Fault Line (A Bob and Marcus Mystery, 2), by H.N. Hirsch

[Ulysses]

Fault Line (Bob and Marcus Mysteries 2)
By H.N. Hirsch
Pisgah Press, 2023
Five stars

H.N. Hirsch has created a series of murder mysteries set in the historical past—but a past which is part of my lived experience as a gay man in the first post-Stonewall generation. So it’s an odd feeling, looking backwards in time, but also feeling the immediacy of my own life resonating in his narrative.

Bob Abramson and Marcus Rivers are a young gay couple, four years into their relationship, which began in Maine in the wake of a shocking murder five years earlier. In the first book, Marcus was the accidental detective, an underpaid adjunct professor at Harvard. Bob was the victim’s roommate, ten years Marcus’s junior, and about to start Harvard Law School.

Five years down the line, we find Bob and Marcus just moving in to their new—first—house together in San Diego’s Normal Heights. They’ve just experienced their first earthquake, and the headline in their morning newspaper is about another shocking murder. This time, however, it is Bob, in his role as a brand-new Assistant District Attorney, who becomes a detective. Marcus is a newly-minted professor at UC San Diego, and still wondering at his happy relationship and the strangeness of living in California.

From my calculations, I am two years younger than Marcus, and I vividly remember the second half of the 1980s, when both of these books take place. Clearly Hirsch has firsthand experience in this period as well, because he gets it all right in terms of what it was to be an out gay couple trying to build a life—professional and personal—in Ronald Reagan’s America.

What Hirsch also gets right is a bird’s-eye view of gay life in the late 1980s, ranging from closeted executives to gay sex-workers. It’s a world still feeling the impact of Dan White’s murder of Harvey Milk in San Francisco in 1978, but drastically shaken by the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan administration’s callous treatment of the nation’s lesbian and gay citizens (there was no real concept of LGTBQ+ in 1989).

The murder is confusing and complicated, as every good murder should be. Politics and corporate ambition swirl in the background, as Bob learns what it is to work in a big urban district attorney’s office. With Bob at center stage, Marcus becomes his one-person Greek chorus, and the author gives us a clear study of a developing relationship built on notions of equality and partnership. Although I felt that Bob was a little priggish in his view of the gay world—I also saw rather a lot of myself in that perspective. Even though they are still in Connecticut, Bob’s family is present in this story, and I loved them, because they represent a precious reality of the time: a prosperous family who actively supported their gay son and his partner.

“Fault Line” is an engaging and interesting book. It’s a fun read, but for me it was also an example of the kind of historical fiction that serves as a vivid reminder of what life was like back in the last century. As 2025 and a new regime in America begins to unfold, I felt a rather strong wave of nostalgia as I read Hirsch’s narrative.