By Michele Karlsberg–
Michele Karlsberg: June is Rainbow Book Month, a perfect time to check out H.N. Hirsch’s Fault Line, a suspenseful murder mystery set in the political world of Southern California. It is a sequel to Shade, Hirsch’s first in the series and set in the Ivy League. (The author formerly taught at Harvard and other well-known universities and colleges.)
In Fault Line, the character Bob has completed law school and landed a job as an assistant district attorney in San Diego, and Marcus has accepted a new position at UC San Diego. As they settle at their new home, they’re thrust into the investigation and its political ramifications, and they find that a gay subculture roils much of Southern California’s placidly straight surface. This series compliments Hirsch’s other literary works Office Hours: One Academic Life, The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter, and The Future of Gay Rights in America. All of his works are memorable and compelling. I recently spoke with him for the San Francisco Bay Times about his new book and what lies ahead for the series.
Michele Karlsberg: What made you decide to write mysteries after being a college professor for so long?
H.N. Hirsch: Well, I have always been a fan of mystery series, [such as those by the authors] Tony Hillerman, Stuart Woods, Dorothy Sayers, Amanda Cross. I tend to binge on authors I like.
Amanda Cross was in reality Carolyn Heilbrun, a very distinguished professor of literature at Columbia in New York. When I read her novels, which feature a detective who is also professor, I thought, “Hmm. It could be fun to write something like this, with gay characters and a professor-detective.”
And then there was the accident of timing—I retired from teaching just as COVID hit and I was on lockdown, like everyone else. So, not being able to travel at all, or do much of anything, I thought, “Well, it’s now or never.”
Michele Karlsberg: Tell us about the setting of each.
H.N. Hirsch: Shade is set at Harvard, and I make some fun at its pretentiousness. Marcus George, the amateur detective, is an assistant professor there, just as I was. The murder victim is his former student, who is murdered in a resort town in Maine. Marcus is asked by the student’s wealthy family to look into the crime. As he does that, he meets Bob, who becomes his romantic interest.
Fault Line is set in San Diego. Bob has graduated from law school and is an assistant district attorney there. He takes the lead in this murder—the murder of the mayor’s husband—along with the police. Marcus now teaches at the University of California campus there, which is where I taught after my stint at Harvard.
Michele Karlsberg: So, two very different settings.
H.N. Hirsch: Yes, extremely different. When I moved from Harvard/Boston to San Diego and the University of California in real life, it felt like moving from Earth to Mars. Shade’s setting is really academia, and the world of the Boston elite. Fault Line is set in the political world. And California really is a different country.
Michele Karlsberg: Is there another novel in the works?
H.N. Hirsch: Yes. Shade takes place in 1985, Fault Line in 1989. One of my goals in those was to document what it was like to be gay in that era—the era of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, and, of course, the AIDS crisis. The next novel, the third, is set in 1994, and it’s now the Clinton era. I’ll be having some fun with that.
Michele Karlsberg: And are Bob and Marcus still together?
H.N. Hirsch: Yes, but they’ve hit some bumps in the road, which will make it interesting.
For more information on H.N. Hirsh and his work: https://tinyurl.com/3py29djk
Michele Karlsberg Marketing and Management specializes in publicity for the LGBTQ+ community. This year, Karlsberg celebrates 34 years of successful marketing campaigns. For more information: https://www.michelekarlsberg.com
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Published on June 8, 2023
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