The Pride Edition

Queer Murder Mystery Recommendations and Reviews!

Queer Murder Mysteries

It’s that time of the year again! When all the bars sell boozy slushies and big corporations slap rainbows on their logos to try to make us forget about the money they give to bigoted political groups. Most importantly, it’s the time for queer joy. As much as I love pride, I struggle with crowds and loud noises. But joy can also be found inside, tucked up on the couch, watching murder shows. For all my fellow noise-sensitive queers and allies, I’ve rounded up some murder mysteries with the most LGBTQ+ representation.

I have to say, in terms quantity and variety, it’s disappointing. The inherent campiness of the cozy mystery genre suggests it should have a lot more queer representation. There are very few queer characters, and even fewer trans and genderqueer characters. It’s a shame, and I hope we get more queer mysteries in the future. Maybe once I get bored of this newsletter, I’ll try writing one myself.

Anyway, below are a few solid mystery options with LGBTQ+ representation, and one review of a new lesbian-centered mystery that’s streaming now. There is some joy to be found in them, I hope!

Agatha Raisin

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know why I love this show: jokes, absurdity, and fashion. There is one queer main character, Agatha’s friend Roy (Mathew Horne) who is one of the funnier and more emotionally grounded characters. While the cast could definitely use some more queer characters, the show itself is delightfully campy and extravagant.

Murdoch Mysteries

This show also owes a great deal to camp, particularly in later seasons. With its huge cast, it would be shocking if there weren’t any queer characters. Detective Lewellyn Watts (Daniel Maslany) comes to terms with his sexuality on screen, and goes on to have two fairly compelling romances with other queer male characters.

There are also a few individual episodes that focus on queer characters. Victor, Victorian (Season 3, Episode 3) is about a murdered freemason. In universe, the main characters understand the victim as a woman crossdressing as a man in order to join the freemasons, but the viewer understands that he was trans or genderqueer. This is not a perfect episode—not least because the queer character is dead the entire time—but it is an interesting attempt at looking at gender identity in a period piece.

Midsomer Murders

Hear me out: Midsomer Murders is good. It’s also one of the most twisted cozy mysteries I’ve ever seen. It’s set in the idyllic Midsomer villages, and every episode someone gets murdered in a shockingly fucked-up, serial-killer-esque way by another villager. It has the amnesia that makes the cozy so bizarre—the atrocities never seem to build up on the psyches of the detectives. Besides the main detectives, the episodes focus on a new set of characters each time, so that the show is like a series of plays. There are a number of queer characters throughout the episodes and thankfully, they aren’t always murdered first or even at all.

Grantchester

If you want a period piece with a little more seriousness and better acting than Murdoch Mysteries, try Grantchester. Set in the 1950’s, the main characters are a vicar in a small English village, the curate, and the local detective who work together to solve crimes. (The Brits love a “religious professional solves crimes” show.) Leonard Finch (Al Weaver) is the curate who throughout the show comes out as a gay, starts a romance, and eventually is ex-communicated by the church for his refusal to stay closeted. He’s a fascinating and appealing character, and his strong friendships with the two vicar characters, Sidney (James Norton) and then Will (Tom Brittney) are delightfully rich and supportive.

Perry Mason (2020)

Technically, Perry Mason (Mathew Rhys) is a lawyer, but the show is solidly a noir and a mystery show at heart. Set in 1930s LA, the show is delightfully dark, devious, and everyone is smoking so much all the time. Mason’s partner Della Street (Juliet Rhylance) is a lesbian, and the machinations she and other queer characters have to do to protect themselves is a theme of the second season. She’s wonderfully competent, complex, and has a romance in season two that will keep you on your toes.

The New Lesbian Murder Show Everyone’s Talking About: Deadloch

I was sold on the premise of this show immediately: a comedy-drama that is a satire of the moody, long-form, depressing murder mystery about the unraveling of a small town.[1] The lead detective is Dulcie (Kate Box), who lives in the tiny rural town of Deadloch in Tasmania, Australia. When a dead body washes up on the beach during the town’s Winter Festival, she is assigned a partner from the city, Eddie (Madeleine Sami.) Dulcie has an anxious wife who doesn’t want her to take on the case, and Eddie is chaotic and borderline inept, so things start out on shaky ground. As the bodies of men pile up, Dulcie and Eddie have to figure out how to work together, and the women of the town, many of whom are queer, all become suspects.

The first few episodes are slow and not quite funny enough, and the character of Eddie starts out as a touch too incompetent. But the show clicks into place at the end of episode two, when Eddie and Dulcie start getting real with each other, and by episode five, which was the funniest and most well-paced, I was all in.

The question I always ask about show like this is: can it both satirize the genre in a funny way, and also be a compelling version of that genre? After all, satire requires a great deal of attention, detail, and love for the original genre, and so a good satirical mystery should also be intriguing, well-plotted, and surprising.

Deadloch is doing ok with that fine line. It certainly gets more intriguing as it goes along. In the first few episodes, it is actually more of a straightforward mystery than a satire—it’s just a longform mystery with jokes. For a more precise and hilarious send-up of genre, I recommend the first season of American Vandal[2], a very on-point satire of the true crime documentary genre. Deadloch’s satire is light, and sometimes hard to pin down. The vaguely culty woo-woo stuff of the winter festival is reminiscent of both Top of the Lake’s all-women cult and the pagan rituals common in Midsomer Murders. But it’s staying within the same tonal realm as those shows—it’s not pushing the absurdity. What is the goal of this show? Is it actually a satire, or is it just a light mystery in long form?

The truly exciting element of Deadloch is its variety of queer characters. Unlike the shows I mentioned above, it’s not just one or two queer characters operating within the straight culture of the rest of the cast. The town of Deadloch has a large queer community. Queerness, lesbian culture, queer community, and themes of gender and sexuality are baked into the fabric of the show. Unfortunately, because of the slow the pacing of the first few episodes, that commentary and richness takes a while to come into focus.

The other important component of this show is the gender-flipping of the crime narrative. There is a serial killer loose in Deadloch, murdering people in horrific ways. So far, the murder victims are all men and the suspects mostly women. That is a refreshing flip from most dark mysteries which center a missing or murdered young woman. In a gag that may be too subtle, the camera lingers perversely on the naked bodies of the dead men, reminiscent of the way the male gaze is deployed in other dark mystery shows.

I hope that the show will have something interesting to ponder beyond simply flipping this script. What does it mean to have a female serial killer? Dulcie and Eddie decide the killer is a woman because the victims have been drugged, and they say, “men don’t poison.” Hmm. I’m not sure whether to take this at face value or not, and I’m not yet sure if the show does either. What does this assumption say about Dulcie and Eddie’s relationship to gender? Eddie herself presents as very masculine and Dulcie is more femme, but Eddie appears to be straight. That complexity is interesting, and I hope that means that there is more rich and nuanced commentary on gender, queerness, violence, and crime narratives coming in its final episodes.

The show is still airing on Amazon Prime, so let me know who you think the murderer is. My prediction: I think it’s all the women in the town—sort of a feminist Hot Fuzz situation. So far, all the murdered men have been predatory or problematic in some way, and I think the women of the town are taking revenge. If that is the case, I hope there is another little twist still in store.

Closing Thoughts

The inherent tension of crime stories. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for Bitch about Mare of Easttown and the stickiness of loving a genre that often uses the murders of women as the inciting plot point, and how having a woman as a detective doesn’t absolve a show of its participation in patriarchal storytelling. Similarly, the inclusion of a few queer characters doesn’t change the genre’s tropes of othering and killing off of queer characters: using them as plot devices or tragic victims rather than as full characters.

Where are all the bi folks? As a bi woman, I am always excited to see bi characters because too often, shows forget that bisexuality exists at all. I was wracking my brain trying to think of a bi character in a murder mystery, and the only one I came up with who is textually bisexual is Angela from Bones, which is pretty grim.

Breaking the format. As much as I love the murder mystery genre, I think we can all agree it could be a lot more queer, and it would be better for it. With more queer writers, directors, main characters, and representation of queer community, the murder mystery genre could open up. For example, stories could explore the complication of being a queer detective within the heteronormative justice system, or maybe there could be one about a queer private detective agency, working on cases the mainstream forgets. Queer folks need more than representation and visibility in already existing hetero-patriarchal narrative formats. We need our own stories full of complexity, variety, and joy.

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[1] Think Broadchurch or Top of The Lake

[2] Find it on Netflix.