Gravedigger

19 July 1923 – 24 November 2004

Joseph Hansen was an American crime writer and poet. Although he published almost forty books in a wide variety of genres, Hansen is best remembered for his ground breaking series of crime novels starring his most iconic creation, Dave Brandstetter, an openly homosexual private eye who still embodied the tough, no-nonsense personality of the classic hardboiled protagonist. His first adventure, *Fadeout*, was published in 1970, and over the next twenty-one years eleven more entries in the series were written. Hansen published his first work, a poem, in *The New Yorker*, in 1952. He also published poetry in other magazines, briefly sang with a folk-music-group on a California radio-station,…