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Declan Colette #1
Cheap as Beasts
Like most soldiers, Declan Colette lost his fair share in the war—in his case a sailor, drowned off Iwo Jima. Since then he’s been scratching out a living as a cut-rate PI, drinking too much, and flirting with danger. Then a girl arranges to consult him, only to be murdered en route, and the cops tag Colette as their prime suspect. To save his neck he’ll need to find the real killer, a quest that pits him against a rival detective firm, a dangerously rich family, and a desperate foe whose murdering ways started back during the war.
Could this be the case he’s been waiting for? Catching the killer could make his reputation. Failing, could cost him his life.
Either way: win-win.
[Cheap as Beasts was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Best Gay Mystery 2015.]
Could this be the case he’s been waiting for? Catching the killer could make his reputation. Failing, could cost him his life.
Either way: win-win.
[Cheap as Beasts was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Best Gay Mystery 2015.]
264 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 2015
1 person is currently reading
131 people want to read
About the author
Jon Wilson
13 books29 followersGrowing up, Jon Wilson wanted to be a stunt man, a professional wrestler or a rodeo clown. After breaking his neck in 2001, he decided writing might be safer.
He was wrong.
Currently living in California, he is occasionally hard at work on his next novel. The first of his Declan Colette Mysteries, Cheap as Beasts, was short-listed for Lambda Literary's Best Gay Mystery.
Learn more at: http://jonwilsonauthor.blogspot.com/
He was wrong.
Currently living in California, he is occasionally hard at work on his next novel. The first of his Declan Colette Mysteries, Cheap as Beasts, was short-listed for Lambda Literary's Best Gay Mystery.
Learn more at: http://jonwilsonauthor.blogspot.com/
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 14, 2015
Declan Colette is a private investigator in 1950s LA. When a young woman is killed on her way to an appointment with him, he comes under suspicion. To extricate himself, he must solve the mystery of her death, while entangling himself with a powerful family, obstructive police, resentful rivals and local gangsters. And a redhead. But the redhead is male.
This is the setup for Cheap as Beasts. It’s classic noir in the Chandler vein and yet it isn’t. It faces the eternal challenge for the genre novel – give us what we know, what we want, but give us something surprising, moving, new. And for me this book really does.
Everything about it is subtle. The prose is clever and laconic. The characters are all fluent in subtext. Colette has the obligatory world-weary take on the world. People may think they can take him in, but he’ll work out what’s going on. When he quotes Shakespeare he doesn’t stop to explain it. You’ll get it. Or you can look it up. (I had to look it up.)
It’s clear that, whatever Colette is telling you, there’s a lot more he’s keeping back. Colette’s ironic detachment comes, you sense, from a feeling that he’s living in a world he no longer believes in.
The book takes on themes that are controversial or ambiguous or sublimated in Chandler. When Colette sees a black lawn jockey, an image taken from Chandler’s The High Window (okay, I had to look that up too), he thinks of the humiliation of the black servant who has to polish it. It’s the same world, but from a different perspective.
Ideas of masculinity are questioned. Men judge each other, not only on their words or their strength, but on their war record. Colette’s sexuality is acknowledged, with varying degrees of acceptance – as long as he can pass those other tests.
World War Two and its aftermath are at the heart of this story. The man Colette loved was killed in the war. Clubs and bars are renamed to conceal their Japanese ownership. The case Colette is investigating turns in on itself, testing family alliances against wartime bonds. War and loss subtly suffuse everything.
Chandler himself wrote about how he struggled against the constraints of genre. This book, in turn, takes on Chandler and creates something new.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.
This review first appeared on The Next Best Book Blog
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
This is the setup for Cheap as Beasts. It’s classic noir in the Chandler vein and yet it isn’t. It faces the eternal challenge for the genre novel – give us what we know, what we want, but give us something surprising, moving, new. And for me this book really does.
Everything about it is subtle. The prose is clever and laconic. The characters are all fluent in subtext. Colette has the obligatory world-weary take on the world. People may think they can take him in, but he’ll work out what’s going on. When he quotes Shakespeare he doesn’t stop to explain it. You’ll get it. Or you can look it up. (I had to look it up.)
It’s clear that, whatever Colette is telling you, there’s a lot more he’s keeping back. Colette’s ironic detachment comes, you sense, from a feeling that he’s living in a world he no longer believes in.
The book takes on themes that are controversial or ambiguous or sublimated in Chandler. When Colette sees a black lawn jockey, an image taken from Chandler’s The High Window (okay, I had to look that up too), he thinks of the humiliation of the black servant who has to polish it. It’s the same world, but from a different perspective.
Ideas of masculinity are questioned. Men judge each other, not only on their words or their strength, but on their war record. Colette’s sexuality is acknowledged, with varying degrees of acceptance – as long as he can pass those other tests.
World War Two and its aftermath are at the heart of this story. The man Colette loved was killed in the war. Clubs and bars are renamed to conceal their Japanese ownership. The case Colette is investigating turns in on itself, testing family alliances against wartime bonds. War and loss subtly suffuse everything.
Chandler himself wrote about how he struggled against the constraints of genre. This book, in turn, takes on Chandler and creates something new.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.
This review first appeared on The Next Best Book Blog
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
January 22, 2016
Well written but didn’t flow as smoothly as his westerns (which I loved) and no romance (which I really missed). There was almost too much detail about floor plans, the placement of people in a scene, routes between places, etc. And I found the mystery somewhat confusing. I often get annoyed at all the constant recapping done by the P.I. or amateur sleuth as they try to figure out whodunnit, but I could’ve used some of that here. Declan didn’t share anything with us readers. It seemed like he started to figure some things out fairly early on, but we never knew what he was thinking until the very end. And I’m still not clear on everything.
February 4, 2020
Good procedural with perhaps a little too many suspects. The MC's voice is distinct and I grew to like his 'story' and intrigued regarding his 'back story' (read emotional hang-ups).
August 24, 2017
A good historical mystery, Wilson's Cheap as Beasts does a great job of bringing post WWII San Francisco to life. The descriptions are illuminating and the language his PI uses helps to flesh out his character and give him a salty edge. While I eagerly read through it, the actual mystery itself felt a little distant from the action of gathering clues and dealing with unruly family members, aggressive cops, and a slimy PI hired by someone else. The character of Declan Colette helps to overcome it, but I'm hoping that the second book in this series pays as much attention to the skeleton of a mystery as it does the skin and features that make it great.
March 24, 2015
Available now! Find it at Amazon or direct from the publisher, Bold Strokes Books, which is becoming one of my favorite GLBT publishers.
I'm also editing my rating to a full 4 stars, because over the past few weeks I keep bringing it up to customers and friends.
4 Stars
Declan Colette is not quite your average gumshoe. For one thing, this book is set in the late 40's or early 50's and he's a veteran of WWII.
Second, he's not renowned for his skills. Actually, he turned down a full-time gig with an agency in favor of starting his own private detective business. That might have been a mistake, since he isn't exactly swimming in clients.
Third, although he was raised by his black grandmother and readily stands up for the black community around him, he admits to being racist against the Japanese. He hates them even more than he hates the Germans, and like many people in that generation he struggles to make the distinction between the foreign soldiers he had fought against and the fellow American citizens around him in the city.
And lastly, he's gay. This being the 40's or 50's, well, he's not exactly 'out'. Not even in the narrative exactly; he dances around the subject here and there, only obliquely referencing his attractions.
Now as far as the mystery involved, I don't feel that what we learn adds up to the conclusion. I never felt like Declan understood why the girl had been murdered. It's all a vague muddle until the very end when the author lays out things that should have been laid out in the actual investigation. And even then...there are no real clues for the reader to follow.
Or maybe I'm just not a mystery reader and the plot was over my head, but I think I'm going to stick with "the plot made very little sense".
But the plot was not really the driving force behind this book, Declan was. so I would recommend it just so more people can get to know him, bitter asshole that he is. You don't have to like him, but it's hard to look away from him all the same. And I'm rating it 3.5 stars because it's so rare to find a modern author who can make a novel feel like it fits into an earlier time period.
I'm also editing my rating to a full 4 stars, because over the past few weeks I keep bringing it up to customers and friends.
4 Stars
Declan Colette is not quite your average gumshoe. For one thing, this book is set in the late 40's or early 50's and he's a veteran of WWII.
Second, he's not renowned for his skills. Actually, he turned down a full-time gig with an agency in favor of starting his own private detective business. That might have been a mistake, since he isn't exactly swimming in clients.
Third, although he was raised by his black grandmother and readily stands up for the black community around him, he admits to being racist against the Japanese. He hates them even more than he hates the Germans, and like many people in that generation he struggles to make the distinction between the foreign soldiers he had fought against and the fellow American citizens around him in the city.
And lastly, he's gay. This being the 40's or 50's, well, he's not exactly 'out'. Not even in the narrative exactly; he dances around the subject here and there, only obliquely referencing his attractions.
Now as far as the mystery involved, I don't feel that what we learn adds up to the conclusion. I never felt like Declan understood why the girl had been murdered. It's all a vague muddle until the very end when the author lays out things that should have been laid out in the actual investigation. And even then...there are no real clues for the reader to follow.
Or maybe I'm just not a mystery reader and the plot was over my head, but I think I'm going to stick with "the plot made very little sense".
But the plot was not really the driving force behind this book, Declan was. so I would recommend it just so more people can get to know him, bitter asshole that he is. You don't have to like him, but it's hard to look away from him all the same. And I'm rating it 3.5 stars because it's so rare to find a modern author who can make a novel feel like it fits into an earlier time period.
November 24, 2016
This was a much more interesting book than I expected it to be. Given that the last few published LGBT+ books that I've read have been a bit disappointing, I didn't know how I was going to like this one, but decided to still give it a chance anyways.
I enjoyed this book on the basis that it was a genre fiction with a gay protagonist, rather an LGBT centered book. While those are important too, I also think there should be more books like this, that allow queer characters to have stories and adventures outside of their sexuality. As a genre book, though, I was less than impressed. I found the story, while beautifully written in 1950s noir prose, was much too convoluted for my liking. Too many characters, too many plot lines trying to converge at once. I'll be honest, I'm not even entirely sure of the end as well, and what it was supposed to mean. It was an unsatisfactory end for me, as I had been hoping for a concrete explanation of the whole affair. Especially considering how, at the end, there had been many pages of Collette hemming and hawwing about how he had figured it all out, which ended up becoming more annoying than interesting.
There are also periods of "period appropriate" racism, if you will, of the way that Declan Collette refers to African-Americans and Japanese-Americans, but I still found them distasteful, and at least one of the scenes (Collette at the Oriental House) I felt did not serve the plot at all. So even though I do understand why these racist views were included, at the same time I felt in some parts they merely detracted from the story line.
However, despite its imperfections, overall I still rather enjoyed the novel.
I enjoyed this book on the basis that it was a genre fiction with a gay protagonist, rather an LGBT centered book. While those are important too, I also think there should be more books like this, that allow queer characters to have stories and adventures outside of their sexuality. As a genre book, though, I was less than impressed. I found the story, while beautifully written in 1950s noir prose, was much too convoluted for my liking. Too many characters, too many plot lines trying to converge at once. I'll be honest, I'm not even entirely sure of the end as well, and what it was supposed to mean. It was an unsatisfactory end for me, as I had been hoping for a concrete explanation of the whole affair. Especially considering how, at the end, there had been many pages of Collette hemming and hawwing about how he had figured it all out, which ended up becoming more annoying than interesting.
There are also periods of "period appropriate" racism, if you will, of the way that Declan Collette refers to African-Americans and Japanese-Americans, but I still found them distasteful, and at least one of the scenes (Collette at the Oriental House) I felt did not serve the plot at all. So even though I do understand why these racist views were included, at the same time I felt in some parts they merely detracted from the story line.
However, despite its imperfections, overall I still rather enjoyed the novel.
January 29, 2015
Cheap as Beasts by Jon Wilson is a noir, murder mystery book that is a quick, complex and entertaining read!
The novels' protag is a man named Declan Colette, who is almost hired by a rich brother and sister to prove that their step-mother killed their father...but before anything can come of that, another person in their family is murdered & Colette is hired by the brother, a man named Morgan.
The mystery of the novel is almost like a game of whodunit, which introduces the reader to a series of very interesting and sometimes, slightly suspicious characters. Even characters who are only around for a few pages make an impact and add layers to other characters and the novel's main mystery.
What I liked most about the novel was Colette himself, because the man is damaged and it is obvious in is demeanor, but its not cliche or overbearing - he isn't whinny or melodramatic, but he is believably dark, brooding and often, sharply sarcastic.
Colette is gay, but the romantic aspect of the novel is not front and center and though I would have loved more of a romance edge to the story, the fact that there isn't one, at least not exactly, is extremely powerful and dark and lends itself for their being a continuation to the story...Which I really hope there will be!
Def check it out!
The novels' protag is a man named Declan Colette, who is almost hired by a rich brother and sister to prove that their step-mother killed their father...but before anything can come of that, another person in their family is murdered & Colette is hired by the brother, a man named Morgan.
The mystery of the novel is almost like a game of whodunit, which introduces the reader to a series of very interesting and sometimes, slightly suspicious characters. Even characters who are only around for a few pages make an impact and add layers to other characters and the novel's main mystery.
What I liked most about the novel was Colette himself, because the man is damaged and it is obvious in is demeanor, but its not cliche or overbearing - he isn't whinny or melodramatic, but he is believably dark, brooding and often, sharply sarcastic.
Colette is gay, but the romantic aspect of the novel is not front and center and though I would have loved more of a romance edge to the story, the fact that there isn't one, at least not exactly, is extremely powerful and dark and lends itself for their being a continuation to the story...Which I really hope there will be!
Def check it out!
June 14, 2016
Stylish Noir Mystery
Jon Wilson, writer of wickedly funny Westerns, has now quite successfully managed to tackle another genre – that of the gumshoe potboiler. He has a special skill of weaving gentle humor with serious drama. This noir mystery features a hard-drinking, down-on-his-luck private investigator, Declan Colette, who is the homosexual version of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Declan’s rapid-fire dialog would fit most comfortably on the lips of say… Humphrey Bogart. The mystery unravels quite skillfully, though by the conclusion the complexities of who did what and who knew what may take a bit of muddling to get it all straightened out in your head. Wilson knows the genre and succeeds in recreating the black and white 1940s world we know so well.
Jon Wilson, writer of wickedly funny Westerns, has now quite successfully managed to tackle another genre – that of the gumshoe potboiler. He has a special skill of weaving gentle humor with serious drama. This noir mystery features a hard-drinking, down-on-his-luck private investigator, Declan Colette, who is the homosexual version of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Declan’s rapid-fire dialog would fit most comfortably on the lips of say… Humphrey Bogart. The mystery unravels quite skillfully, though by the conclusion the complexities of who did what and who knew what may take a bit of muddling to get it all straightened out in your head. Wilson knows the genre and succeeds in recreating the black and white 1940s world we know so well.
February 24, 2015
Once again, I really enjoyed Jon Wilson’s story telling.
The denouement was confusing. I’m not sure just who did what, and why, so I’ll have to read the last couple of chapters again. I gave it 4.5 stars, which seems generous, but the story had me thinking all the way through, and it was hard to put down.
The denouement was confusing. I’m not sure just who did what, and why, so I’ll have to read the last couple of chapters again. I gave it 4.5 stars, which seems generous, but the story had me thinking all the way through, and it was hard to put down.
never-finished
May 24, 2015I'm having a hard time getting through this, this book is just not for me
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews