Joseph Hansen

The death of a Vietnamese immigrant brings former death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter out of retirement. As an insurance investigator, Dave Brandstetter built a reputation unraveling suspicious deaths. Now, well into middle age, he has decided to retire for the sake of Cecil, the young TV reporter who loves and cherishes him, and has too often risked his own life for Dave's work. But retirement does not come easily. Dave never did it for the money. He always had that. Nor did he tirelessly work cases in hopes of chasing renown. It was always the pursuit of the truth that drove Dave. He enjoyed the truth's habit of coming into direct conflict with bigotry, allowing him to surprise the small-minded along the way. It doesn't take much arm twisting, then, to get Dave back in the saddle when an old friend in the public defender's office asks him to help Andy Flanagan, a shiftless young man accused of murdering a Vietnamese businessman to defend the Old Fleet -- a shantytown of houseboats that has been earmarked for development. Beneath the surface of this oil-slicked slum lurks an international conspiracy so appalling that Dave will regret postponing his retirement.

While investigating a suicide, Dave Brandstetter discovers a dead reporter's final scoop. Journalist Adam Streeter covered some of the most dangerous stories of the last quarter century, ranging from Cambodia to Siberia and anywhere troubled in between. Fearless, dashing, and more than a little resourceful, Streeter was renowned as much for his virtuosic writing as the shocking reality of what he uncovered along the way. Why would someone who lived so purposefully and with such demonstrable bravery turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know this isn't one. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story -- an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher -- and finds that Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. Dave quickly realized that some very powerful people would like him to drop the case. Dave's own lover, Cecil, would like to see him take it easy for once. But Cecil knows Brandstetter is not so unlike the man whose death he's investigating. The truth, to someone like Brandstetter or Streeter, is worth the ultimate price. As he attempts to finish Adam's story and get to the bottom of the journalist's death, Dave will find more than a few people willing to make him pay it.

The brutality of the AIDS epidemic and a nation's growing homophobia set the stage for a serial killer targeting gay men in Los Angeles--and Dave Brandstetter finds himself in the killer's path. Dave Brandstetter's afternoon does not begin well: his ex-boyfriend picks him up at the airport, and the ride home -- in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic -- is one long argument between them. The insurance investigator's day gets worse when he finds a man -- bloody, rain-soaked, and ice cold -- lying on his porch, killed by a stab wound while Dave was out of town. There is a serial killer loose in Los Angeles, and this man is his sixth victim. Like the others, he had already been marked for death - by the unforgiving plague known as AIDS. Someone is targeting sick men in the city, and Dave's search for the killer leads him into the dark side of gay Los Angeles, where death comes without warning and life is a fearful dream. Decades after its original publication in 1987, Early Graves remains an important literary achievement. The exigence of Joseph Hansen's frontline reportage of the AIDS epidemic is as powerful as his prose craft and mystery plot are clever.

While investigating a suicide, Dave Brandstetter discovers a dead reporter's final scoop. Journalist Adam Streeter covered some of the most dangerous stories of the last quarter century, ranging from Cambodia to Siberia and anywhere troubled in between. Fearless, dashing, and more than a little resourceful, Streeter was renowned as much for his virtuosic writing as the shocking reality of what he uncovered along the way. Why would someone who lived so purposefully and with such demonstrable bravery turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know this isn't one. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story -- an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher -- and finds that Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. Dave quickly realized that some very powerful people would like him to drop the case. Dave's own lover, Cecil, would like to see him take it easy for once. But Cecil knows Brandstetter is not so unlike the man whose death he's investigating. The truth, to someone like Brandstetter or Streeter, is worth the ultimate price. As he attempts to finish Adam's story and get to the bottom of the journalist's death, Dave will find more than a few people willing to make him pay it.

Mitteilungen aus dem Stadtarchiv von K ln - Zw lfter Band ist ein unver nderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1902. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ern hrung, Medizin und weiteren Genres. Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur. Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquit ten erh ltlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese B cher neu und tr gt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch f r die Zukunft bei.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTER A cult leader named Azrael perpetrates a brutal mass murder and afterwards a slimy lawyer is trying to claim the life insurance policy for his missing daughter; it's the early '80s in Los Angeles and private investigator Dave Brandstetter has a new love in his life as exciting as this case is dreadful. Two years ago Charles Westover disgraced himself and his family when he was disbarred for bribery. Westover's daughter Serenity, disgusted with her once beloved father, ran away to a cult founded by a mesmerizingly handsome young man, a self-appointed messiah going by the grimly grandiose name of Azrael. The whereabouts of Serenity pass unknown for years until the police raid Azrael's compound and discover that the cult leader lived up to his ghastly "Angel of Death" moniker. Thinking his daughter has been murdered, Charles Westover claims her life insurance, and then he too vanishes. Insurance companies don't like to cut a check without a body and especially don't like cutting a check to someone who is also missing. Hired as a private investigator for Banner Insurance, David Brandstetter quickly finds himself in a complicated maze of lies and hidden histories. And Dave suspects that, just like in the labyrinths of old, there will be a monster at the end of it. It's not all bad times and extreme hazard for our man Dave. A passionate romance has entered his life with the reappearance of Cecil Harris, a handsome young African American investigative reporter for the local news station looking to get to the bottom of a different kind of story.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTER Death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter navigates the opposing realms of evangelical Christianity and the porn business while tracking a lost girl in late 1970s Los Angeles. Lon Tooker certainly fits the profile: big, strong, a Marine Corps veteran, and recently the target of evangelical crusader Gerald Dawson's wrath. Tooker's adult toys and pornography store on the local skid row has recently become the target of Dawson's church men's group and their destructive masked raids on "un-Christian" businesses. When Dawson is strangled to death by someone of Tooker's size and ability, the police see a smut-peddler with a motive. Case closed. But death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter doesn't like it. By all accounts Tooker is a softy incapable of such a crime. Actual evidence is nonexistent and assumptions many. And Dave particularly doesn't care for assumptions based on someone's sex life. But Dave is also navigating new personal territory. His father's death has left him bereaved and for the first time in a long time without a job. Dave quit the insurance company his father built and has struck out on his own as a private investigator. Add in his breakup with his recent partner and he's a man unencumbered. It's the late 1970s and Dave may be aging a bit but he's still handsome, wealthy, and recently in possession of a new convertible Triumph. Looks like it's not all hard work.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTER The murder of a conservative police chief in a fishing village north of Los Angeles sends death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter into the no-man's land between cops and activists in this brilliantly plotted mystery, which perfectly captures California in the mid-1970s. A small-town Chief of Police with reactionary politics and national ambitions, Ben Orton struck fear in the hearts of anyone who fell out of line in his little fiefdom of La Caleta. Most recently that has included gay rights activists pushing for the hiring of a police officer from their community. When big Ben is found in his backyard bludgeoned to death by a large terracotta pot, the police arrest the outspoken gay owner of a local nursery. Orton had a life insurance policy that brings death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter north to pry. As far as Dave can tell, the cops did almost nothing to investigate Orton's death and what evidence they did compile doesn't seem to add up. Dave quickly learns that the pool of suspects is much deeper than the police reported. Ben Orton may have seen himself as a pillar of the community but what many in La Caleta saw instead was a violent man whose commitment to enforcement didn't always also include room for the law. With an ailing father in the hospital and a relationship headed toward the rocks, a very distracted Brandstetter finds himself making more wrong moves than right while those on the other side of the thin blue line are making it painfully obvious his presence is not wanted.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTER Death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter enters a world thespians and booksellers as he uncovers the true story behind the death of a rare book dealer in this noir-spun masterpiece of California crime fiction. Since a burning accident that left him painfully disfigured, John Oats, a well-liked collectible book dealer, has been self-isolating at his beach house in Arena Blanca, California. An avid swimmer, John Oats had taken to night swimming to hide his injuries from daytime beachgoers. When his body is found one morning smashed against the rocks at the treacherous point near the house, the authorities rule it "Death by Misadventure." Insurance companies don't much care for verdicts like that and therefore Medallion Insurance, the policy holder for Oats's substantial life insurance policy, sends out its best investigator, Dave Brandstetter, to poke holes in the story. The night Oats died there was a dangerous storm along the coast, and Brandstetter finds it hard to believe that the bookseller, a lifelong swimmer, would have gone out. As his investigation reveals more of John Oats's sad story Brandstetter learns that the motives for murder are many. But Brandstetter has his own problems to deal with. Still mourning the death of his partner, Rod, Dave is navigating his own twilight world of grief. His new lover, Doug, is also grieving, and the two men must come to a reckoning of whether their love is an ersatz stand-in for their lost partners or something more.

Love and money are the easy motives in the death of a California beachfront nightclub owner, but death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter is certain of one thing: the case is going to be far from easy and the police have it all wrong. Rick Wendell wouldn't hurt a flea. The big, jovial owner of the Hang Ten, a surfing-themed gay bay on the boardwalk, was loved by regulars and new arrivals alike. But Rick was found naked and dead, with a local hustler named Larry Johns standing over him, smoking gun in hand. Wendell's death is ruled as a homicide and Johns is arrested. Everyone thinks it's a simple open-and-shut case. Everyone except the death claims investigator, Dave Brandstetter. Brandstetter, a homosexual himself, doesn't make the same assumptions about the crime scene and easy story it tells. Larry Johns had enough time to escape had he wanted to. Not to mention Johns lacked any discernable motive, especially since the $200 in Wendell's wallet was left untouched. In an investigation that takes him from sun-scorched hillside ranches to seedy boardwalk bars, Brandstetter gets to the bottom of a twisty mystery in this hardboiled and entertaining portrait of the '70s gay culture by groundbreaking poet and award-winning crime writer Joseph Hansen.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTER With a new Introduction by Michael Nava. Published fifty years ago, a time when being gay was illegal in 49 out of 50 states, Joseph Hansen's first Dave Brandstetter novel shattered stereotypes and redefined the Private Eye novel as we know it. Five decades after its original landmark publication, Joseph Hansen's Fadeout is as fresh and important as ever. Preceded only by a handful of gay protagonists in crime fiction, Hansen's Dave Brandstetter, a ruggedly handsome World War II vet with a quick wit, faultless moral compass, and endless confidence, shattered stereotypes and won over a large reading audience, a feat previously considered impossible for queer fiction. Set in the mid-1960s, Fadeout centers on the disappearance of a southern California radio personalitynamed Fox Olson. A failed writer, Olson finally found success as a beloved folksinger and wholesome country raconteur with a growing national audience. The community is therefore shocked when Olson's car is found wrecked, having been driven off a bridge and swept away in a fast-moving arroyo on a rainy night. A life insurance claim is filed by Olson's widow and the company holding the policy sends their best man to investigate. The problem is that Olson's body was never found. Not in the car. Not further down the river. As Dave Brandstetter begins his investigation he quickly finds that none of it adds up.

With retirement just out of reach, Dave Brandstetter investigates the killing of a Vietnamese immigrant. As an insurance investigator, Dave Brandstetter has spent his life unraveling suspicious deaths. Now, well into middle age, he has decided to retire for the sake of Cecil, the young TV reporter who loves and cherishes him, and has too often risked his own life for Dave's work. But retirement does not come easily. An old friend in the public defender's office asks Dave to help Andy Flanagan, a shiftless young man accused of murdering a Vietnamese businessman to defend the Old Fleet--a shantytown of houseboats that has been earmarked for development. Unable to resist the case, Dave heads to the Old Fleet and begins asking questions. Beneath the surface of this oil-slicked slum lurks an international conspiracy so appalling that Dave will regret postponing his retirement.

While investigating a suicide, Dave Brandstetter discovers a dead reporter's final scoop. Adam Streeter has covered international crises from Siberia to Cambodia. When disaster strikes, he grabs his battered typewriter and hops on a plane, hurling himself into danger wherever the story demands. He is brave, talented, and internationally renowned--so why would he turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know that a journalist this successful would never take his own life. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story--an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher--and Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. To finish Adam's investigation, Dave will have to make like a war correspondent and leap into the line of fire.

While investigating a suicide, Dave Brandstetter discovers a dead reporter's final scoop. Adam Streeter has covered international crises from Siberia to Cambodia. When disaster strikes, he grabs his battered typewriter and hops on a plane, hurling himself into danger wherever the story demands. He is brave, talented, and internationally renowned--so why would he turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know that a journalist this successful would never take his own life. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story--an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher--and Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. To finish Adam's investigation, Dave will have to make like a war correspondent and leap into the line of fire.

While investigating a suicide, Dave Brandstetter discovers a dead reporter's final scoop. Adam Streeter has covered international crises from Siberia to Cambodia. When disaster strikes, he grabs his battered typewriter and hops on a plane, hurling himself into danger wherever the story demands. He is brave, talented, and internationally renowned--so why would he turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know that a journalist this successful would never take his own life. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story--an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher--and Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. To finish Adam's investigation, Dave will have to make like a war correspondent and leap into the line of fire.