A Queer Case

A Queer Case

Author: Robert Holtom

Rating: A

Vibe:  A clever, fair-play whodunit with a sparkling queer hero—it just occasionally underlines what it's already shown you so well.

Selby Bigge keeps two sets of books. By day he's a bank clerk in 1929 London, tallying other people's fortunes from behind a desk he's desperate to escape. By night he slips into the city's queer underworld—the River Styx and its kind—where a young man can find company, if not love, as long as he stays careful. When he runs into Patrick Duker, a handsome old acquaintance from his Oxford days and the son of banking millionaire Sir Lionel Duker, Selby gets hauled up out of his dreary bedsit and into a gilded world of dinners at the Ritz and a mansion on Hampstead Heath. Then, after a party, someone turns up strangled in the billiard room, and everyone in the house has a reason to have done it. Selby plays detective. The catch is that every question he asks is a small act of risk, because the world he's investigating would happily see him arrested for what he is.

As a mystery, A Queer Case plays fair. Holtom does the hard, old-fashioned thing—every clue is on the page, hiding in plain sight, so that when the solution arrives it feels less like a trick than a debt being paid. I'm a sucker for a closed-circle whodunit, and this one is built with real care—a houseful of suspects, a tidy tangle of motives, red herrings that actually herring, and a final click where the scattered details snap into one clean picture. The billiard-room corpse is practically a Clued mystery, and Holtom knows it. Agatha Christie is a stated influence, and you can feel her bones in the construction, with a dash of Noël Coward in the banter. It's the kind of book you'll want to flip back through afterward just to admire how cleanly you were fooled.

But the reason I tore through it isn't the puzzle—it's Selby. He's sharp, funny, hopelessly romantic under the armor, and entirely willing to settle for sex while he waits for love. What I loved most is what he isn't. So many period queer characters get handed to us pre-broken, defined by shame and self-loathing and an early grave. Selby refuses that script. He gets to be witty and horny and brave and fully alive, and Holtom—who is queer and non-binary, and clearly writing from inside the tradition rather than peering in at it—treats that joy as its own kind of resistance. He's also given a wonderful partner in crime in Theodora Smythe, Theo when the occasion calls for it, an aristocratic ally whose fluidity the book wears lightly and gladly.

And then there's the Polari. If it's new to you, Polari was the coded slang gay men used in Britain back when being gay could cost you your freedom—a language stitched together from Italian, Romani, theater cant, and rhyming slang, used to clock allies and speak safely in rooms full of people who might turn you in. Holtom threads it through the book so naturally that you pick it up the way you absorb vocabulary in a subtitled film—bona, vada, the gloriously silly fantabulosa—until you're half-fluent and fully charmed. It's a history lesson that never once feels like homework, and it does something quietly moving along the way. It reminds you that queer people have always built private worlds inside hostile ones, that the slang and the nightclubs and the in-jokes were never frivolous but survival with a sense of style. Reading it now, with so much of that hard-won ground being refought in legislatures on both sides of the Atlantic, the book's lightness starts to feel almost defiant.

Quibble aside, this is a debut that knows exactly what it is and pulls it off with style. It won the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Mystery, with a Dagger nomination on top, and you can see why—it delivers the airtight pleasures of Golden Age crime while handing the genre's center stage to the people who usually only haunt its margins. And the good news for anyone who finishes it wanting more (hi, it's me) is that the wait is already over. The sequel, A Morbid Passion, just landed, sending Selby and Theo to a fancy-dress servants' ball at the Royal Albert Hall with a fresh body to find. Mine's queued up.