#the absolute bare minimum of halfway-decent rep to creative and heartfelt but not what it could've been to beautiful and free

[july-19th-club]

LGBT+ Books I’ve Found at Work

Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz

Part....four? in the ongoing series of book reviews I’ve been doing whenever I read anything notably gay (which is hit-and-miss, especially miss this summer because I’ve been mostly listening to podcasts). Today we’re back at it again with a review of Magpie Murders, which is not *technically* a LGBT+ book but which does contain LGBT+ themes and characters in a fairly big way.

Before I go into the read-more, here’s the main skinny: I would love for each of these reviews to be good ones, with stellar examples of some of the new and old queer fiction that I find in a mid-sized public library. 

THIS IS NOT THAT REVIEW. Magpie Murders is a good example how not to write a book with queer themes or characters. 

OKAY, so I was really, really rooting for Anthony. In middle school I devoured every single one of the Alex Rider books even as the heists grew increasingly outrageous and the spies survived increasingly ridiculous situations. They were fun escapism, and I’ve read some of his adult fiction and enjoyed it too. It had been a couple years, but I was looking forward to Magpie.

The premise is great: our main character, Susan, is a book editor who works for a small publishing company whose best author is a gay writer of very popular cozy mysteries. The first half of the book IS Alan’s most recent manuscript, which Susan reads over the course of one weekend at home. Unfortunately, it’s cut off before we actually find out whodunnit, and as Part One ends, we realize that the final chapters are missing, and also, Alan is dead. 

Fuck!!!! Right? Susan then takes on the role of amateur sleuth, trying to figure out if Alan died of foul play (he *seems* to have fallen off his roof, but what if he was pushed) and also discover the rest of that manuscript. Only problem: Alan was actually an asshole, to literally everybody he ever hung out with, and did not even seem to be very good friends with his own partner. Her suspects include: his younger sister, living perpetually in his shadow; his ex-wife, who could be jealous or bitter; his recently widowed partner, who’s like twenty years younger than him; his next-door neighbor, who he’s been arguing with. 

I won’t bother getting into spoilers or plot stuff from then on, because my problems with the book aren’t with it’s plot. It’s tight, clever, and at the end of the book you get not one, but two solved mysteries. But the queer elements of the book aren’t handled great from the get-go. Alan and James (the partner) fall prey to a number of stereotypes: Alan is much older and more successful; James is twenty-nine and kind of naive; the gays are buried (goes without saying, it’s a murder mystery). But it’s the other characters’ reactions to Alan that really got under my skin: Susan admits that she worried his coming out would affect his book sales and the prevailing attitude among most of the speaking and secondary characters is that of resignation. If he could keep it to himself, it’s fine as long as he’s not obvious about it. Lots of dodging-with-euphemisms and “really, I’m FINE with The Gays” on the part of our narrator and her friends and the cast of suspects. It’s not exactly unrealistic - it’s the kind of stuff you hear every single day in real life - but it doesn’t make for friendly reading, either. Susan goes so far as to say she doesn’t think the rest of James’ life will be at all happy, even though she and he are friends by now and he’s moving on from his unsatisfying relationship towards someone closer to him in age and personality. While the narrative and the characters are not openly homophobic, there’s no real reason why Alan couldn’t have been a straight man with a much younger second wife. The entire thing would’ve played out the exact same way, and I would have been much more comfortable while reading it. 

Here’s the bottom line, and the dealbreaker for me: for a book with such prominent queer characters, it is very clearly written from the perspective of a straight person who doesn’t want to get too close. 

Like I said, it’s not a *queer book* per se; it’s a book with queer things in it. I almost didn’t include it in the review series, but I wanted to do at least one review of a mainstream book with LGBT+ themes that showcases the worn-out and uninspired treatment of those themes that is all too common in what we read and watch. I’d like to give Magpie at least a B+, because I did feel like the resolution was pretty bleak and it soured the satisfaction of the payoff for me a little, but I have to take it down to about a C+. If you’re a straight writer and you want to include queer elements in your story, it should serve to enhance the story as a whole, and you should do your research - otherwise some representation can easily become worse than no representation at all.

NEXT UP ON QUEER BOOKS I FOUND AT WORK:

The Devouring, by James R. Benn

and A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, by Mackenzi Lee