelettes proved immensely successful, finding their chief popularity among ex-servicemen, the virulent misogyny of the plots doubtless reflecting postwar gender tensions. (Having gotten a taste of independence, a lot of erstwhile homemakers seemed reluctant to relinquish their jobs to returning GIs, and from then on females in “men’s” fiction inevitably turned out to be treacherous and perverse.) Were these really detective stories? Though nominally a gumshoe, Hammer actually fell closer to Ian Fleming’s James Bond (though significantly less sophisticated) than to Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. With its pervasive focus on “outsider” heroes, the classic American mystery had always exerted a powerful attraction for gay writers (and readers). Such works suggested a radical outlook on contemporary culture, but Spillane’s books were socially and politically regressive, even for the fifties.

Enter Stud Draqual.

“Thai Died” is narrated in a style long considered mandatory for private dicks, a sort of unrelentingly facetious colloquialism. (Truthfully, it is difficult to determine how much of this was intended as humor.) The fruity-tough-guy tone may be something of a specialized taste, but it does eliminate a need for well-wrought descriptive passages. The men pretty much all have "handsome faces" and "hard bodies," though an unfortunate few are merely "ruggedly good-looking." Occasionally, the text strives to be colorful. The book is set in Bangkok, and Thai characters are depicted as ‘exotic' in the worst sense: barbaric, corrupt, indistinguishable. Mike Danger would have approved. The tediously involved plot turns out to be something about stolen antiquities, but that can be safely ignored. (Remember Hitchcock’s definition of a MacGuffin?) Things explode, shots get fired, throats get slashed, masked assassins creep up behind the hero (who dispatches them with karate chops), and Asian callboys show up in strange beds. But even this procession of events is insufficient to pad out the storyline.

However, one aspect merits remark. Despite all the throbbing members and devious cross dressers, despite even the fashion industry background (and the way the book is being marketed), Stud Draqual is not a gay character, though he does sometimes fantasize about men, usually while having sex with gorgeous dames. (This is about as deep as the author’s insight penetrates.) The men who continually proposition him are just as continually rebuffed, as though readers were expected to derive a thrill from plot twists that thrust this "straight" male and his permanent erection into suggestive situations with gays. Somehow this manages to be simultaneously lurid and coy. (Could this ambivalence explain why anal rape, which the hero merely observes, figures so prominently at the book’s climax?) Neither truly gay nor really a mystery (unless the reader invests energy trying to figure out the target readership), “Thai Died” is decidedly D.O.A. ( )