The title should have been a clue. If the term “disaster gay” irritates you (although normally you hear the term “disaster bisexual”, so, erasure), then this is not the book for you. Furthermore, the title is a misnomer: this book is a pilot episode with no detective agency, even metaphorically, and more than that, it’s a goddamn spy novel. This is a caper novel that triggers so many pitfalls that author Lev AC Rosen spends most of the book digging his way out of them, featuring staggeringly unintelligent decisions on the part of his ensemble, and an approach to story structure that is frequently exhausting.
Hotel concierge Brandon is an inveterate romantic, constantly falling in love with men who don’t feel the same way. When a one night stand with a guest results in an early checkout with the guest’s phone left behind, Brandon goes on the hunt. Helping him on his quest are Ollie, a gummy guzzling dog walker, Nicole, a workaholic lawyer, and Ian, a drag queen and book shop clerk with anger management issues. When, instead of finding the guest, Brandon witnesses a murder, the entire crew is plunged into chaos.
This sort of book depends on several elements to work: brisk storytelling and compelling (or entertaining) characters. Rosen’s chapters are the sort of length that would not matter in a book that was not split into quadrants, but this is not a story that jumps around. As such, you get the group chat between the characters regurgitated every chapter, albeit sometimes with some editorialising from the currently featured player. These play-by-plays of their lives are never interesting and often you have to ask if these characters even like each other. People drift from their college friends all the time, but they replace them with new circles and move on with their lives. Rosen has arrested the quartet’s development not for any real psychological reasons but simply from narrative convenience.
It doesn’t help that most of the novel’s progression is reserved for the Ian chapters, which almost always end on a cliffhanger. For all of the group chats, no one shares important information with each other, choosing instead the “gentle ribbing” banter that gets old fast. Periodically we’re treated to an interstitial for a mysterious unnamed fifth character, but these parts are so poorly integrated that they catch the reader off guard almost every time; there should either be more or fewer of them. For a book that takes place over a relatively short stretch of time, it certainly drags itself out, and never understands that mystery and espionage aren’t quite the same thing.
The insult compounds itself in the later stages, when Rosen is trying to bring things to a head but has hamstrung himself through the choices of having four separate focal characters and making all of them long. When the game night that has been threatened throughout the book is finally staged, we have to read through it four times, with the dialogue reproduced almost in its entirety — very little elision here — and the only points of difference being when the characters finally branch off from one another. At a time when you would most want momentum, the book grinds to a halt.
On top of this, this is the moment that Brandon chooses to snap, but in a way that makes it clear that his mentality is dangerously unstable rather than that his friends — damaged though they all are, in a pseudo-literary fashion — have treated him wrong. What’s supposed to be funny comes off as sad, and to top it off we have to read the exact same meltdown four times. It’s not a cathartic moment, and there’s no release: it’s just the complete realisation of a delusion that up to this point had only been threatened. Of all of the paper thin characters in The Disaster Gay Detective Agency, the nominal prime protagonist proves to be the worst of them all.
By the time we escape that horrible gathering, Rosen shifts for the first time to zippy chapters as if he knows that he’s against the clock if he wants to get the book done within 400 pages. At this eleventh hour The Disaster Gay Detective Agency finally feels like the caper that Rosen wanted it to be. It’s a classic feel that hearkens back to the double, triple, and quadruple crossing plots of countless pseudo-cosies of yore, but it’s too little, too late. And, on top of that, it’s too silly to count.
Rosen’s previous mysteries were all period pieces. The Disaster Gay Detective Agency is painfully au courant. Maybe that means that it’s for people with a modern sensibility, who enjoy characters who can’t manage to form the semblance of a functioning person between themselves. But if that’s the case, why are they always watching The Nanny? This is a pilot novel: although the plot is resolved, it’s merely setting up a franchise. This book can’t be recommended in good conscience, even if a quarter (half, if we’re being generous) of its title ends up being true. Not every book needs to be elegant, but most of them shouldn’t be as thrown together as this one.
An Advanced Reader Copy was provided by Poisoned Pen Press for review.
