This is great summer beach reading! Bourbon Street Blues is a delightful romp through the New Orleans gay community…at least the portion involved with beautiful bodies, hot guys, drugs, gyms, and charming quirkiness. No substance here but that’s the whole point.
Greg Herren provides us with a one-dimensional view of gay New Orleans of which we’d all like to be part, at least for a long weekend. Our hero, Scotty Bradley, is a personal trainer and sometimes go-go boy, dancing as a fill-in at one of the more popular gay clubs in the French Quarter.
Inevitably, mysterious happenings arise as a former client whom Scotty trained re-appears on the scene but refuses to acknowledge Scotty. Surreptitiously, smuggled computer discs, muggings, a trick who’s a cat burglar, and soon the murder of a quasi-stalker acquaintance …this is just the beginning of the tale that propels this quick read headlong into a not-so-believable plot to destroy gay New Orleans.
But that’s OK because, after all, this isn’t intended to be heavy reading. It’s intended to be fun!
Our hero’s family proves to be well conceived, clever and amusingly drawn. Mom and Dad are dyed in the wool aging hippies still holding onto their dreams and paranoia of the ’60s. Sister, Rain, has bowed to the establishment and married an up-town (up-scale) doctor. Brother, Storm, has sold out even more and become a lawyer.
Even better drawn though, is the city. Herren manages to create an end-of-summer ambiance that is almost palpable. Heat and humidity fairly drip from the pages.
The plot is goofy enough to keep the reader involved; several action scenes are compelling and a couple of other action scenes (that kind!) hold your attention.
Gay mysteries, like most other mysteries, tend not to be heavy and in their superficiality they become formulae…cookbook stories where substitution of one criminal act substitutes for another, one gay cop for a gay newspaper editor, one handsome trick for a different hot second date. This is not necessarily bad…just accept it as the diversion it is intended to be.
Bourbon Street Blues was published in 2003. A year earlier Herren wrote Murder in the Rue Dauphine. These two mysteries are fraternal, if not identical, twins. Scotty is a personal trainer; Chanse MacLeod is the other story’s hero, a private detective. New Orleans crack police detective, Venus Casanova, appears in both books. The ambiance of the books is identical. Normally I’d feel cheated, led to read two books by the same author which turn out to be the same…but not! I watch crime shows on TV, knowing full well how it will all come out. I watch to be entertained and overlook the similarity of dialogue, of setting, of gore.
Both these books are enjoyable light reading. Both are well written. Both are page-turners. Among the many gay mystery novels these are good literary dalliances. Pick one up for a pleasant summer afternoon.