![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, Laurence Fishburne will be joining CSI this season. Unfortunately, I don’t think his character will be gay or drive a Jag.
Let me start over. About ten years ago, Fishburne bought the film rights to A Queer Kind of Death, George Baxter’s 1966 mystery novel introducing the gay homicide detective Pharoah Love, but was never able to get it funded. I know this because I looked it up this week after having burned through the two sequels, Swing Low, Sweet Harriet and Topsy & Evil. I thought I’d read A Queer Kind of Death a few years back, but that turned out to have been Baxter’s 1995 restart to the series, A Queer Kind of Love. Got all that?
Baxter, I think, was able to get away with an out detective in 1966 mainly because the original trilogy is so lurid and tongue-in-cheek (though with odd flashes of genuine emotion). An amoral gay black hipster NYPD detective doesn’t seem that outré when the rest of the cast includes kooky/homicidal 1930s starlets, mischievous twin true-crime writers, international men of mystery, cheery Japanese-American thuggettes, bottomless waiters and seductresses named after the heroines of Little Women. The narratives are weird too, for the mystery genre. Though Pharoah is identified as the detective character, he usually lurks in the background until the finale, when he steps forward to solve the case – or screw it up further (like I said, he’s amoral). In the last novel, he’s mysteriously missing until the last couple of chapters, turning up just in time to get killed (this is not as big a spoiler as it sounds). I’ve only read one of the 1990s books, so I don’t know how Baxter contrived to fish the character out of the Reichenbach. 1990s Pharoah is a much more conventional detective – he’s picked up a conscience somewhere, and solves cases that, while still colourful, aren’t anywhere as weird as the originals. On the plus side, he stops referring to himself in the third person and addressing everybody as “cat.” That was really annoying.
Curiously, neither Baxter nor his character have Wikipedia entries.
Let me start over. About ten years ago, Fishburne bought the film rights to A Queer Kind of Death, George Baxter’s 1966 mystery novel introducing the gay homicide detective Pharoah Love, but was never able to get it funded. I know this because I looked it up this week after having burned through the two sequels, Swing Low, Sweet Harriet and Topsy & Evil. I thought I’d read A Queer Kind of Death a few years back, but that turned out to have been Baxter’s 1995 restart to the series, A Queer Kind of Love. Got all that?
Baxter, I think, was able to get away with an out detective in 1966 mainly because the original trilogy is so lurid and tongue-in-cheek (though with odd flashes of genuine emotion). An amoral gay black hipster NYPD detective doesn’t seem that outré when the rest of the cast includes kooky/homicidal 1930s starlets, mischievous twin true-crime writers, international men of mystery, cheery Japanese-American thuggettes, bottomless waiters and seductresses named after the heroines of Little Women. The narratives are weird too, for the mystery genre. Though Pharoah is identified as the detective character, he usually lurks in the background until the finale, when he steps forward to solve the case – or screw it up further (like I said, he’s amoral). In the last novel, he’s mysteriously missing until the last couple of chapters, turning up just in time to get killed (this is not as big a spoiler as it sounds). I’ve only read one of the 1990s books, so I don’t know how Baxter contrived to fish the character out of the Reichenbach. 1990s Pharoah is a much more conventional detective – he’s picked up a conscience somewhere, and solves cases that, while still colourful, aren’t anywhere as weird as the originals. On the plus side, he stops referring to himself in the third person and addressing everybody as “cat.” That was really annoying.
Curiously, neither Baxter nor his character have Wikipedia entries.
