In The Bell in the Fog (Forge), Lev AC Rosen’s latest neo-noir novel, private investigator Evander “Andy” Mills is hired to find a blackmailer threatening to ruin a closeted gay Navy officer’s career. It’s an unusually personal assignment—the Navy man, James Morris, is Andy’s ex. What’s more, Andy knows what it’s like to be a gay man working in a macho organization.
We’re in San Francisco, it’s 1952, and Andy’s new career as a P.I. is off to a slow start. He served in the Navy during the Second World War, and afterward, was a San Francisco police officer,
a job he quit after witnessing fellow cops beat up gay men. Now, as his own boss, Andy intends to help oppressed people fight back. He hasn’t had many cases just yet, but helping James foil the blackmailer would be an important milestone, evidence that Andy, the city’s “only queer detective,” is a formidable voice for the underdog.The Bell in the Fog is the second book to feature Andy Mills. With its crisp prose and after-dark intrigue, the novel is an homage to the hard-boiled fiction and film noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. Like its predecessor, 2022’s Lavender House, it’s a stylish period piece centered on a likable protagonist whose motivations are vividly depicted.
Rosen, speaking from his home in New York City, answered a few of my questions about his work. This interview has been edited for length.
Kevin Canfield: The title of your first Andy Mills novel alluded to the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, when many government employees suspected of being gay were fired. Is that how you found your footing in these novels, through real historical events?
Lev Rosen: It was about the history, but also my love of noir. It was always brewing in the background, this idea that I want to write a gay detective. But there were reasons I didn’t. Publishing wasn’t really interested in gay genre novels for a while. But one night I was watching an Agatha Christie adaptation, and I thought to myself, this would be so much more fun if everyone were gay. That was the spark.
KC: Tell me about your fandom of film noir from the ’40s and ’50s, and the hard-boiled novels from the same period.
LR: That was my parents. They raised me with all that stuff. I was watching Bogart and Bacall when I was young, and I just really loved it. Especially Lauren Bacall. There was something about her that was “snazzy,” which I know is a weird word choice.
KC: Appropriate for the period, though.
LR: Right. She’s snazzy. There was this confidence. She’s this Jewish girl from Brooklyn. In her first movie she’s 19 years old. There’s just something really exciting about her on screen. In college, even though I was majoring in creative writing, I took a film minor. And so I got to watch more of those movies. At Oberlin, they have this weird thing where they let you teach classes if you’re a student.
KC: Sounds very Oberlin.
LR: It’s very Oberlin. I taught a class on the femme fatale, which I loved. And then I taught classes on film noir, generally. Teaching those classes was an excuse to get even more into it. One of the first things I always did when I was dating a new guy would be like, alright, if I’m going to make it serious with this guy, we have to watch The Big Sleep.
KC: So the films came first for you. And then you eventually read writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler?
LR: I read The Big Sleep in high school, but it wasn’t till after college when I decided, I’m going to read everything. And then I read, you know, everything by Chandler.
KC: Did you know from a young age that you’d write novels?
LR: This was kind of the thing, even in grade school. I went to Village Community School [in New York’s Greenwich Village], where there were 18 kids in my whole grade. When we graduated, the teachers gave each student a gift. I’ve still got it. [From a bookshelf behind him, Rosen grabs a figurine of a wizard.] Because I was a wizard with words, they said. I was the writer in the grade, and that’s what everyone thought I would be doing.
KC: You have three books that’ll be published in 2023, correct?
LR: Yeah, the one that came out in the spring is called Lion’s Legacy. There’s The Bell in the Fog. And then next month, Emmett.
KC: You're writing for different ages.
LR: Yeah, both Lion’s Legacy and Emmett are young adult.
KC: How are your working days different when you’re writing for adults versus writing YA?
LR: In terms of the workday—me sitting down and writing—no one would notice anything different. But the music will change. The music I listen to is different for every book, and obviously when you’re writing something historical, you’re listening to historical music. But for me, it’s more of an internal attitude. The thing I’m known for are romantic comedies, which are obviously very different than hard-boiled noir. Being able to go back and forth between the darkness
and the joy, that is definitely an internal shift.(Left) Author Lev AC Rosen.
KC: The prose is surely different. What’s your mindset when you’re writing about Andy Mills in 1950s San Francisco? The sentences in those books are direct, efficient.
LR: Obviously, since it’s first-person, there is a certain voice. With Andy, there’s something about his sadness. There’s something about Andy that needs to be clipped. Because he himself is clipped in some way.
KC: The prose, the sentences need to be clipped.
LR: Yeah, the voice is clipped because he himself is clipped. It also has to do with getting that sort of staccato rhythm. I think it evokes a mood, and Andy himself is not a whole person but two half-people. Those clipped sentences reflect who he is and how he’s growing.
KC: At least one of your YA books has been targeted amid this latest wave of right-wing outrage about books with gay content. How have you felt and reacted to this?
LR: My [2018] book Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), which is a YA sex-ed thriller, has been targeted. According to CBS, last year it was the 23rd most banned book in the country, though I don’t know how they do those statistics.
KC: Do people who want to censor you contact you directly?
LR: There’s a contact form on my Web site, and I do occasionally get hate mail. I got one death threat. Generally, I try to block them and move on.
KC: It’s not a spoiler to say that Andy will be back in another novel?
LR: It’s not. There are two more books coming, and I’m hoping for more. The next one actually has to do with book-banning.
(Author photograph by Rachael Shane.)
READ MORE: “The Big Sleep and the Black Cat,” by Lev AC Rosen (CrimeReads).
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