H. N. Hirsch is currently Erwin N. Griswold Professor of Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College in Ohio. Born in Chicago, he was educated at the University of Michigan and at Princeton. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of California-San Diego, and Macalester College, and has served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin. He is the author of The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter ("brilliant and sure to be controversial," The New York Times), A Theory of Liberty, and the memoir Office Hours ("well crafted and wistful," Kirkus), as well as numerous articles on law, politics, and constitutional questions. He is currently writing the Bob and Marcus Mystery series, the first of which, Shade, was published in 2021, with the sequel, Fault Line, following in June 2023.
Rain is the third installment in H. N. Hirsch’s acclaimed Bob & Marcus Mystery series featuring Marcus George, a professor at UC San Diego, and his life partner, attorney Bob Abramson. Bob is enlisted to defend one of Marcus’s students who has been accused of murder, in a plot that—naturally enough, in sunny southern California—includes handsome hustlers, arrogant multi-millionaires, and twists and turns that boggle the reader’s mystery-solving skills. Jean Redmann, author of the award-winning Micky Knight Mystery Series, has called the duo of Bob and Marcus "a gay Nick and Nora, a couple you’ll want to spend time and solve mysteries with."
H. N. Hirsch stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the books:
My Bob and Marcus mystery series began on a beach in Maine.
It was the summer of 1984, I was 32 years old, and I had discovered the lovely resort town of Ogunquit, about ninety minutes north of Boston. At the time I was an assistant professor at Harvard and living in a ramshackle apartment on Beacon Hill. Harvard doesn’t pay lowly assistant professors very much, and Boston was an expensive town, even back then, but I saved my pennies and spent a few summer weeks in Ogunquit.
In many ways, the days I spent there were the happiest of my life. The town was charming. It had a small gay colony, was also a magnet for French Canadians, and it had a beautiful, white-sand beach. Every day, if it wasn’t raining, I would rent a little plastic chair from the hotel at the entrance to the beach and sit on the sand and read, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.
That summer, I had discovered the mystery novels of Amanda Cross. Cross was in fact Carolyn Heilbrun, a distinguished professor of English and American literature at Columbia University in New York. Her amateur sleuth was (not surprisingly) also a professor of literature at Columbia, Kate Fansler. Many of the books had an academic setting.
Most novels in the series were delightful and fun, but one day, I finished one I didn’t think was very good. I slammed it down on the sand and said to my friends, “We could do better than that!”
These friends, like me, were young academics.
So we started hatching a mystery plot. I don’t remember what moved us to do so, but once we got going, we were throwing ideas around, who killed who, how, why. Of course, since we were all academics, the murder victim was a Harvard student and the amateur detective a young Harvard assistant professor, like me.
I took notes. In the Fall, back at Harvard, nose to the grindstone, I put the notes away.
Flash forward to the Spring of 2020—thirty-six years later. That Spring, of course, is when Covid hit and we all put ourselves on lockdown. As it happens, it was also my last semester of teaching before retirement—I was now sixty-eight years old and teaching at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Like everyone, Covid meant my plans shifted abruptly. I had been planning to move to Chicago, my hometown, travel, possibly do some research at the Library of Congress in my academic field, American constitutional law—but, of course, none of that was now going to happen. Everything was on hold.
I needed something to do.
So after finishing the semester via online teaching, and then sleeping for a month, I puttered around the house, and one day took out the notes from 1984. It was the first time I had looked at them, and reading them over, I could almost smell the ocean and the sunscreen.
And I thought, “you know, this isn’t half-bad.”
So I ordered several books from Amazon on how to write mysteries—there are some very good ones—and got to work. I had always been a fan of mystery series—Dorothy Sayers, Tony Hillerman, Stuart Woods—and had a pretty good grasp of what made them work.
So I started to write. To my delight and surprise, I enjoyed it, and the writing went quickly. I had never written fiction of any kind, and it felt a bit like I was using muscles that I had neglected during decades of scholarly writing.
And in fiction, you got to make things up. Who knew.
I set that first mystery, Shade, in 1985, around the time I had first made the notes. Marcus, my amateur sleuth, was of course gay like me, and some of what I wanted to accomplish in the novel was to document what it was like to be a gay man back then, although I’ve also tried to be careful to write the novels in a manner that would appeal to any reader.
As the series has continued, I have moved forward in time. The second novel in the series, Fault Line, is set in 1989, after Bob and Marcus have moved to San Diego (just as I did), and the third, Rain, is set in 2004.
There have been a number of very well done gay mystery series—Michael Nava’s books perhaps the most distinguished contemporary example—but it was a genre that was, and remains, relatively under-developed. There were potboilers published constantly, but “serious” gay mysteries, mysteries with something to say beyond the sex, have been relatively few and far between.
In my reading of mystery series over the years, what kept me reading was less the murder or the crime and more the character of the detective or detectives, seeing them develop as people and change over time.
Since Marcus, the amateur sleuth at the center of Shade, was also a young professor, the novels also offered me an opportunity to describe and comment on academic life. I made Bob, who becomes Marcus’s partner in life, a law student and then a lawyer, which allowed me to focus in subsequent novels on his defense of various criminals. And, since I taught constitutional law for the bulk of my teaching career, including a course on Criminal Law, I was already familiar with police investigations and the complications that can ensue.
So my research has in my many ways been shaped by my own life and observation—as a gay man, as an academic, and as someone with an interest in the law. When I’ve needed more detailed information about the finer points of the law, I’ve found most of the information I need on the internet, and have on one or two occasions also called on former students, many of whom are now lawyers, with my questions (one of them helpfully offering to represent me when the novels are sold to Hollywood. If only.)
After Shade, the next entries in the series are set in San Diego, where I moved in 1986 to teach at the branch of the University of California. So once again I was able to draw on my own experience and make location a central element of the story. California is different—amazingly so. Going from Boston to San Diego, and from Harvard to a large state university, was a bit like moving to another planet.
The third entry in the series, Rain, will be published shortly. In this entry, it is now 2004, and Bob and Marcus have been together for a long time, almost twenty years. Marcus is approaching 50 and Bob is coming up on 40. Following them over time has given me a chance to comment not just on crimes but also on how lives shift and change over time, something we all experience, gay and straight alike.
So, after a lifetime in academic life, I have, much to my surprise, become a writer of mysteries. . .and perhaps, if my former student is right, the executive producer of a television mini-series.
Life is full of surprises. And mystery.
You can learn more about H. N. Hirsch and his books via his website and follow him on Facebook. Rain is now available via Pisgah Press and all major booksellers.
