The Cutbank Path

Nathan Reed #2

by Joseph Hansen

Jack of Hearts and Living Upstairs (Lambda Award, 1993) chronicled the times of young writer-to-be Nathan Reed in the early 1940s. In The Cutbank Path, it's 1952, and Nathan, bright, talented, funny, but not too smart about life, is living happily with school-teacher Steve Schaffer in a shacky little house in the Hollywood hills, among a crowd of odd but friendly neighbors. But Joe McCarthy has the whole country running scared and Steve loses his job. Nathan fights to wangle it back for him. Then, just as the worst seems over, he gets the shock of his life.

Genres: LGBT

217 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) was an American author of mysteries. The son of a South Dakota shoemaker, he moved to a California citrus farm with his family in 1936. He began publishing poetry in the New Yorker in the 1950s, and joined the editorial teams of gay magazines ONE and Tangents in the 1960s. Using the pseudonyms Rose Brock and James Colton, Hansen published five novels and a collection of short stories before the appearance of Fadeout (1970), the first novel published under his own name.

The book introduced street-smart insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, a complex, openly gay hero who grew and changed over the series’s twelve novels. By the time Hansen concluded the series with A Country of Old Men (1990), Brandstetter was older, melancholy, and ready for retirement. The 1992 recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Hansen published several more novels before his death in 2004.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.

Reviews

[Brian Rodriguez]

Wasn't great!