DANGEROUS MEDICINE

Gay couples battle the Ku Klux Klan and a predatory gangster in this period thriller set in the Roaring ’20s.

The concluding novel in Stookey’s Medicine for the Blues Trilogy finds piano player Jimmy Harper returning to Portland, Oregon, in shock after seeing his musician lover get gunned down by mobster Danny Felton in Chicago. There to catch him is previous lover Carl Holman, a surgeon whose renewed live-in relationship with Jimmy complicates life in a Portland dominated by a homophobic Ku Klux Klan. Rumored to be a gay man—he announced a fake engagement with his lesbian friend Gwen Cook to quiet the gossip—Carl also runs afoul of Klan taboos by performing surgeries at St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital and prescribing birth control to women. Friction with the Invisible Empire increases when Carl discovers that a Klansman who runs a bootlegging operation had been molesting his 12-year-old son before the boy died of appendicitis. Then Carl’s boss, another Klansman, pressures him to join the group and marry Gwen in a Klan mass wedding. As if that weren’t enough, Danny arrives in Portland and tries to blackmail Carl into giving him drugs, and the surgeon gets on the wrong side of vice cop (and Klansman) Steve Bateson when he investigates the bigot’s savage beating of a gay suspect. On the bright side, a solution to Carl’s relationship conundrum materializes: He marries Gwen and Jimmy weds her lover, Charlene, and the two ostensibly straight pairs reside in neighboring houses, which allows them to surreptitiously live as gay couples. But will that keep them off the Klan’s radar?

Stookey’s tale throws together elements from his Acquaintance (2017) and Chicago Blues (2018) in a frenetically busy, often overstuffed narrative. The romantic reveries—and graphic sex—of the previous novels are muted here. Jimmy doesn’t have much to do besides lick his wounds after his Chicago misadventure, and Carl remains preoccupied with sleuthing and strategizing his way through a maze of threats and murders. The author succeeds in conjuring a pressure-cooker atmosphere with a sinister noir vibe as Carl probes the seamy underbelly of placid Portland. Danny is a charismatic figure of insinuating malignancy. Bateson is a vicious, violent man, and Carl has to maneuver carefully around him. In one scene, barbershop customers subtly rally to protect Carl when Bateson menacingly gay-baits him; in another, the surgeon elicits enough nuance and residual conscience from the cop to reach a rapprochement that serves both men’s purposes. In Carl’s first-person voice, Stookey’s prose shows flashes of poetic imagery. (“Cawing overhead caught my ear and I looked up to see a flock of ragged black shapes flapping above me. I rested a moment, leaning against the wooden handle of the shovel while the crows circled once and flew on.”) Too often though, Carl’s sensibility sounds stolidly clinical—“During these weeks, Jimmy continued to come into my office for his periodic Wassermanns, and I kept an eye out for penile and anal warts”—or moralistic (“There are a lot of things in this world that are more unnatural than my friendship with Jimmy Harper. And one of those things is bigotry”). Still, there’s enough tension and drama in Carl’s claustrophobic predicament to keep readers turning pages.

An engaging historical crime yarn set in a minefield of intolerance.