Last summer, while I was staying at a remote French convent turned anarchist commune, I read every Raymond Chandler novel. People would ask me what I was working on and I’d say that I was reading every Raymond Chandler novel, which created the false impression that I was “working on” detectives. I was not. I was meant to be working on my dissertation. “But the books are incredible,” I’d say. “The detective, Marlowe. He’s so vulnerable to the world. You wouldn’t think he’d be like that, but he is.” My conversation partners would nod pleasantly before returning to sessions of communal nude drawing or group psychoanalysis.
It’s the case that makes Marlowe vulnerable. Better yet: Marlowe has to be vulnerable in order to solve the case. He can’t say no to a lead, so he says yes to everything. He’s beaten up, tied up, battered, bruised; he’s drugged by others and drunk by choice; he’s surrounded on all sides by women who want him and are willing to hurt him to get him. He doesn’t cry, but he’s always bleeding from his head. He sweats and sweats. None of this is incidental to the genre. Noir presents a theory of chance encounters, which is to say a theory of the world: The hard-boiled detective can only do his job if he successfully makes himself open to happenstance, searching his environments for messy signs that shape him and become shaped by him in turn.
He’s surrounded on all sides by women who want him and are willing to hurt him to get him.
Soon I was done with Chandler, but I didn’t want to be done with my hard-boiled streak. I picked up every detective novel I came across and unintentionally read a lot of queer fiction: Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain (2026), Jaw Filler by Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray (2025), X by Davey Davis (2022), the reissued Dave Brandstetter series by Joseph Hansen (2022 and 2023), Maggie Terry by Sarah Schulman (2018), and so on. The queer appeal of noir won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has spent time with the genre. Even the most traditional noir evokes queerness because what’s traditional about it — alienated protagonists, zany antics, strict chivalric codes, open and mutable bodies — is already a little queer. “Did you know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other worm?” Marlowe asks a woman who might be about to kill him (antics, check). I don’t want to overstate a diagnosis, but I do think we’re curious about the possibilities of the explicitly queer detective — curious about what queerness can do for fiction’s steeliest archetype who nevertheless bruises easy. What’s in the queer desire for chance encounters, for getting tangled in the big scary world?
In Davey Davis’ X, protagonist Lee misses their ex: “I was in love with her,” they say, “and I knew it from the moment I started to plan how I’d style her for her funeral viewing.” Old-school romanticism from Brooklyn’s most ruthless sadist top. While processing the breakup, however, Lee, previously stone, gets topped so unexpectedly and so well by the mysterious pro-domme X that they drop everything to try and find her again. They suspect X is one of many undesirables (nonwhite immigrants, sex workers, leftists, queers, so on) about to be semi-voluntarily “exported” — that is, strong-armed into emigrating by an American state slightly more advanced than ours in its sprint toward the far right. Lee has no choice but to follow the few leads they have, interrogating anyone in X’s leatherdyke milieu who might lead them to her.
If Marlowe has to be vulnerable in order to investigate, Lee takes it into the bedroom. Sex is the engine of the case. Each new partner lays down the next clue, the next breadcrumb. As Lee moves between these variously disappointing hookups, the world glimmers with hot and grimy moisture: their spit gets caught eagerly in other mouths, they touch themself to the thought of tears, they get stuck in the rain. In the book’s first scene, they let a woman “tease them to her heart’s content” in exchange for information about X. She waterboards them with an industrial-grade nozzle. The leads aren’t even good, hardly worth the torture: “I bottomed for nothing,” they sulk. This steady liquid drip — following them from the adrenaline rush of the bed, or the couch, or the dungeon, to the humdrum pace of everyday life under increasingly repressive conditions — shows us that they can’t stay unimplicated while on the case. They, too, are permeable, porous to their surroundings. After all, they’ve been changed so thoroughly by X. They bottom for nothing now, as opposed to for no one.
Of course, the obsession with X is really a smoke screen for Petra, Lee’s estranged ex-girlfriend. As X and ex bleed into each other sonically, flashes of the two characters form deferred, depressed double exposures in Lee’s mind. Here is another genre innovation offered to us by the queer detective: Marlowe is an ex-cop, but every other protagonist I mention in this piece is an ex-partner. To be an ex-anything means that you’ve already been chewed up and spat out by something you cared about. Lee tries to be over it. They insist on portraying their sadism as misanthropy, but they betray themself in remembering the care they brought to scenes with Petra, to the welts, “spaced evenly as piano keys … exactly the same size and color as the next.” They return, begrudgingly but firmly, to scene safety, refusing overly intoxicated partners on the basis that they “have rules.” They remark on how their mentor taught them to “do anything [they] wanted to a body, including keep it alive.” It’s not unlike Marlowe, a self-professed cynic who can’t help but help people.
If the traditional detective combines total alienation with compulsive care for others, this doggedly individualistic S/M’er chases the kind of undeniable reciprocal intimacy that leaves welts. As they do the marking, they don’t always realize what’s being done to them. They yearn for X’s touch to re-figure them again, to melt the stone. They don’t need her. In detective work, there’s no such thing as stone.
In Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s Bone Horn, a newly registered private investigator wonders at her luck: “More women than I’d expected had come, clashing, into my personal space since I’d started looking for the horn.” The horn in question belongs to one Alice B. Toklas. We are told that it grew out of her forehead, obscured all this time by thick-brimmed hats and strategically styled bangs. The PI, our narrator, is contacted by an anonymous caller who claims that he has exclusive knowledge of Toklas’ horn — that the investigation could be dangerous and deadly — that, if discovered, evidence of the horn could resuscitate his scholarly career in literary modernism. She takes the case.
Our narrator is unnamed, but her ex-wife who passed away suddenly isn’t: May. Neither is the Shakespeare and Company employee she sleeps with, in the store itself, when she visits Paris for research: Blake. Neither is the archivist who shows her around the Beinecke, taking her back home and giving her detailed instructions on how to fist them: Kai. What little backstory we get for the PI is easily overtaken by these new encounters, exceptional for their tendency to happen wherever she goes. Set against named characters in their named workplaces, the unnamed PI seems more like a container for the accumulation of experience, archival and erotic, than anything else.
The parallel between detective work and academic research is well worn (Dorothy L. Sayers’ cult classic Gaudy Night, which is more beloved by lesbians than you could possibly imagine, comes to mind). Indeed, our PI was once an academic herself. You get the sense that her desire to throw herself into a field of contested texts, to wrangle and interpret information, is a habit from her scholarly days. You also get the sense that she didn’t really meet people like this as an academic — that women weren’t clashing into her personal space at quite the same rate. Detective work takes the solitary pursuit of academic research and pushes it out into the world of social encounter. Under ideal circumstances, detectives and academics would share this world of collaborative, incremental meaning-making. As it is, the state of academia is better demonstrated by the scholar desperate to find a secret horn because he thinks it’ll prevent his research from being “relegated to some kind of untrendy past” by students who are all about identity politics (imagine him sneering). If Marlowe was too insubordinate and principled to be a cop for the state, Bone Horn casts the academy in the role of the state; in either case, it’s not exactly harmonious between the detective and the disciplinary institution. Another ex-something, our PI nevertheless jumps back into the kind of research that she washed out of in the first place.
Like queerness, “detective” isn’t something to be, but something to do.
Bone Horn isn’t the year’s only satirical neo-noir about isolated people and isolating structures. In Jaw Filler by Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray, detective Sean Hastings is hired by the parents of a character named Character who disappears after getting involved with a digital cult: a transgender commune set in Sim World. Sean starts off as an “internet sleuth” before graduating to the kind of in-person work that sees him interrogating, sleeping around, and getting bruised with the best of them. “I grew tired of endless entanglements in interpersonal schadenfreude,” he says, justifying his reasonable decision to move on from investigating online trans drama to investigating missing persons cases. “I became the man who knew too much. It was affecting my social life!”
If the sensory world of X leaks, Jaw Filler’s oozes. As cult leader Kevin leads his acolytes through the practice of “Releasing,” trying to let go of trauma in Sim World, they push bloated blobs out of their avatars. “Feel it leave your body,” Kevin coaxes. “Breathe.” Sean’s ex Releases something “huge, elastic, and bright blue” — residual anger about the breakup, no doubt. Anyone who disturbs the Releasing process is apprehended by Kevin’s bodyguards, Hans and Umlaut. It’s a lot of visceral embodiment for a virtual platform whose point is bypassing embodiment, or at least the vulnerability that comes with it. For Character, who lacks access to the surgeries he wants, it’s easier to imagine life without a body: “My brain was all I had. I had a brain instead of a body, that had always been my thing.” He thinks about how it felt as if he’d “missed out on the joke; that everyone knew their current life was temporary and had a nuclear family plan in their back pocket.” He upgrades his Sim World membership.
Delving into their own psyches in an attempt to address or escape some sort of alienation, Kevin’s followers turn the process of investigation inward. Unlike detection, this is work that only takes them further away from other people. The cult members must learn a lesson that Sim World can’t teach them: There’s no amount of introspection that’ll serve as a substitute for relation. (I learned that in France, in communal nude drawing and group psychoanalysis.)
The bookstore hookup, it turns out, had the horn all along. Her grandfather collected rare body parts and made a deal with Toklas: He’d pay for the horn before her death, collect after. The PI is clued in when she gets too close to cracking the case and is summarily abducted. In her villain denouement, the bookstore hookup offers us a thesis:
I mean — she hesitated — you just vibe bottom. Like the energy you put out into the world is kind of, just take me.
Just take me hostage?
That’s very specific to this scenario. It’s just bottom energy. You’re like a bottom forever in search of a top.
This is it, the noir detective. A bottom forever in search of a top — a bottom whose top is nothing short of the world itself, the world of signs and the world of people, the world of chance encounters. The position of “top” is never secured, because it never can be secured. In order to keep investigating, the detective has to keep letting the world have its way with them. In order to understand anything about that world, the detective has to cruise it — to let it lead them around the corner and touch them, change something about them. After all, they might shake loose the missing piece that pulls everything else into place.
What I’m trying to say is not just that the traditional detective was queer the whole time, although of course he was. What I’m trying to say is that the queer detective makes these erotic dynamics explicit in the broader genre, because queerness is — should be — a project of living relationally in the world. Following the unnamed PI, we can think of any noir detective as a container for relation, one that is more successful the more it is filled up by experience. Here’s another way to put it: Like queerness, “detective” isn’t something to be, but something to do. As queer people, we should already know that we only ever become what we are through our experiences with others. These experiences are not strictly positive; it’s worth remembering that the detective only enters the scene when harm has been done, when the body count has begun, when the streets are already mean and slicked with rain. In a literary landscape full of introspective trauma novels, the queer detective genre is surprisingly matter-of-fact about this harm. Just because the world is “bad” — and there’s a relief in the plainness of this admission — doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go out into it and enjoy its perils. Take it from Marlowe:
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
It all starts with getting out of the room. What else?
If there is indeed renewed interest in the genre, it might be because we’re tired of a hyperindividualistic ethos that tells us we can manage alone. The detective’s vision of relationality pushes back against the myth of self-sufficiency without capitulating to saccharine fantasies of capital-C Community, a word used by neighborhood mutual aid organizations and investment banks alike. This is appealing politically in part because it is appealing tonally. When you’ve heard too much earnest language used for cynical purposes — “Is Mastercard a queer ally?” — you can try the detective, who is cynical for earnest purposes.
Besides, there’s a particular charm to the figure that can’t help but care even when they should know better: that classic, steely private eye with a heart of gold. Tangled up in a million complex social webs — at the world’s mercy, like any of us — more romantic than jaded, more jaded than green — who could resist?
Asya Sağnak is a writer, editor, and joint PhD student in English and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.
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