I’d add that it’s often, in its own way, a variety of Stiff Upper Lip (I’m thinking of Ernest Thesiger’s description of his WWI experiences: ‘oh my dear, the dreadful noise and the dreadful people.’)
Have you ever encountered the Pharoah Love books? The original trilogy is from the 1970s late 1960s. I’ve never found the first one (A Queer Kind of Death), but I gather Pharoah makes the typical series-detective initial appearance, i.e. he’s a background character who becomes a major character in the second half of the book. The two subsequent novels get progressively more baroque and tragicomic. The author, George Baxt, tried rebooting the character at some point in the 1990s, and I’ve read A Queer Kind of Love from that era, but making Pharoah better Representation™ makes him less fun imo.
*Goes to look at Baxter’s Wikipedia entry* Huh, he also wrote some murder mysteries set in 1930s Hollywood—that makes sense, in Swing Low, Sweet Harriet the case had an Old-Hollywood angle. Oh, here’s a more-detailed blog post about him: https://brookspeters.blogspot.com/2011/12/the-mystery-of-george-baxt.html
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Have you ever encountered the Pharoah Love books? The original trilogy is from the
1970slate 1960s. I’ve never found the first one (A Queer Kind of Death), but I gather Pharoah makes the typical series-detective initial appearance, i.e. he’s a background character who becomes a major character in the second half of the book. The two subsequent novels get progressively more baroque and tragicomic. The author, George Baxt, tried rebooting the character at some point in the 1990s, and I’ve read A Queer Kind of Love from that era, but making Pharoah better Representation™ makes him less fun imo.*Goes to look at Baxter’s Wikipedia entry* Huh, he also wrote some murder mysteries set in 1930s Hollywood—that makes sense, in Swing Low, Sweet Harriet the case had an Old-Hollywood angle. Oh, here’s a more-detailed blog post about him: https://brookspeters.blogspot.com/2011/12/the-mystery-of-george-baxt.html