The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

The Bar Watcher – Audio Version
Written by Dorien Grey – Narration by Jeff Frez-Albrecht

Review by Jon Michaelsen

In the third book in the Dick Hardesty gay P.I. series, we find tough guy, Dick, playing the field much more so than the first couple books, which is interesting in that this novel is set at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic (which actually isn’t mentioned by name since the virus was not yet identified). Rumors abound of otherwise healthy young gay men getting sick and dying, causing Dick to take note. It so happens, Hardesty’s latest case involves investigating the death of one of the partners of “Rage”, a popular, members only gay bathhouse where only the gorgeous need apply.

The Bar Watcher – Audio Version
Written by Dorien Grey – Narration by Jeff Frez-Albrecht

Review by Jon Michaelsen

In the third book in the Dick Hardesty gay P.I. series, we find tough guy, Dick, playing the field much more so than the first couple books, which is interesting in that this novel is set at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic (which actually isn’t mentioned by name since the virus was not yet identified). Rumors abound of otherwise healthy young gay men getting sick and dying, causing Dick to take note. It so happens, Hardesty’s latest case involves investigating the death of one of the partners of “Rage”, a popular, members only gay bathhouse where only the gorgeous need apply.

Read the rest of my review;
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

The Bar Watcher
(Dick Hardesty Mystery #3)
By Dorien Grey
Untreed Reads Publishing, 2015 (print editions 2001 and 2009)
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
Four stars

Dorien Grey was the nom de plume of Roger Margason, a longtime gay author who died at the age of 82 in 2015. His Dick Hardesty Mystery series, first published in the early 2000s, numbers 14 volumes, and I have just finished the third (having just bought the fourth, “The Hired Man”). His work was widely popular in the gay community, but I only started to read it after his death. I waited to start on the Dick Hardesty books because I knew they were not romances – and I am very into romances.

Grey’s writing is very good. It is not poetic or “literary,” because that is not the point. “The Bar Watcher” seems to be the perfect introduction for his work, however, because it touches on the best aspects of his writing and his narrative goals. Dick Hardesty is a one-time advertising writer, who leaves the homophobic world of business and sets himself up as a private detective for and within the gay community. The timeframe of this series is the early 1980s (exactly paralleling Marshall Thornton’s Chicago in his “Boystown” books – about which I’ve posted).

Dick is still young, maybe early 30s. He’s a year or so out of a five-year relationship that started in college, and he and his ex have managed to become friends (long distance). In “The Bar Watcher,” Dick is, as he makes clear to the reader, “in his slut phase.” He is interested in sex, not romance. He has a wide circle of friends (both new ones and from the previous books). In the course of investigating a series of increasingly disturbing deaths, Dick visits all of the various kinds of bars and gay restaurants in his city (he is very specific about details of this city, but I can’t figure out if it’s a real city or a made-up one). In this moment in gay history, long ago, but well after Stonewall, the police are still quite homophobic and there are no gay cops. Their interest in the deaths of a few gay men is minimal, and thus Dick takes it upon himself, with the support of Glen O’Banyon, a corporate lawyer and leader in the local gay world, to solve the mystery.

Even as Dick investigates the killings, he is becoming increasingly aware of another pattern of death in his town – the death of young gay men from unexplained illnesses, sometimes described as pneumonia. Against the background of his investigation and cruising in gay bars and clubs, we are seeing the emergence of the plague that devastated the gay world in the 1980s. Here again there is a parallel with Marshall Thornton’s books, but Dick is not like Marshall’s Nick Nowak. There is no self-doubt, no shame. Dick doesn’t need to evolve as a person. His personal mission is simply to help his community.

Dick Hardesty is not anti-monogamy; he is simply not at that place in his life at the moment. He is indulging in the freedom and sexual availability of the gay world in which he lives. As did we all, back then. It was increasingly uncomfortable for me to read about Dick’s growing number of one-night stands, knowing that safe sex was not yet a thing, and that awareness of the nature and source of the so-called “gay cancer” and crippling pneumonia was still very much in its infancy. All sex is off the page, by the way, but we know exactly how gorgeous the men Dick picks up are; and we know exactly how Dick feels and reacts to each individual liaison along the way – clearly this is a point being made, a plot arc, if you will, that parallels that of the murders.

The double tension that Grey builds in his narrative is subtle and distinctly his. The book is as much about the way gay men treat each other as it is about gay sexuality and the ways gay men cope in a homophobic world. The interweaving of death by violence and death by disease is unnerving, and very intentionally crafted. We see Dick as a man who has made peace with his own life, just at the moment when his life will be tipped into an international nightmare that will change the course of gay history.

Although Dorien Grey was old enough to be my father, I am old enough to have been a young, active gay man in the early 1980s. These books cut very close to the bone for me, and as I read this one in particular I was able to really ponder the emotional reactions it stirred up in me. These books brought out some very personal stuff with me, but I can vouch for their authenticity, even when packaged with Dick Hardesty’s self-possessed, private-eye cool. It is a series I suspect I will grow to love more and more as I keep reading.