Fadeout

"I can only applaud the republication of Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter books. I've increasingly come to regard the phrase 'an important writer of crime fiction' as oxymoronic, but if one's going to use the label, Hansen's not an unreasonable bearer of it."

—Lawrence Block

“Incredible books, much overlooked.”

—Jeff Abbott

"The Brandstetter books are classics of the private eye genre... It's great to see them available again."

—Peter Robinson

“First published over fifty years ago now, Hansen’s novels are not just clever and compelling stories, but to my mind they are also a feat of incredible bravery. I wish I’d discovered him sooner.”

—Russ Thomas, CrimeReads

“No one in the history of the detective novel has had the daring to do what Joseph Hansen has done: make his private eye a homosexual…who is both a first-rate investigator and one of the most interest series characters in the history of the genre.”

—David Geherin, The American Private Eye

Praise for the original publications…

“Hansen is one of the best we have… [He] knows how to tell a tough, unsentimental, fast-moving story in an exceptionally urbane literary style.”

—New York Times Book Review

“After forty years, Hammett has a worthy successor.”

—The Times (London)

“Mr. Hansen is an excellent craftsman, a compelling writer.”

—The New Yorker

“Apart from its virtues as fiction, Hansen’s Early Graves is a field correspondent’s breathtaking dispatch from a community in the midst of disaster.”

—Time

“Read in the order written, [the Brandstetter mysteries] are remarkably linked through symbol, incident, and character, to the point that one sees them as a single, multi-volume novel, by which one may learn a great deal about what it means to be homosexual and male in modern America.”

—The New Republic

“Hansen is quite simply the most exciting and effective writer of the classic California private-eye novel working today.”

—Los Angeles Times