ABSTRACT
From [Irigaray's] point of view, the philosophers, of whatever persuasion, are comfortably installed in the male imaginary, so comfortably that they are completely unaware of the sexuate character of 'universal' thought. (Whitford, 1991: 103)
While heterosexuality is necessary for the maintenance of any patriarchy, homophobia, against males at any rate, is not. (Sedgwick, 1985: 4)
'If you set out to find a man who isn't a boy anymore', Dave said, 'you're going to be a long time looking.' (Hansen, 1982: 163)
As the investigations of Part I have shown, the process of detection is about the reading of bodies, both living and dead. The detective must decode the desires emanating from and written upon the bodies he or she encounters, and a connection can be traced between the detective's relationship to the physical world and the methodology employed in his or her investigation of the narrative's criminal desires. In the case of Joseph Hansen's serial detective Dave Brandstetter, this paradigm has considerable implications. Brandstetter succeeds as an investigator not through ratiocination nor, like Chandler's Marlowe, through an inherent distrust of wealthy or feminine bodies; rather he succeeds through his ability to read the signifiers of repression. His
Joseph Hansen's Economy of the Same 97 investigations succeed because he identifies both desire and its denial. He sees through the locked doors of the closet and the myths of the heterosexual family ideal, and in so doing he destabilises the norms of hard-boiled detective fiction. In Dave Brandstetter, middleaged homosexual insurance investigator, Joseph Hansen has created a 'medium-boiled' transitional phenomenon, and his novels present a paradoxical stage upon which detective fiction's bodies become both more obviously politicised and yet more determinedly attached to the patriarchal structures that underpin popular fictional forms.
