A lovely, memorable novel about listening to the whispers of a wayward heart and claiming a place in the world.” While Last Night at the Telegraph Club may not strictly be a crime novel, its explorations of forbidden love and Red Scare America give the book the feel of a spy novel, and the ever-present neon dovetails right into classic noir.

Sarah Waters says about this novel that “Lo’s writing, restrained yet luscious, shimmers with the thrills of youthful desire. Malindo Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club And she’s about to do something very, very bad to these bank robbers. She couldn’t be more annoyed when her ex-boyfriend walks in on her with her new girlfriend-except, perhaps, for the next day, when the three of them get trapped at a bank during a heist. In Tess Sharpe’s new YA novel, Nora O’Malley is confident in her abilities to deceive-she is the daughter of a con artist, after all.

You’ll find all these narratives and more in the books listed below. Then there are those who have turned the classic queer villain in an anti-hero to celebrate, ready to fleece the intolerant and embrace the iconoclasts surrounding. And of course, those concerned with the bleak facts of hateful violence can find crime fiction a cathartic space to confront the world in all its brutal realism. We’ve also seen an enormous flourishing of queer narratives in young adult fiction, paralleling the younger generation’s self-confident acceptance of their own and others’ identities. Starting in the 1970s, however, queer crime writers and the small presses willing to publish them began to carve out their own space in genre fiction, and to reclaim the right to tell their own narratives.įast forward through several decades of marginalizing gay voices or treating gay romance as erotica, and these days, we’ve finally got mainstream publishers waking up to the fact that queer stories have a vast and growing audience, although we continue to be indebted to the outsized contributions of small presses such as Bywater Books.

There isn’t enough space in this article (or, indeed, a rather long history book) to explore the long and shameful literary history of framing gay characters as either victims or villains.

She's Too Pretty to Burn by Wendy Heard