HAVE A GAY
FIRST NIGHT!

First Night Montpelier 2004
is proud to present performers
Janice Perry
in Hol_vShiI:' Tule.s‘_fmm Heriiwi &HcII:
Jason P. Lorber
in Hm:-—'r.1m,’ Dam, a Mrrase ma‘!
A Gay Rabbi Walk Into A Bar...;
Suzi Wizowaty
reading from her forthcoming novel. Joe/co;
The San Gordon Band:
Gabriel Q’s giant parade butterflies

58 peitormzlnces in all. Dance to Contra. l\'lezmer and
At‘n‘c:iii bands. 3 differenfftiiik bands pius Jenni
Joliiison & the iunlreteeis at our 3-hour diiiice party’.
Coiiceits in jazz. cliissical. world. roots and more.
lmzgic. storytelling. comedy. theater. chiltlreifs
W()l‘l{.\‘l2()p.'s'. SK road race. intematioiial footlcoi1i'{.
pzmicle, freworl<s. .. There’s something for everyone.
Buttons:

Bclorc Dcccnibci' 25 '7/iiidiviilisat . $L%3l.)i’grc:iiip (up to 5)

Al'icr Dec. 35: S1U/iiirliviiluril . 5;-at/gi*oiip (up to 5}

Button Locations in B£l!‘i'C. Berlin,
E. Montpelier, a\-ioiiipclicr,
Noifntield. Plztintield , Riindnlpli
Stowe. \\~'.iitstield . Waitei*hui'_v

\=‘nlinite<<i' 2 hours and get in free.
C.ill Fiitst Niglit l\'loiiipeliei' 22‘)-‘}~ll)E€

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BY E. LYNN LEMONT

ermont’s own lesbian press,
VNew Victoria, has released
three mysteries this fall — a
hit and two hmmms.
The hit is Owl of the
Desert by first-time novelist Ida
Swearingen. It’s a tautly written
suspense story following Kate
Porter as she exits prison on a trip

~ to find her father, the man who put

her there. The twist is that she and
her family are not leftist revolution-
aries or members of the Weather
Underground, but a right wing mili-
tia group called the American
Patriotic F ront._

Bud is the general of the
Texas-based militia, the father who
raised Kate and her brother Dwight
by military discipline. Dwight, crip-
pled by the premature explosion of
a homemade bomb probably intend-
ed for the Jewish editor of a news-
paper, has become a televangelist.
Kate almost escaped the militia’s
reach, getting Bud’s permission to
attend the University of Kansas in
pre-med.

A bank robbery gone
wrong, the death of a bystander, the
abandonment of the “troops” by the
general, and Kate’s improbable
escape form the backstory. After
two years underground, the memory
of the secretary dying in her arms
got to be too much, and she turned
herself ‘in to the Kansas Bureau of
Investigation Agent Ray Gruber.

_ By turning state’s evi-
dence, Kate got a 12-year sentence.
When the book opens, she’s just
out, and_ her first desire (afier beer I
and the blues) is to find‘ her father
and kill him. Of course it’s not that
simple, even with the help of
Gruber; And then there’s her broth-
er’s political backing of figurehead
candidates in a grab for power, a
drug importation ring, and her ex-
girlfriend from prison, who improb-
ably turns up in the middle of a
scam and a murder, but manages to
help.

Swearingen, who has been
a taxi driver and a beet shoveler
before working as a family thera-
pist, writes compellingly of a world

under the radar for most of us. I’d
read anything else she wrote in a
heartbeat.

One of the two hmmmms
is Dispatch to Death by Martha
Miller, the third of her books (the
first a collection of lesbian erotic
stories, the second a mystery whose
protagonist is a minor character in
Dispatch). Trudy Thomas, a lesbian
taxi driver who drives a lavender
cab for the Red, White, and Blue
Cab Company (long story) of
Springfield, Illinois, is drawn into
several drug-connected murders by
the attractive but mysterious Anita
Alvarez, who claims she is the gov-
emor’s illegitimate daughter.

What follows is a plot that
onscreen would elicit shouts of
“Don’t go there! She’s trouble!
She’s using you!” If all lesbian taxi
drivers were as naive as Trudy
Thomas, they’d be an endangered
species. "Every single contact
between Trudy'and Anita ends in _
someone being shot and/or several
someones being murdered. Let’s
just say that Trudy’s motivation for
remaining involved is not adequate-
ly explored. And, somehow, the
traumatic effects of being shot don’t
really show except for a few brief
paragraphs glossing over some
months driving for a pizza company
and being “depressed.”

If you really like myster-
ies and are willing to consume liter-
ary junk food just for its lesbian
content, then go ahead and order
this one.

The third book from New
Vic this fall, another hmmmm
(maybe it deserves a few more
mmmms), is Sudden Loss of
Serenity from first-time novelist
Jacqueline Wallen, who otherwise
teaches psychology and human
development at the University of
Maryland.

The plotline is interesting
enough: A neighbor — and best
friend - of protagonist and college
professor Claire Winston is found

‘ murdered in a cemetery, the body

blindfolded. There are connections
to a possibly shady guru teaching an
esoteric Buddhist practice called
Chod that involves facing demons
and fears and ofiering up one’s life.
And to top it off, Claire’s biracial

  hree Mysteries

daughter Serenity is discovered
missing the same day.

Serenity‘s father and
Claire’s ex—husband is a lawyer in
the state’s attorney’s office. The
investigator is a black female police
detective who can’t understand how
Claire let such a line black man slip
through her hands. The characters .
are reasonably well drawn, and the
explanation of Chod makes a kind
of paradoxical sense. The red her-
rings pointing to various suspects
are adequately distracting to create
tension. . ’

But there’s something not
quite convincing about the assem-
blage. The players are too civilized,
the resolution so accidental. If the
purpose of detective fiction is to
leave the reader with a sense of
order restored, this book fails that
purpose.

And ifl were judging a
book’s quality from the number of
typographical errors missed by the
editor, Sudden Loss of Serenity
would be a candidate for bottom of
the list. As I was reading, the num-
ber of typos began to bother me. In
a mass-market paperback from a
mainstream publisher, I might
notice two or three typos. In
Serenity there were nearly two
dozen. I decided to keep track:
Dispatch had eight; Owl had two.
By way of comparison, a mystery I
read from glbt publisher Alyson
Books had seven typos, and a les-
bian memoir from Michigan State
University Press had none.

Perhaps the smaller gay
and lesbian presses are undercapi-
talized and cannot afford to pay
someone with a fresh pair of eyes to
proofread their manuscripts.
Perhaps the assumption is that mys-
tery readers aren’t that bright or
don’t care about language.
Whatever the reason, it reflects
badly on the presses, and readers
deserve more respect. V

E. Lynne Lemon! reads‘ and writes
in Franklin County.