HANSEN, JOSEPH

born July 19, 1923, Aberdeen, S.D., U.S. American writer, author of a series of crime novels featuring the homosexual insurance investigator and detective Dave Brandstetter. Hansen, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Rose Brock and James Colton, began his career as an editor, novelist, and journalist in the mid-1960s. He taught writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1977 to 1986. In Fadeout (1970), the first novel to feature Brandstetter, the detective falls in love with a man whom he clears of murder charges. Death Claims (1973) is about surviving the death of a lover. Brandstetter investigates the murder of the owner of a bar for homosexuals in Troublemaker (1975). In Early Graves (1987) he comes out of retirement to trace a serial killer who murders men who have AIDS. Brandstetter also appears in several other novels and in Brandstetter and Others (1984), a collection of short stories. In addition to the Brandstetter series, Hansen wrote the novels A Smile in His Lifetime (1981), Backtrack (1982), Job's Year (1983), and Jack of Hearts (1995), as well as the short-story collections The Dog and Other Stories (1979), Bohannon's Book (1988), and Bohannon's Country (1993).