The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Men Like Us
By Hollis Shiloh
Published by the author, 2019
Five stars

In 1950s Chicago (?), a young private detective, Oliver Boyle, fresh from the cornfields of Iowa, gets to know a well-known and successful private eye working on his own – Jack Finley. Ollie looks up to Jack, envious of his brains, his financial success, and his cool. Jack is older, having fought in World War II, and Ollie is flattered to be taken under Jack’s wing, and made part of his weekly poker game.

But Ollie begins to realize, to his dismay, that his interest in Jack has crossed a line. He finds himself physically drawn to Jack, realizing that his emotions are getting tangled up in his admiration. Thing is, Jack understands this, too, but he’s more interested in protecting his young friend than seducing him. It’s when Jack is badly beaten, as a result of rescuing a young man from a gang of hoodlums, that he and Ollie begin to hash out how they both really feel.

Murder, blackmail, and men who wear hats and ties all the time: Hollis Shiloh shifts the narrator’s viewpoint between Jack and Ollie, drawing us into a unique friendship and offering insight into the hearts and minds men on the edge of society at a time when the risk was enormous.

What impressed me most about this book is Hollis Shiloh’s skill at capturing the feel and language of the 1950s. I’d say that Frank Butterfield’s Nick Williams books are a prime example of that as well, but those fantastic plots and super-hero-like main characters give Butterfield’s books a distinctly post-Stonewall feel. Shiloh’s carefully modulated writing has just the right amount of formality and even stiltedness (is that a word?), and there’s an uncanny authenticity to it. I could believe this was a book written in the 1950s by one of those anonymous authors who published gay stories through tiny niche publishing houses. Both Jack Finley and Ollie Boyle resonate as American men of that time and place.

The restricted nature of the storyline feels eerily right, too. It’s sort of startling to step back and realize that all of the classic tropes of contemporary m/m fiction are in place; but each is shaped and tailored to look like something from the past. Jack’s bluff self-assurance is tinged with shame and regret. He’s only as out and proud as the time would allow. Even Ollie’s emerging self-awareness, which could readily have been a “gay for you” trap, becomes a thoughtful study of a young man’s realization that he is more complicated than he thought. There is a quiet maturity to Ollie’s self-analysis, just as there is to Jack’s, that give these two men dimensionality and emotional heft.

The author wants encouragement to write more about Ollie and Jack. I’m going to give it with all my heart. I want to see what these to young men, expert and apprentice, will do when they face the world on their own.