People have such queer ideas about private detectives.
—Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)
Hardboiled detective fiction has never ignored the existence of ethnic minority, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ characters. The representation often wasn’t great; prejudices were common, and sometimes a plot point. Genre-blending mixes with hardboiled fiction tend to follow similar lines. In the made-for-tv movie Catch A Deadly Spell (1991), for example, a key plot point is that the man who stole the Necronomicon is in a relationship with a transwoman.
There has been a trend in contemporary works, however, to swing the other way. Instead of token diversification or showcasing prejudices while fixing on a white cisgender heterosexual viewpoint, there are stories that focus on minority viewpoints, and in particular on intersectional experiences. Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys has as a protagonist an Innsmouth woman during the 1950s, but her group includes two gay men, a brother and his Black girlfriend, and a Japanese-American woman; Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark focuses on a group of Black women, one of whom is gender-nonconforming and homosexual, another mixed-race; The City We Became (2020) by N. K. Jemisin has a group as cosmopolitan as New York itself.
The Long Shalom by Zachary Rosenberg is another entry in that mode—I asked a few folks for a pithy descriptive term, and they suggested “wokepunk” and “diversifiction”—focused on protagonist Alan Aldenberg, a bisexual Jewish WW1 veteran and ex-mob gunsel, now wise-cracking private detective, who ends up dealing with a Lovecraftian supernatural threat. Aldenberg teams up with his half-Japanese/half-Jewish bisexual ex-girlfriend and two fellow WW1 veterans: an African-American man and a transwoman.
Yet the most important thing about The Long Shalom isn’t the cast of characters; it’s how the story is fundamentally based on their experiences and the discrimination they face. As in Ring Shout, the racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination they face becomes embodied as both traditional and supernatural threats. These individuals, who each have to deal with intersectional discrimination for their particular identities, also now have bigoted cosmic horrors to deal with.
Which leads to a certain aspect of the protagonists taking these new horrors in stride. There is more to the complex interplay of identity as Alan, long non-practicing, returns to the Jewish neighborhood and finds himself an outcast among outcasts, than there is to him confronting an ancient horror that seems immune to bullets. As the fantasy aspects increase—thanks to ancient scrolls and some very Innsmouthian-flavored Jewish women in a remote seaside community—the impression becomes closer to a retelling of a game of Harlem Unbound (2017), albeit with more of a Jewish than Black focus, and the mundane antagonists become almost cartoonish in their bigotry.
Yet that is kind of the point: as much as some of these characters feel like a caricature, the real thing, whether they were police uniforms or Klan robes, was if anything more explicit and violent. Racism and prejudice is seldom nuanced or interesting at base; it’s dull, ugly, and stupid, a combination of ignorance and stereotypes, hot points of emotions that can flash into bursts of unbelievable violence over almost nothing.
Alan clenched his teeth, fighting for something inspiring to say and coming up emptier than a wine bottle after Purim.
—Zachary Rosenberg, The Long Shalom 90
While the novel is short and the fantastic elements get away a bit from the more grounded characterizations, Rosenberg does have a certain style and authentic understanding of the characters and their cultures, which is appealing. Like Ring Shout, the threat is Lovecraftian without being based explicitly on Lovecraft’s Mythos; this is fundamentally an effort to write a Jewish horror story, with a hardboiled setting and more than a taste of pulp action—and it succeeds at that.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 