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The Red Raven (Book 4, LA After Midnight)
By Steve Neil Johnson
Clutching Hands Books, September 2021
Five stars

As I finished reading this final book in the LA After Midnight Quartet I was dissolved in tears. This morning, to get myself back in that mood to write this review, I asked Alexa to play Leonard Cohen songs. First it was “Dance me to the End of Love,� and then “Everybody Knows.� Ah, there, that brought back the tears. Cohen released “Everybody Knows� in 1988, the year in which “The Red Raven� is set. The song perfectly captures the air of cynical despair that Johnson brought to his last novel. “Dance me to the End of Love,� released in 1984, also captures the romantic side of this book—because there is one. Even despair can’t kill the power of love.

This remarkable contemporary-noir series, each book set in a different decade from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, tracks the lives and careers of two gay men born a generation before me: attorney Paul Winters and detective Jim Blake. At the center of each of these books is a dark mystery involving death and deception. Intertwined throughout is the story of their relationship—Blake, who chooses marriage and fatherhood, and Paul, who joins with David Rosen and builds a long life together rooted in the activism of the day. The background history is the seismic shifts in the world of gay folks (meaning men AND women) as they fight for recognition and dignity and, in the last book, their very lives.

It is a gripping mystery, intriguing and upsetting by turns, touching on corporate greed and the general political disregard for the value of the lives of gay men as AIDs carries on its destruction in the USA. With the wisdom of hindsight, Johnson makes sure to bring in the changing relationship between gay men and lesbians as the plague advances; but also focuses on the despair of a generation of young men who find their joyous liberation suddenly overturned by the relentless spread of disease and death and political indifference.

If I sound a little glum, don’t let that put you off reading this series. It’s great; and it’s true. In 1988, on Valentine’s Day, in fact, my boyfriend took me to dinner and told me that he was HIV negative. That prompted me to get myself tested anonymously, and to find out that I was also negative. That moment changed our lives as a couple forever. Like the characters in The Red Raven, we’re in our sixties now. The history in Johnson’s book is our history, too; but we survived.

Johnson was just a year younger than I am, something I didn’t know until I read this fourth volume. His life and mine paralleled across those decades. He must have known he had cancer when he published this book, since he died a few months later. I remember thinking when I found out I was HIV negative: “Now we only have to worry about all the other things that could kill us.� Yeah. Here’s to the memory of a wonderful writer, gone too soon.