I don’t read many genre books but a bisexual detective from 1980 was simply too intriguing to pass up. I went into Duffy without knowing anything about it - and I’m glad I did. It allowed me to fully experience the novel from both a literary and queer perspective.

Duffy starts out as a silly mystery in the posh London suburbs - the stakes are pretty low and Kavanagh paints both the victims and the villains with a goofy, satirical tone. The first few chapters of the book could easily be a cosy English mystery.

But then we meet our detective, the titular Duffy, and it becomes very clear he’s not a cosy mystery detective, he’s a hardboiled, noir private eye. He’s smarter than all of the other characters, has a troubled past that’s left him bitter and traumatised, he’s broke and his business isn’t going well but he’s attractive and has a broad range of skills and connections.

As he starts untangling the silly suburb mystery, his investigation takes him into the seedy underbelly of London. Duffy takes us into full hardboiled territory, including nighttime allies and corrupt policemen. We visit a lot of porn cinemas and peep shows but their detailed descriptions are not for the reader’s titillation - Kavanagh focuses on the used tissues on the floor, on business transactions, on talking to sex workers off duty rather than buying into the sexy illusion they’re selling.

Duffy is very explicitly bisexual - we meet his ex girlfriend and we also learn about him cruising gay bars.

“Duffy’s mind idled over the choice between trawling for a man and trawling for a woman. To Duffy it was like choosing between bacon and egg and bacon and tomato. Whichever you decided on you had a good time; it was just what your taste-buds felt like that evening.”

Seeing a book older than me portray a bisexual character in such a direct, sympathetic way without sanitising him was truly fascinating. Duffy is also not a character who “just happens to be bisexual”. As he delves deeper into the mystery, he discovers how the case is connected to his own dark past, and homophobia becomes not just a passing remark by side characters but the main theme of the book. Kavanagh dissects in painful, brutal detail, how homophobic legislation, and homophobic conflation of queerness with pedophilia are leveraged against LGBT people, including by the police.

Until 1994, the age of consent in the UK for sex between men was 21 (five years higher than for straight sex) and it was easy to use this legislation against queer men, as it is used against Duffy. His bisexuality is integral to the commentary of the novel. Despite the fact that his main love interest is a woman, he is actively marginalised by his bisexuality in a way I have rarely seen portrayed in media.

Dan Kavanagh is the pen name of the award winning author Julian Barnes. Barnes said Duffy was a personal challenge to see how fast he could write, and was finished in two weeks. There is definitely some stylistic sloppiness and self indulgence in Duffy that seems like it could be a result of such a short writing window, but the clever structure makes up for it. The structure also makes me wonder whether the sloppiness and self indulgence might actually be intentional nods to the conventions of the genre.

The first print of the book featured on the cover a pretty, disembodied foot wearing a pink stiletto, presumably a sex worker’s. It’s a trashy cover that seems in direct opposition to Kavanagh distinctly non-erotic descriptions of the sex industry. The only time Duffy actually indulges in it for his own pleasure, the only scene that isn’t described in a naturalistic but a titillating tone, turns out to be a trap, a turning point for both Duffy and the reader.

I wonder whether Duffy was written as meta-commentary of the genre, designed to lure in readers with the cheapest promise of sex and violence and then cut the ground from under their feet and face them with a truly sickening display of child abuse and homophobia that is too disturbing to enjoy as a trashy read.

Of course, I might be reading into it. But the fact that such a reading is possible speaks well for Duffy. This was a thoroughly fascinating read - both as an 80s time capsule and as a crime novel.