Stop Explaining the Rain

There’s a version of LGBTQ crime fiction that doesn’t trust its readers. You can feel it in the prose — the careful hand-holding, the moment where the narrative pauses to acknowledge the weight of what the character is carrying, the identity-as-wound mechanics that turn every case into a referendum on whether gay men can be whole people. The writing means well. It’s also exhausting to read.

I went the other way.

My fiction is written on the assumption that the reader is intelligent, paying attention, and does not need the emotional content of a scene explained to them after it’s already happened on the page. If the dialogue does the work, the prose doesn’t repeat it. If the action shows where a character is, the narration doesn’t announce it. Trust the scene. Trust the reader. Cut the rest.

This approach is anti-noir in a specific and deliberate sense. Classic noir uses its protagonist’s alienation as the engine of the story — the lone figure moving through a corrupt world, fundamentally apart from it. It’s a powerful structure, but it’s also one that maps uncomfortably onto queer identity if you’re not careful. The alienated gay detective, isolated and tragic, finding brief connection that’s inevitably taken away. It’s a cliché that flatters readers who want to feel something about queer suffering without actually engaging with queer life.

My leads aren’t alienated. They have friends, professional networks, complicated personal histories, and community. Graham Miller has colleagues he genuinely rates. Joey Moretti has a social life that sometimes gets in the way of his casework. Carlos Martinez operates under an assumed name and still finds connection in the city he’s chosen. The cases are dark. The men are not broken.

That matters in this genre especially, because crime fiction reaches readers who don’t necessarily come to it for the LGBTQ content — they come for the plot, the procedural tension, the satisfaction of a case closing. And what they find, if the writing is doing its job, is gay men who are fully functioning people in a recognisable world, and that’s the most quietly radical thing a book can do. Not advocacy. Not representation as a box ticked. Just: here’s a person, here’s their case, keep reading.

The anti-trope position isn’t just about what I don’t do. It’s about what I do instead. The cases are procedurally grounded. The relationships earn their place on the page. Secondary characters have professional stakes independent of the lead. The plot logic holds up under pressure. And when identity does become relevant to a case — which it occasionally does, because that’s also part of the world — it’s handled with the same specificity as everything else. Not a lesson. Not a moment. Just a fact of the situation that the character navigates competently and moves on from.

Readers get that. You don’t have to explain rain. You just have to write it accurately enough that they feel it.