#BlogTour-‘Careless Whisper’ by TS Hunter

About the book…

It’s 1986, and Adam Cave, lead singer of sensational pop group Loose Lips, is struggling to stay in the closet, especially as his group is going through a messy split, and media speculation about the reasons behind it are rife.

Joe Stone is assigned to Adam as a runner for the behind-the-scenes, warts and all expose of the recording of the bands last album, and an unlikely friendship begins to form.

But when Adam’s manager, Jack Eddy, is found dead in Adam’s hotel room, in what looks like a sex game gone wrong, Joe turns to his flatmate, Russell, to help him clear the pop star’s name, and keep his secret.

Russell, meanwhile, has a secret of his own. He’s just been for a test, the results of which may change his life forever.

I am of a certain age who remembers taping the top 40, trying to find that sweet spot between the end of the son but before the dj started talking,miming along to Top Of The Pops and doing a paper round that I got paid for in issues of Look-In, Smash Hits and then NME.

This is a perfect slice of nostalgia, placed in a very set area of London that ticks all the nostalgia boxes-Walkman? Check! Manufactured bands? Check! Murder? Wait a minute now…

Threaded through this murder mystery is a very real sense of time and place.It’s a whodunnit, for sure, so it will meet the expectations of crime lovers, yet it deals with very real issues that really cause you to pause, reflect and realise that there was so much going on beneath the fluorescent lights and glitter of the time.

Part of the manufactured image is to play to the teen girls who lapped up records by boy bands like kittens with a bowl of cream-this was the era of the Hit Factory, bands like Bros and Brother Beyond were gods of the charts. A gay lead singer, at a time when the decrimininalisation of homosexuality was still in the minds of most of the adult population would be career suicide. Added to that persona non grata of the gay man in the public eye was the looming threat of HIV and a group of people who were already discriminated against, murdered, beaten and subjugated into hiding were about to face their toughest challenge yet. This is further cemented in the reader’s mind by the seemingly casual throwaway line about MAry Whitehouse and Channel 4. However, Mary Whitehouse was a self appointed guardian of censorship and moral values and Channel 4 was seen as proof positive of the decline of public decency as they had programmes featuring swearing, nudity, discussions about sex…we were, as a society, heading towards a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah,god help us all!

With this context in mind, it is all too easy to visualise the panic surrounding an increasingly unstable, closeted singer of Loose Lips letting this secret fly before the documentary of the band recording their last album is filmed. There is a journalist from Smash Hits hanging around,a manager trying to rein in his money making machine and a young singer on the edge.

Added to that, a runner who is juts out of a relationship, and a flatmate with secrets of his own…who has the most to lose in this scenario?

Unless the mysterious Mr Hunter has a time machine and has gone back to the 80’s , his youthful appearance suggests that he may have not been old enough to have remembered them this acutely, so I going with the alchemy school of thought on how he managed to conjure, so vividly, a time through characters who happen to be gay. I am hopeful that this is sensitively phrased without causing offence-please call me on it if it is not- but this is absolutely mainstream fiction with characters who happen to be gay men. It’s not their defining characteristic, they are all people who are being treated appallingly by the social standards at the time which made it deadly for them to be obviously homosexual.

‘Careless Whisper’ is a novella about a lie,or is it about the truth- the title is perfect, the band ironically named, perfectly named, and a lot of story is packed into these 47 pages. It’s not a niche publication, it deserves to be bandied about in the mainstream and take it’s place on booksellers tables with pride.

Thank you Red Dog Press for the blogtour opportunity and TS Hunter for letting me read your fabulous novella.

The Soho Noir series can be bought via the link below , via the Red Dog Press site.

The Soho Noir series is growing into a collection that readers are prud to say they have read-this is the first one that I have read in full and I am about to quickly backtrack to the first two before the next issue is released.

Absolutely loved it! Bravo!

About the author…

Claiming to be at least half-Welsh, T.S. Hunter lived in South Wales for much of his latter teens, moving to London as soon as confidence and finances allowed. He never looked back.

He has variously been a teacher, a cocktail waiter, a podium dancer and a removal man, but his passion for writing has been the only constant.

He’s a confident and engaging speaker and guest, who is as passionate about writing and storytelling as he is about promoting mainstream LGBT fiction.

He now lives with his husband in the country, and is active on social media.

Links-https://www.reddogpress.co.uk/all-books

Twitter @TSHunter

@RedDogTweets