Steve Neil Johnson
A Little About Me
I was born and raised in rainy Seattle before it became a cool place to live, and ran off to New York in the early eighties with just a backpack (with a pair of cowboy boots tied to the back) to become the greatest writer who ever lived. Some dreams, it turns out, don't come true. While there, I lived in Chelsea across from the YMCA on 23rd, in Jersey City in a neighborhood later revealed to be a toxic waste dump, and finally in Brooklyn. While in New York struggling to become a writer, I worked with AIDS researchers in the early days of the crisis, including Mathilde Krim, who became the co-chair of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. I also worked for the first, and hopefully not the last, lesbian District Attorney of Brooklyn, where I began to formulate the ideas that became the Doug Orlando mysteries.
The blizzards of New York eventually sent me westward to the sunny skies and palm trees of Los Angeles, where I have lived for many years with my husband in the shadow of the O.J. Simpson murder scene, and just a block down the mean streets from where Raymond Chandler once lived. Along the way I received a bachelor's in English from UCLA, was Elton John's massage therapist for a while, wrote a couple dozen telenovela scripts, and was honored by ONE/National Gay & Lesbian Archives for my contributions to gay lit.
My first book, FINAL ATONEMENT, featuring gay Brooklyn Homicide cop Doug Orlando, was published in 1992 and received a Lambda Literary Award nomination for Best Mystery. The second book in the series, FALSE CONFESSIONS, was published in 1993. Both books hit the bestseller lists, and one critic called me "our queer Raymond Chandler," which has to be my favorite moniker.
My latest magnum opus, The L.A. After Midnight Quartet, is a four-book, four-decade spanning epic of gay life in the City of Angels, starting in the 1950s and ending in the 1980s, with each book representing a different decade. The first book, THE YELLOW CANARY, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Best Mystery (always a best man, never a groom). THE BLACK CAT is the second in the series, THE BLUE PARROT the third, and THE RED RAVEN concludes the quartet.
Recent Books
STEVE NEIL JOHNSON
Written in an elegant literary style, it combines Los Angeles' murky history of political corruption, organized crime, and real estate development over buried bodies, with the hidden world of gays in the 50's.
The main characters are well drawn, charismatic, and three dimensional. For readers who are not gay, they allow a window into the lives of people who may be different in their sexual orientation but that's about all.
The story and characters stay with you long after you put the book down. On to the next volume!
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We return to L.A. ten years following the first book in this series. Steve Neil Johnson continues to unfold very believable characters whose lives and relationships clearly reflect the questions, conflicts, and turmoil that can preoccupy gay lives. The historical context is fabulous, so you can learn, or be reminded (if you were there) of the social and political unrest that were rocking the city, and the continuing emergence of the glbtq community in the larger society.
If you enjoyed the first book (The Yellow Canary) you will not be disappointed in this second installment as Paul Winters is faced with the hard life choices of career over truth and relationships.Will he remain in the closet for the sake of his career? I really appreciate how carefully the author has constructed the personalities and psychology of his characters which ring true to life; they are plausible and realistic, not just paper cutouts of sexy gay men as in other gay novels.
This series should be required reading for anyone who wants to better understand gay history and the emergence of the gay community into mainstream life.
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As so many other reviewers have said before me, all three books in this series are engaging and suspenseful. Not only as a well crafted and convoluted series of events unfolds in this third novel, we are also drawn into the complexities of our gay selves and gay souls. We are challenged to consider who we love, why do we love, and can we love more than one person? Difficult questions at any time, but thank you to Steve Johnson for bringing us to this task again. This reflection on our personal psychologies and emotions play out against the backdrop of the horrendous misuse of mental health to torture and permanently maim the lives of gay men and women who were seen as sick and mentally ill because they were homosexuals. This is not a pretty history of gay glamour and martinis and club life. This is the tumultuous, gritty story of the 1970's and the challenges and choices faced by every homosexual person in America at the time. Steve Johnson clearly portrays the conflicts we all struggled with: to be activists or to work within the system? To submit to the power and authority of law and medicine or to believe that we were "normal" human beings?
Steve Johnson uses his fictional novel to bring to life the sorry antecedents of the misuse of therapy as well as portraying the role of activism in bringing about gay liberation. I hope this effort succeeds in reminding each of us to consider our responsibilities to our community as the power to oppress will never disappear although the victims may shift.
With all this sad and painful history as backdrop Steve Johnson does not fail in providing an engaging story that will keep you turning pages deep into the night (or under the summer beach umbrella!). Plaudits to the author for engaging us in the story while teaching us, or reminding us, of the sordid backdrop of gay life in the 1970's.
Enjoy the story, become attached to the main characters and share in their struggles, and learn this history. Or history will repeat itself (is repeating itself)! Now on to the next book and the decade of the 80's.
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You know you are in the hands of a master writer when he can combine suspense with the sharp detail of time and place along with characters that jump off the page. The paranoia of AIDS coupled with rampant homophobia takes the reader back to the Los Angeles of the eighties when it was acceptable for a police detective to chortle derogatory words about homosexuals.
For those us who lived through the eighties the reference to watching The Golden Girls on Saturday night is one of the rare fond memories of the plague years.
Throughout the novel Steve Neil Johnson’s spot-on descriptions like “an archway of gnarling deep-red bougainvillea and steep terra cotta steps” make for glorious vivid reading.
The author elegantly weaves the politics of AIDS, tense procedural plotting, believable mystery twists and an unrequited romance that will flood your eyes.
This excellent book is the fourth in the series but it is so clearly written that it can easily stand alone as a literary stunner.
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I’ve been waiting for this book for over two years and I wasn’t disappointed. The Red Raven, the final book in the LA after Midnight Quartet left me emotionally drained. In a testament to Mr. Johnson’s skills as a writer, the book is both devastating and uplifting.
As a gay man who came of age during the 80s, I expected that the book would be difficult to read. It wasn’t. It was painful, and I couldn’t put it down. Interwoven with a worthy mystery were the anger, terror, hopelessness, determination, and compassion found in the gay and lesbian community in the late 80s. In the midst of all this are the two main characters, Paul Winters and Jim Blake, who have been passionately in love for 30 years yet always kept apart by fate and their own fears. Although the characters are fictional, the circumstances are very real. As the storylines of Paul, Jim and the other characters in the book resolved one-by-one, I found myself simultaneously angry and, literally, tearful. I can’t think of another book that has had such an emotional impact on me. It makes me wish that there was a discussion group devoted to this series.
As I mentioned, this is the final book in the LA after Midnight Quartet. While it can be read standalone, Mr. Johnson doesn’t spend much time on character development or filling in backstory in this book. In order to truly understand the characters, both major and minor, and their motivations and their references to the past, one should read the entire series in sequence, starting with The Yellow Canary.
Barry - NJ
The Red Raven
Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2021
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Nobody does a better job of capturing the tensions between various minority groups in Brooklyn than Steve Neil Johnson in the Doug Orlando Mysteries, FINAL ATONEMENT and FALSE CONFESSIONS.
Yet he expresses so much compassion for the characters and such a love for the neighborhoods that you feel like you've lived there your whole life and fought their battles with them. Doug Orlando, a Brooklyn Homicide cop, is a compelling and haunting character: ostracized by his fellow cops for testifying against his brutish former patrol-car partner, Briggs, in a grand jury probe, his life in danger as much from other cops as criminals. The heart of the story, though, is the relationship between Orlando and his partner of many years, Stewart, which is troubled but filled with love and humor. The plot itself is ripped-from-the-headlines: when a politically active right-wing rabbi is murdered in a bizarre manner in the city's Hasidic stronghold, Williamsburg, Orlando must track down the killer before hostilities between minority groups in the overcrowded city explode.
The neighborhoods are so vividly described, you feel like you could taste them. Astute political commentary and memorable characters that stay with you long after you've finished the book make these novels special. Johnson's style is so sharp it cuts like a knife, and both books move at a rapid-fire pace that keeps you turning the pages. I highly recommend this captivating book.
J. Rosen
FINAL ATONEMENT
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2011
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The thing that I like about this book was how immediately engaging it's characters were which for me as a reader, is what I need.
The plot was clever, well thought out and kept me me turning the pages looking forward to what happened next This really is a dead-on depiction of life in New York city in the 1990s. I lived there during that time period and this book is right on target telling it like it was.
Dripping with words
FINAL ATONEMENT
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2015
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The Doug Orlando Mysteries are the best books I've ever read describing the treacherous political landscape in New York City and the troubled relationships between the very different groups who reside there. If you've ever lived in New York, you'll know how honest and incisive these novels are.
FALSE CONFESSIONS is my favorite mystery novel: compelling, politically astute, with characters so sharply described you feel like you've known them all your life, and a climax so suspenseful I just couldn't put it down. I especially love the relationship between Brooklyn Homicide detective Doug Orlando and his partner, English professor Stewart, which is so real and sexy and yet quite humorous, too. The supporting characters--particularly caustic gossip columnist and political writer Herb Chiligny, and diesel-dyke medical examiner turned lipstick lesbian Ronnie Bell--originally introduced in the first book in the series, FINAL ATONEMENT, really hit their stride in this book. The scenes with Ronnie are especially hilarious and on-target--yet full of compassion--in skewering the cultural rift between older and younger lesbians.
But at the core of this novel is the dead-serious subject of how people exploit religion to deny others their civil rights, and the devastating impact that oppression has on people's lives. When a serial killer targets gay men involved in underground piercing and tattooing culture, and rumors spread that the killer has confessed to a troubled priest who refuses to reveal the killer's identity, all hell breaks out between the gay community and the notoriously homophobic New York Catholic Church. Orlando's search for the killer brings him into contact with a wide variety of New Yorkers--with often bitterly different views on morality--but it's the haunting stories of the people Orlando encounters and what we learn about the human condition that makes this book so moving and compelling. The heart-stopping climax of the book has the best choreographed chase scene I've ever read. FALSE CONFESSIONS is a gripping page-turner and an absorbing must-read.
J. Rosen
FALSE CONFESSIONS
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2011
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“Steve Neil Johnson returns in top form…the series promises to provide both extremely good reads and a better understanding of gay American life during a very crucial period.” --Lambda Literary Review
“Terrific…Steve Neil Johnson writes like a You Are There newscaster —breathless, on-the-spot reporting—and paints word images like a Weegee crime photo. His is the voice of a generation of gays who had only just begun, haltingly and courageously, to speak for themselves. Come for the page-turning storytelling, stay for the engrossing journey to a historical era that lies at the roots of modern day liberation. It’s a great book.” --Eric A. Gordon, author of Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein
“This is a real treat—believable characters who illuminate the dark just before the dawn of gay liberation. A bonus is the richly detailed backdrop of Los Angeles in 1956, including political corruption, real estate scams, Hollywood scandals and organized crime. I’m looking forward to the sequels.” --Peter Cashorali, author of Gay Fairy and Folk Tales
The Yellow Canary:
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
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“Johnson has crafted a literate murder mystery that expands the genre to include deft commentary on the changing face of urban centers.” --Publishers Weekly
“One of the most exciting new detectives in years.” --John Preston
“Very entertaining…fun and lively.”
--Ten Percent
“Doug Orlando is dedicated, compassionate…appealing. Johnson provides an effective and unexpected ending.”
--Los Angeles Times
“It will keep readers fascinated until it’s read straight through to the end.”
--B’nai B’rith Messenger
“Deftly plotted and well written…I enjoyed it immensely.”
--Michael Nava, author of the Henry Rios Mysteries
Final Atonement:
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
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“Steve Neil Johnson may very well turn out to be our queer Raymond Chandler… the plot twists are clean and clever… strikingly original… the best casual reading I’ve come across yet. Orlando is a great detective… (builds to) a heart pounding climax.” --San Francisco Bay Times
False Confessions
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