Dead on Your Feet
Page 1
DEAD ON YOUR FEET
by Grant Michaels
A Stan Kraychik Mystery
Book 3
Nominated as Best Gay Mystery
6th Annual Lambda Literary Awards - 1994
ReQueered Tales • Los Angeles
2019
Dead on Your Feet
by Grant Michaels
Copyright © 1993 by Grant Michaels.
Preface to 2019 edition: copyright © 2019 by Charles Michelson.
Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs
First American edition: July 1993
This edition: ReQueered Tales, November 2019
ReQueered Tales ebook version 1.50
Kindle edition ASIN: B08192CFR4
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ALSO BY GRANT MICHAELS
THE STAN KRAYCHIK NOVELS
A Body to Dye For (1990)
Love You to Death (1992)
Dead on Your Feet (1993)
Mask for a Diva (1994)
Time to Check Out (1996)
Dead as a Doornail (1998)
GRANT MICHAELS
Critical Praise for Dead On Your Feet:
“This is a first-rate mystery with an Agatha Christie lineup of very possible suspects and Stan Kraychik playing a terrific Poirot.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Michaels hands another case to out-of-the-closet, loud and proud Boston hairdresser Stan Kraychik in this witty, fast-moving romp.”
—Publishers Weekly
Critical Praise for Grant Michaels’s Stan Kraychik novels:
“Refreshing… a pleasant story of murder, mixups, and mayhem. The story’s perky pace is due to Michaels’s penchant for campy conversation and humorous insights from the snappy snipper from Snips.”
—Lambda Rising Book Report
“Grant Michaels’s sleuthing hairdresser has both the sensitivities of his craft and the balls to impel him into atypical daring. A Body to Dye For has the tart, racy smell of success.”
—The Bay Area Reporter
“Love You to Death is an engaging murder mystery that epitomizes the best in the genre. The one-liners fly as fast as bullets and there is a surprise in nearly every chapter.”
—The Advocate
DEAD ON YOUR FEET
by Grant Michaels
Pink Triangles and Silver Handcuffs:
Grant Michaels and the LGBTQ+ Sleuth
In thinking of mystery novels and the mystery as a genre, it is amazing to think of the wide variety of sub-genres that have emerged within the last one hundred years. Since the ’60s, the LGBTQ+ mystery sub-genre has come to the forefront. Starting as early as 1961 with A Wicked Pack of Cards by Hugh Ross Williamson, and gaining prominence in the later 1960s with the emergence of the pulp novel, the gay sub-genre has helped to expand the mystery genre as a whole. Of significance in the 1960s was the writing of George Baxt, and the introduction of his queer sleuth, Pharaoh Love. In his 1966 novel, A Queer Kind of Death, we follow Pharaoh, a New York City police detective, who is both black and gay, as he investigates the murder of a “handsome” young man. As one examines the emergence of the gay detective from Williams’ 1961 Wicked Pack of Cards through the 1966 release of A Queer Kind of Love, we can see how the gay sleuth and its meteoric rise with Pharaoh Love break out of the gay pulp genre as a fan favorite among general audiences of the mystery genre. Although highly debatable, Love is considered by many to be the first gay detective making way for other authors with main characters that are gay to be introduced by mainstream publishers.
As gay people came out of the proverbial closet, so too did the gay detective. Authors were now able to present the truth, and no longer had to use coded language to express same-sex desire. From Felice Picano’s gripping thriller Lure to the whimsical cozy Simon Kirby-Jones Mysteries of Dean James, the gay sleuth has covered the range from amateur sleuth to police detective to private eye. The gay sleuth is rife with complexity and can serve as a beacon to first time LBGTQ+ readers.
Dave Brandstetter is one of the icons of gay mystery. With his dashing good looks and razor-sharp detection skills, Brandstetter has become the most influential gay detective as he gave a realistic and human identity where prior novels such as Baxt’s novel did not. With this respect Joseph Hansen and the others have set the stage for authors like Grant Michaels who burst onto the scene and out of the closet in 1990.
Born Michael A. Mesrobian, in Lawrence Massachusetts, Grant Michaels epitomized the gay mystery writer in the 1990s, crafting his stereotypical hair stylist and amateur queer sleuth, Stan “Vannos” Kraychik. For Stan, life as an out hairdresser in Boston is awesome. He somehow finds himself solving murders, his identity helps him better understand how and why the murder was committed. In each book, how his views of the world and his role in it alters but it also makes him cherish the people in his life.
Grant Michaels benefits from the writers who came before him, pioneering gay authors who took risks to bring their gay sleuths to life, such as Baxt and Hansen. Grant Michaels stayed true to the story of the emerging amateur gay sleuth by the way he uses the character and plot. This is clearly articulated in the novel Dead on your Feet, where his boyfriend is in the hot seat for the murder of a ballet director. When Stan and the police suspect his lover, he goes into action to prove his innocence and find the true culprit. In this vein, Michaels’ Kraychik continues the role of an amateur sleuth dating back to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. August Dupin, Miss Marple of Agatha Christie or Father Brown from C. K. Chesterton, yet with a queer twist.
What sets Grant Michaels apart from other gay mystery authors is how profoundly he impacts the reader. Throughout the book, Stan spars with his boyfriend Rafik, along with the wide array of characters that appear in the series such as Lieutenant Vito Branco, his boss Nicole, his Abyssinian cat Sugar Baby and his boyfriend Rafik. Rafik and Stan are stretched between the one who assumes his lover is oblivious to his work and the one who demands he listens. A fight many couples have. Much like his character, Michaels is able to articulate his true feels through pace, setting, and plot.
Michaels carries off an amazing story by connecting the reader with Stan and his passionate and lustful relationship with Rafik. The reader is captivated at points by the emotional fervor which Michaels employs to emphasize the importance of the connection between Stan and Rafik. In this and many other ways, Grant Michael’s Dead on Your Feet stands firmly in the canon of LGBTQ+ mystery genre. So then how does it stand up to mainstream mysteries…Quite well.
Through such a dissection of Grant Michaels and his protagonist, Stan, it is possible to see how they fit so splendidly in the LQBTQ mystery genre and in a broader sense within the mystery genre as a whole. It is the job of the author to create such a connection, and Grant Michaels is brilliant at it. To reassess Dead on Your Feet after twenty-five years is to understand that not much has changed as it is just as relevant today as it was in 1993. Dead on your Feet allows the reader to fully immerse themselves into the life and adventures of Stan “Vannos” Kraychik, and explore the world of a gay man in 1993 Boston, and understand the fears and the joys.
—Charles Michelson,
Charles Michelson, a graduate of Lynn University, is a poet and Mystery Junkie and lives in South Florida
In memory of Tatjana and Andre,
with gratitude and respect and love.
Thanks to the patience and
generosity of my friends.
1
Shall We Dance?
I THINK MY LOVER IS KILLING ME.
I don’t mean literally, with a knife or a gun or poison. It’s a more refined yet relentless termination of my life the way it was before I knew him. Not that there was so much to kill. My existence was mostly work and home, work and home, the dull routine broken by an occasional quiet evening with a few close friends, or the rare night of reckless frolic with a noisy gang of heavy drinkers. But at the heart of it, despite the patient love of my friends, despite the extreme social nature of my work as a hairstylist, despite the enduring love of my family and the vague love of my pet, I was lonely for another kind of love. Physical passion had been dormant so long my nether regions were feeling wizen. Then along came Rafik—that’s his name, rhymes with technique—who quickly relieved the anguish of physical loneliness. The cure, however, was not without complication.
It was late March, a rare blue-sky morning to mark the first day of spring. An all-night rain had scrubbed the air and left it sweet. Boston weather had passed that critical point when we natives can safely put away our scarves, gloves, and mukluks, put all of it back into storage until next winter, which on the first day of spring in New England is honestly only six short months away. I was on my way to work, to Snips Salon, on the posh lower end of Newbury Street just around the corner from the Public Garden and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I was early and I knew I had no customers booked that morning, so I decided to pay a surprise visit to Rafik where he works, at the studios of the Boston City Ballet, deep in the South End.
Rafik had been a dancer in Montreal until he injured his hip in a nasty fall during rehearsal five years ago. I hadn’t met him yet, but sometimes I wish I had so that I could have nursed him back to health. He was in his late twenties, just entering the mature phase of his performing career, the best years. But his destiny had abruptly changed course in that moment when an old moving van had backfired wildly outside the studio, and Rafik had lost his precious concentration during his third revolution in midair, and gravity had taken over. He landed badly from the complex aerial tour, crashed directly onto the pelvic crest of his right hip, and cracked it clear through to the ball-and-socket joint. The injury no longer affects his everyday life. But for a performer of classical dance, where at any moment the body’s equilibrium might be directed by only three or four muscle fibers, that kind of injury was the death knell. So to remain with his art, Rafik turned to choreography and teaching. Outwardly he seemed satisfied with the decision, yet I sense that some part of his psyche was scarred and desensitized, some aspect of his emotional growth arrested when his life on stage was interrupted in its progress to artistic fruition. Perhaps that’s one reason he moved to Boston—to give his life a fresh start in a new place. His arrival here certainly changed mine.
So there I was, ruminating about love and art and destiny, neglecting the womby scent of moist soil and the green sprouting things along the sidewalk, blind to tree limbs gauzy with pale buds, unfazed by all the optimistic signs of springtime that pervaded my stroll, as though I could not believe that winter was finally over—that’s when I found myself at the entrance to the studios of the Boston City Ballet. Parked outside the main doorway was Rafik’s motorcycle, which I have nicknamed Big Red. The name comes partly from the color of the paint, and partly from those indelible memories of Rafik’s courtship, when he’d appear unannounced, dressed in “high leather” and balancing the big red machine between his densely muscled thighs.
At his request I rarely visit Rafik at the ballet studios. He seems intent to keep his personal life, including me, separate from the ballet company. That early spring day though, I was waxing romantic, more so than usual, and I wanted to see him. Maybe the arrival of warm weather had got my vital juices moving again after a winter’s siege. But I knew one thing: A whiff of my man would jazz me up that morning.
I pushed my body against one of the massive glass doors and entered the building. The entire structure had been renovated recently inside and out, forged into an exemplar of late-twentieth-century architectural safety. Every aspect of the new design had been color-coordinated, thematically unified, and accessorized. I was certain that someone had used a computer to obtain such flawless and consistent results. It was a long way from the ballet studios of yesteryear, where numerous flights of creaky wooden stairs usually led to a musty old hall. A sense of history prevailed in those places, a lingering of old and sacred ritual. I wondered how the modernized surroundings of the Boston City Ballet affected the artists who worked there. Were their temperaments yanked out from the past, aborted from the long tradition that had conceived their art, and then flung down into the computer-assisted environment of today?
Inside the austere lobby was another world, one unaffected by changes of season. Here were only open space and mundane bodies, lacking all sentiment but in pursuit of absolute beauty, catalyzed by music and refracted into grace and movement—kind of like a fabulous color and cut by me. The receptionist recognized me as Rafik’s friend and told me that company class, which is the ballet class reserved for the performing members of a ballet company, was just about ready to break before “center.”
I trotted up the broad stairway to Studio A, also dubbed the Grand Studio, where company class was always held. Even before I got to the landing, I could hear through the studio’s open door the sound of a concert grand piano, slightly out of tune but swelling and receding with musical phrases of oceanic dimension. Above that turbulent drama I heard the strident voice of an old woman.
“Straaaaaaaaaytch!”
From that bestial wail I knew that Rafik was not teaching company class today. I looked in through the open door. The stratospheric ceiling suggested a cathedral, or else an airplane hangar. From windows cut into the roof high overhead, broad ribbons of yellow sunlight cut diagonally into the huge space and illuminated some of the dancers, as spotlights would on a stage. The scent of clean sweat mingled with the pungency of crushed rosin on the raw wood floor. It had been one of the Boston City Ballet’s most controversial extravagances to install hardwood flooring in the renovated Grand Studio rather than opt for the cheaper but more modern vinyl covering widely used in most other studios and on stages. Rafik had once remarked that dancing on unfinished wood was the best. The aroma and the texture of the long slats of pale wood over the expanse of floor did seem to maintain a link with the past. Perhaps history was still alive here after all, both in the flooring and in the movements being made upon it.
There were about forty-five dancers in the studio, two-thirds ballerinas and one-third ballerinos. Their attire ranged from classic—black tights and white T’s for the men, pink tights and black leotards for the women—to postmodern—shimmering unisex bodysuits of iridescent colors found nowhere in nature, not even in tropical forests. Some of the dancers donned baggy cotton sweats strategically torn to expose the critical knee and hip joints, and a few more, the more brazenly exhibitionist, sported flimsy shorts of skin-tight jersey and even skimpier tops, all sweat-soaked and showing the muscular workings of shoulder, back, chest, buttock, and thigh. All was inspired by a sophisticated pretense of modesty that created more eroticism that actual nakedness would have.
Madame Ekaterina Rubinskaya, the aged ballet mistress of the Boston City Ballet, was conducting class, or more correctly directing the show, since the combined forces of music, color, and space made everything inside the ballet studio larger than life, like a CinemaScope, Technicolor, and SurroundSound spectacular. I had met Madame once before, back when Rafik first started working for the company, but I had never seen the old woman in action. Now she was supervising a complex set of stre
tches at the barre, the last exercise for the dancers before the center.
Madame Rubinskaya, or Rubi, as Rafik secretly called her, carried a switch of flexible springy willow as she strutted like a field marshal among the dancers, ready to deliver a light swat to an unstretched knee or a raised shoulder, or to any of a few hundred other ill-placed joints and muscles. Her clever eyes caught every movement in that cavernous studio. Even the pianist watched her warily, as though she might deliver a smart slap to his knuckles at a wrong note or a missed beat. Madame noticed me too, the instant I arrived at the open doorway. She walked toward me as she screamed blood curdling orders to the dancers.
“Up! Is all up! Hold back strong! Eeeeeeeeeee, poooosh!”
So this was art.
She stopped at the open door and faced me directly. She was surprisingly short so close up, and I felt myself drawn downward to her, almost against my will. Her entire torso—bust, waist, and hips— was homogenized into a single, shapeless unit, but one that looked firm and strong despite its age. Her face was a prehistoric terrain heavily coated with foundation makeup, a vain attempt to camouflage the ravages of time. But with no other makeup, her features receded into the mask that was her face. Only her eyes remained wide and alert. Our heads were suddenly close, and I could smell the soft wool of her wine-colored cardigan. She whispered like a conspirator, but I heard her clearly in spite of a rush of notes from the piano at that moment.