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DRAG QUEEN IN THE COURT OF DEATH
by Caro Soles
Harrington Park Press, January 2007
191 pages
$16.95
ISBN: 1560236302


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Five years have elapsed since the author’s powerful debut mystery, THE TANGLED BOY, appeared. Her considerable talents have expanded and found new directions in this second excursion into the genre. It belongs in some real measure to the territory that fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood and temporary resident Joyce Carol Oates have so powerfully cultivated.

We are in Toronto, 1990. AIDS is still devastating gays across North America. The will of the recently deceased Ronnie Lipinsky appoints Michael Dunn-Barton, his former lover (and the novel’s narrator), to be his executor. Back in 1965 Michael, then a 22-year-old high school history teacher, threw over his marriage, lost his job, and almost got arrested as a result of his falling in love with the 17-year-old Ronnie, who had fled the specter of the American draft.

Their affair was all too brief. Ronnie soon dismissed him and gave himself to successful dual careers as an accountant and a local drag performer. Their friendship had resumed, however, just the year before, when Michael returned to Toronto to take a post at the university and discovered Ronnie was suffering from the retrovirus. Still, he had no inkling that he would be asked to settle Ronnie’s estate or that he would end up making a grisly discovery.

While sorting through Ronnie’s elaborate costumes, he and two other performers in a new drag show open a sealed trunk. To their shock they find inside, sewn up in a leather casing, a mummified body with a bullet hole in its skull. In an instant Michael faces the overwhelming truth that he never really knew his former lover. Nonetheless, he remains unshaken in his belief that Ronnie could not have killed anyone.

If not Ronnie, then who was the killer? And who was his victim? How was he killed? Why did Ronnie keep the body hidden inside his house, like some bad, leftover scene from the play/movie Rope? And did the murder play any part in Ronnie’s leaving him? Obsessed with answering these questions, Michael finds each new revelation generates yet other mysteries. He also discovers the dangers of using Julie, his journalist tenant, as an ally. As Michael says: "We’ve opened Pandora’s bloody box."

His quest for answers takes him to London, Ontario, to check out a joint acquaintance from 1965, to an unnamed New York town to find Ronnie’s unknown family, and to New York City itself to seek what happened to Ronnie during his brief (and previously unknown) sojourn there. In each place some new part of the puzzle slides into place.

The mystery, however, does not occupy all Michael’s attention. He is working as a rehearsal pianist for the revue. He befriends several of the artists, including Jaym, a young stock market trader who likes to tap dance. He visits a friend in the hospital who was a burn victim. He has an off and on again affair with Ryan, a young man whom he casually meets in a bar and hires as his gardener. He supports a charity benefit. He sees his wife, to whom he is still legally married. He continues a long-simmering quarrel with his sister.

But gradually the reader becomes aware that the narrator himself has mummified. He has encased himself inside his starched look, wounded in his heart to such an extent that he has cut out all emotion, becoming a "picture of the conservative middle-aged man in the navy blazer with requisite brass buttons." As he muses, "How could I explain almost half a century of control . . . . I had let go once, twenty-five years ago. I was still paying."

In his search to solve the mystery of the corpse, however, his life begins subtly, unconsciously, to change direction. He begins to solve some of the puzzle that is himself and decides: "Just let things take their course, for once." His uncharacteristic fling with the gardener begins the process. There is hope the trader will further the process.

By the end, the killer has been identified. Past history has been sorted out as much as it ever can. The narrator’s farewell line acknowledges: "No one knows the whole truth about anything." But the reader is probably leaving the novel more intrigued by Michael’s potential future than by the solution to the crime. He has finally broken out of his navy blazer, along with the figurative straitjacket that has constrained him too long. And by so doing, he can now aver: "I’m going forward, not back." It is a most satisfying close to a rich, complex work.

Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, January 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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