Everyone Gets a World

The mistake most writers make when they set out to write LGBTQ fiction — especially crime fiction — is treating the queer community as a setting rather than a society.

You get the bar. The Pride march in the background. The knowing look between two men that signals to the reader: this is that kind of book. What you don’t get is the full weight of a world. The petty rivalries and professional alliances. The ex who’s now married and works two floors up. The straight ally who’s better in a crisis than half the queer characters around him. The villain who has nothing to do with anyone’s identity and everything to do with money.

That’s the world I’m building.

The series sprawls across Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide. The leads — Graham Miller, Joey Moretti, Carlos Martinez, Eddie Lam — are distinct people with distinct professional registers, not variations on a type. Graham investigates quietly and thinks loudly. Joey operates on instinct and charm and occasionally gets it catastrophically wrong. Carlos works cases from behind an assumed name in a city that doesn’t know him. Eddie navigates the Northern Territory justice system with the kind of cultural intelligence that comes from being a Vietnamese-Australian ex-cop working for a Larrakia barrister. None of them are the same story told in different clothes.

The supporting cast follows the same rule. Every character who recurs across the series has their own stakes, their own arc, their own reason for being in the room that has nothing to do with serving the lead. AFP Senior Agent Evelyn Boucher appears across multiple books and she’s not there to help the gay detective. She’s there because she has her own job to do and it sometimes collides with his. That’s what allies actually look like.

The villains work the same way. The best antagonists in crime fiction aren’t interested in your protagonist’s identity — they’re interested in their own agenda, and your protagonist happens to be in the way. The organised crime operators, the corrupt legal figures, the quiet institutional rot that keeps cases from closing: none of it cares who anyone sleeps with. That indifference is, in its own way, more realistic and more threatening than villainy with a gay target.

Then there are the scenery chewers — the characters who arrive in a single chapter and own it completely. The club owner who knows too much. The forensic pathologist who’s been on the job too long and finds the whole thing blackly amusing. The barrister who’ll argue anything if the brief is interesting enough. These characters are the texture of the world, and the world only works if they’re vivid enough to make you want to follow them into their own book.

Some of them have already got one.

That’s what a universe does. It generates its own gravity. The characters don’t just appear when the plot needs them — they exist in between, living lives that occasionally intersect with a case and pull the whole thing wider.

The LGBTQ community is not a niche. It’s a world. I’m writing it like one.