Rec: Boystown 3

Boystown 3: Two Nick Nowak Novellas by Marshall Thornton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't tell exactly what gets me so addicted to Marshall Thornton's Boystown stories. It started innocently enough with the three short stories of the first book. I enjoyed them, so I hopped to the next book, and the next. Now I find myself pulled in, and it's darker and deeper then it was when I started, but I can't stop.



Boystown is an odd duck in the m/m pond. It's not really romance, although there is a deep emotional undercurrent (or undertow) present since the first story. Nick used to be a cop, and in the closet. An act of hate forced him out, ended his career, and his relationship. At the beginning it's a simple background detail, but it slowly and steadily pushes to the foreground as Nick's ex re-enters Nick's life. There's guilt, sorrow, and longing, and complications, since Nick's is by then involved with somebody else - with a closeted gay cop.



Boystown is not much of an erotica either, despite numerous sex scenes. The m/m genre gives sex a heightened importance, it's nearly always a sublimation of something else, a peak experience. In Boystown sex is sex; it may be quick, dirty, casual, even perfunctory. Like it is in real life.



Boystown is more crime story than anything else - in the classic, hard boiled style. Marshall Thornton might not have the rough, grimy poetry of Raymond Chandler, but has the same straightforward, starkly candid prose. Nick Nowak, private eye is the classic hard boiled detective: he's a man making his way in a corrupt world eyes wide open, yet he's guided by an unerring moral compass. Not that he's an idealist or a knight in shining armor. He's a practical man who doesn't always do things by the book. Nick is a hard, unsentimental man, yet the ugliness of the world around him keep piercing through his armor time and again.



Boystown is also a period piece - if the seventies and eighties can be called a period. And why not? It is certainly an significant period of gay rights, but also the whole country. It's also the moment before the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. The only hint to it at the first Boystown book is the time of the story itself, and the notable absence of the now ubiquitous condoms. As the stories progress, the still faceless threat pushes to the fore front. It's like watching a horror movie - you know what's going to happen, yet you still want to scream at the screen: "No, don't open that door! The monster is on the other side!"



I love Boystown not as m/m, but as good story telling.



View all my reviews