Murder At The Ballet

Dead On Your Feet by Grant Michaels (St. Martin's Press, 256 pp.)

Who knifed Max Harkey, the director of the Boston City Ballet? That's the question hairstylist/amateur sleuth Stan Kraychik must answer in Grant Michaels's mystery, Dead On Your Feet. And the killer could be one of six suspects, including his lover, Rafik, the company's choreographer. Each has a motive, and an alibi. (Of the six, five "at some point had been a contender for Max Harkey's love.")

For Stan, finding the killer is as difficult as getting Rafik to let him see a rehearsal of the new ballet. Stan's primary goal is to clear Rafik's name from the list of suspects. Each attempt draws Stan deeper into the morass. And face to face with an old assortment of characters who include Marshall Zander, the foul-smelling benefactor with the hots for Stan and Sharleen McChannel, a psychic, who, while having her tresses blow dried, brings the salon to a standstill when she receives a revelation about Stan--"Very soon you will take a long trip."

The prediction comes true. Stan's investigation takes him all over Boston--and London, in search of Max's missing diary, which may help Stan identify the murderer.

Throughout his investigation, professional as well as romantic jealousies among the suspects come to the surface. Stan discovers that Max Harkey was not above manipulating the rivals for his heart. Also,Stan believes Rafik is having a fling with co-suspect, Toni di Natale, the female musical conductor. Both deny there is anything going on between them.

I found Dead On Your Feet not a very engrossing read. Michaels is clearly no John Grisham. The book is strictly for laughs, at the expense of giving the reader a real page-turning mystery. Even the chapter titles tip you off that Dead On Your Feet is not to be taken seriously("Singing in the Rain," "She Could Have Danced All Night," "Change Partners and Dance"). When the killer's identity is revealed, it doesn't really matter, even when the killer is pursuing Stan several stories above Boston clutching a stiletto. The killer is presented as a buffoon "with the same demented grin that King Kong used on Fay Wray."

 I much prefer the more masculine demeanor of Joseph Hansen's gay insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter or Robert B.Parker's Boston sleuth Spenser. Stan Kraychik is too campy, too swishy, and too whiny to be an authentic detective hero, who can pry loose information from even the most recalcitrant suspect. When one of the suspects says to Stan, "I don't know why I'm telling you this," my response was: "Me neither."

Ballet lovers may get some pleasure from Dead On Your Feet because it offers a behind-the-scenes look at the ballet world, but I doubt many hardcore mystery fans will.

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (November/December 1993). It was reprinted in Savage Male magazine (San Francisco) in February 1994.

A Cult's Deadly Deeds

 Tribe
by R.D. Zimmerman
Dell Books, 277 pp. 

Homophobia (internalized and societal), religious zealotry, sexual identity, and parental love are the themes dealt with in Tribe, R.D. Zimmerman's latest mystery novel.

Set mostly in Minneapolis during a blizzard, Tribe has two storylines: a mysterious death on a university campus and a cross-statelines hunt. Both involve in one way or another the novel's central character, Todd Mills, an award-winning TV reporter whop hasn't "worked a day since his lover Michael had been murdered and the scandal of their relationship broadcast on all the media."

Tribe opens with a prologue that is a flashback of Mills's undergraduate days at Northwestern University, near Chicago, where he witnesses the falling death of Greg, a fraternity brother. Shortly before the fall, Greg, "the guy from the room next door had been spying on Todd and his friend Pat from outside the dorm room window. Catching them in a moment of intimacy, Greg shouts, "Homo alert!" Mills in a panic flees the room leaving Pat to face to face the consequences. The question  that has haunted Mills into middle age is: Was Greg's death an accident or murder? If it was murder, who was the culprit--Pat or someone else?

The prologue segues into Chapter One which brings the reader to the present day. Janice Grey, an attorney and Todd Mills's college friend, sits in her car parked in a "snow-whitened parking lot," waiting to meet Zebulon, the son she gave up for adoption. He and his infant daughter, Ribka, are on the lam from a fanatical Colorado religious cult called The Congregation. They believe "someday the government's going to come after us" and "lay siege upon us" because "God's true church was prophesized to be tortured."

Rejecting the cult's belief in faith healing, Zeb comes to Minneapolis to leave the ailing Ribka in the care of Janice, an avowed lesbian. Although happy to be reunited with her son, Janice worries that Zeb might not be able to "handle the fact that she's a dyke."

Meanwhile, two Congregation members leave a trail of bruised and battered bodies in a frantic mission to return Zeb and Ribka to "our tribe." Equally determined are Todd and his new lover Steve Rawlins, a Minneapolis police detective, to keep Zeb, Ribka, and Janice out of harm's way.

Heightening the tension is the blizzard which both helps and hinders the good guys and the bad guys alike.

Zimmerman, the author of nine other mystery novels (including Closet), an Edgar Award nominee, outGrishams John Grisham when it comes to non-stop suspense. Plus the twists and turns of the story for the most part are believable and unpredictable. Moreover, Tribe bears out the statement by literature professor Ted-Larry Pebworth in the anthology The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, that "...[T]he main impetus of post-Stonewall gay mystery novels has been the normalization of gay life. In these works, gay individuals and gay subculture tend to be demystified and robbed of their sensationalism." Here is a domestic scene from Tribe that is a good example of the normalization Pebworth speaks of: "He [Todd Mills] took another sip of coffee, then reached for the shoe box full of photographs that sat on the coffee table. Among the many things he wanted to accomplish in this, his first pause in his professional life--he'd taken his first job at a public television station just a week after graduating from Northwestern twenty years ago and had worked constantly since--was to sort through all these pictures and get them into some albums. He also wanted to paint the second bedroom that he used as his office. Get some new skates. And do some writing about what it was like to be closeted for so long in the television industry."

However, there are some flaws: Jeff, the drag queen who babysits Ribka, is stereotypically campy and over-the-top ("Batting his eyes and queening it up, Jeff said, 'Oh, I just love a man in uniform, don't you?'), the uncharacteristic use of profanity by the cult members, the frequent use of long flashbacks, and the ambiguous ending.

Otherwise, Tribe is a thoroughly engrossing mystery. That makes it a perfect book to add to one's summer reading list.

This review was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (August 1996).