Boystown 4: A Time For Secrets (Boystown Mysteries)

Marshall Thornton's "Boystown" series presents mystery cases set in Chicago in the early 1980's, as the AIDS pandemic emerges.Protagonist Nick Nowak started out in his Polish-American south-side family tradition as a Chicago police officer. An off-duty gay-bashing incident estranges him from his family and costs him his job and boyfriend. Making do, he set up shop in the downtown Loop as a bottom-end private investigator, depending on employee vetting and spousal-intelligence jobs for his income. Living in a dumpy basement apartment near Boystown and driving a dumpy car, he has to moonlight as a doorman at a gay nightclub, for the extra money. He has no business partner, no boyfriend, and no clear idea of his future or of his feelings. Nick is hunky, in his early thirties, and a forceful, exclusive, top. When a big case arrives, Nick jumps at the chance to investigate, using research, force, persuasion, and persistence to get the information he needs.Over the course of the stories, he meets new people in all walks of life, from high society to organized crime, and makes useful connections, many with a sexual aside. Characters met in one story make themselves useful in other stories. Two characters have extra importance. Bert Harker is a Chicago detective ex-colleague who gradually wins Nick's compassion and love as AIDS appears, and Daniel Laverty is a former boyfriend with an ongoing interest in Nick. The developing relationships of these characters and their interaction with Chicago's gay history drive the series forward.Nick Nowak is observant in the Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe mode and could readily be put into a film noir."Boystown 4: A Time for Secrets" takes a look at how participants in the difficult-for-gays pre-Stonewall era might have skeletons that don't play well in the early 1980's. A senior citizen hires Nick to look for a former boyfriend. Nick's investigation locates a group of people who knew each other in 1959's Chicago. In that era, raids on gay bars were common, ruining many lives and careers. Was there also a murder involved? Might there be policemen or politicians who would not want the public taking another look? What happens when people start dying now? Nick has to deal with the violent deaths of some client-related characters and with the slow AIDS-related decline of some of his acquaintences.The "Boystown" series shows the gradual emotional coming-out of a hard-boiled gay P.I. and the growing self-awareness of the gay community itself. Thornton's descriptions of the Chicago citiscape are evocative. It's a very good series.

"A Time for Secrets" is the fourth in the excellent series of Boystown books, and to my mind the best and strongest of the four. Set in Chicago in 1982, the parallel stories that intertwine in Thornton's latest are three mysterious murders and the emergence of AIDS in the American consciousness.Thornton's writing makes all of the characters vivid and quirky. His central character is Nick Nowak, a Polish-American ex-cop who lives in a sort of contented exile on the fringe of Chicago's corrupt machinery of policemen and politicians. Nowak has always been a hard-boiled character, but with each of the Boystown series he has become more familiar and more sympathetic. Nowak's story, beyond his history as a detective, is the story of gay pride emerging from gay oppression. It also tells of the birth of a community of gay people that transcends the notion of embattled misfits keeping their collective secret away from prying eyes.For me, a man who could have been Nowak's little brother in 1982, the book has a deeply powerful and upsetting secondary narrative: Nowak's realization that his partner, an older gay cop, has the disease that will come to be known as AIDS; and that this is just the beginning of the nightmare all of us lived through in the 1980s and 90s. The fact that Nick continues to have casual, unprotected sex, even as he frets about his lover's declining health, can only be accepted by understanding the ignorance under which we all lived then. Even as this disease was identified as a "gay disease" and began to kill our friends and colleagues, we had no idea how anyone got it. For all its darkness, Thornton handles this difficult history deftly and with touchig compassion. The last page of the book had me choking back tears on the train. It foreshadows the simple heroism and courage that gay folk would demonstrate to the world in the plague-ridden years that would follow.The murder story, I hasten to say, is riveting and carefully crafted. It tells its own story of gay oppression and powerlessness, without once losing the interest of the reader or sacrificing our keen anticipation as Nowak works his way toward some kind of resolution to the crimes. It is not a simple story, mind you; when one deals with corrupt cops and even more corrupt politicians, the realization that we are in a heterosexual world of complete moral bankruptcy leaves us adrift and disoriented. Marshall Thornton is really good. This book stands alone, but you should read all of them. In its own way, it is a small-scale American saga of surprising importance.

I love this series. Period. I wrote enough in my previous reviews to the series. It is the 4th book.Just a little comment:The real treasures don't lie on the surface.You have to dig deeper to find them.Have patience and you'll be rewarded.Amen.