I can’t remember when I read the first of his books. It could have been in college, but mostly likely it was when I was in grad school, and I discovered that the local public library had a dozen or so gay mystery novels. I’d have never guessed that a public library in Mississippi would have any gay novels, especially not mysteries. I can only assume that someone in town had bought and read them and then donated them to the library. 

It could have also been when I subscribed to the now defunct book of the month club, InsightOut Books, which introduced me to authors like Greg Herren and many other gay authors. I devoured all the gay books the library had and as many as I could afford from the book club. Contrary to present-day gay novels dominated by male/male romances and female authors, these books from the late 1990s and early 2000s, were almost always written by gay men. As a newly out man, this was a fascinating world to discover.

Like I said, I don’t know when I read the first of his books, but once I read the first in Michael Craft’s Mark Manning series, I was hooked. The series began with Flight Dreams in 1997. In the book, Mark Manning, and investigative journalist and the accidental detective in the novels, begins his gay awakening, which begins with a series of dreams after meeting and falling in love for the first time with the man of his dreams, architect Neil Waite. There was a mystery in there too, but I think the love story made these books special to me. The series continued with six more books. Eye Contact and Body Language were next, and the series concluded with Bitch Slap in 2004.

Craft was always a bit of a campy writer who injected a fair amount of humor into his books. This was typical of gay mysteries of the time with titles like Fred Hunter’s National Nancys and Capital Queers (terrible names but fun reads) and Mark Richard Zubro’s Tom and Scott series which features as main characters, a gay schoolteacher and his lover, a professional baseball player. Grad school stopped a lot of my reading for fun because I had a ton of history books to read for classes, but I usually had a stack of books to read throughout the summer months when I was not taking classes. Eventually research and writing my dissertation, my migraines, and teaching took up most of my time.

After Michael Craft concluded his Mark Manning Mysteries and his Claire Gray Mysteries (a somewhat spinoff of the Mark Manning mysteries and his first novel Rehearsing) in 2005, he seemed to have quit writing. A few months ago, I was telling Susan about these books, and she discovered he had begun publishing a new series in 2018 called the Mister Puss Mysteries which featured a talking cat. It’s the first of these, FlabberGassed, that I started reading last night. It’s different from his other mysteries, though it takes place in the fictional town of Dumont, Wisconsin, where the Mark Manning Mysteries concluded.

I wondered if I’d like the new series. In high school I’d read the The Cat Who… Series by Lillian Jackson Braun and the Mrs. Murphy Series by Rita Mae Brown, which both featured cats. (At the time, I did not realize that Rita May Brown was the iconic lesbian author who wrote Rubyfruit Jungle, which when published in 1973 was remarkable for its explicit portrayal of lesbianism). A bit of trivia, the television movie “Murder She Purred” starring the actress and talk show host Ricki Lake was based on Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy Series. Though I had read these cat-based mysteries some 30 years or so ago (and how did I not realize I was gay?), I hesitated to read Craft’s Mister Puss Series, but I gave it a try last night, and while I was not far into it when I went to bed, I was hooked. Yes, a talking cat is strange, but the level of camp is so much fun and reminiscent of the first gay mysteries that I’d read for the first time over 20 years ago. I’m looking g forward to reading more, which I’m about to do before I get ready for work this morning.

I recently finished Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. It’s a beautifully written book that follows the events of Homer’s The Iliad and the Trojan War through the eyes of Achilles’s lover Patroclus. 

A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, and a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.

Throughout history, there have been debates over the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Were they lovers? Were they the same age? All sources claim that Achilles had a great love for Patroclus; the question is: were they romantic? Plato believed they were lovers, and it appears that most ancient Greeks felt the same way.  Also, ancient sources usually agree that Patroclus was the older of the two and that the relationship was pederastic. Miller, however, writes that they are the same age. and The Song of Achilles is about the romantic relationship between the two men.

As a historian who has studied and is fascinated by Ancient Greece, I find Miller’s portrayal of the story fascinating. The Iliad is far from the only source for the mythology of Achilles, and many of those sources vary greatly from one another. Miller is able to take the various stories and show how they can all be accurate from various perspectives. For instance, in the story of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, the king sacrifices his daughter for victory in Troy. (In Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, this is one of the reasons his wife Clytemnestra murders him.) The daughter, Iphigenia, is brought to him in Aulis to be married to Achilles but secretly to be sacrificed to the goddess Artemis. Various sources say she knew she was to be sacrificed and did so willingly; others sources say she did not know. In 

The Song of Achilles, Miller weaves together the stories in a way to make both stories appear to be true. When the Greeks are horrified by the murder, Agamemnon claims Iphigenia knew her fate and sacrificed herself willingly. However, Achilles was close enough to see the shock on her face when she was killed. It really is an interesting way to write the story, and that is just one example.

Reviewing The Song of Achilles for The Guardian, Natalie Haynes commended the novel as “more poetic than almost any translation of Homer” and “a deeply affecting version of the Achilles story.” Mary Doria Russell similarly praised the novel in her review for The Washington Post, favorably citing its “prose as clean and spare as the driving poetry of Homer.” In his review for The New York Times, Daniel Mendelsohn criticized the book’s structure and, in particular, its tone. He compared the book unfavorably to young adult literature, describing The Song of Achilles as “a book that has the head of a young adult novel, the body of the Iliad, and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland.” He also compared the novel’s prose to SparkNotes and softcore pornography. I agree with Haynes and Russell’s assessments, but Mendelsohn couldn’t be further from the truth. There is nothing young adult about the book, and it is mostly certainly not softcore pornographic. In fact, the sex scenes are hardly explicit. The book is beautifully written, moving, and historically fascinating.

Miller’s book is beautifully written and is a new retelling of the famous relationship. The book was published in 2011, so it is hardly a new book, but I just got around to reading it. I you have not read it and have an interest in Ancient Greek mythology, I highly recommend it. If you have read it, what was your opinion of the book?

The Song of Achilles is available from Amazon in Kindle, audiobook, or paperback.

Early this week I finished listening to the audiobook of Rainbow History Class: Your Guide Through Queer and Trans History (Hardcover, Kindle, Audible) by Hannah McElhinney. The author began Rainbow History Class by posting one-minute videos on TikTok. Eventually, it grew into the book Rainbow History Class. The book is meant to be a crash course in LGBTQ+ history from the ancient world through to lesser-known moments in recent history. While there wasn’t much in this book that I did not know, McElhinney is Australian, so the parts about Australia’s LGBTQ+ history was definitely interesting and new information.

The book is well-written, and it is just as it is described, a crash course in LGBTQ+ history. However, at just 216 pages, it can’t come close to covering all of LGBTQ+ history (and it’s not meant to). McElhinney does a good job in delving into more detail about the vignettes in LGBTQ+ history that she chose to discuss.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.