Ice blues

Former US child actor Chad Allen, an out gay, had no worries about taking the lead role in the filmed adaptations made for cable TV of the Donald Strachey mysteries, featuring "America's first gay detective". Two of them appeared in 2008, On the Other Hand, Death and Ice Blues, following in the successful screen-steps of Shock to the System (2006) and Third Man Out (2005).

The novels' originality lay in the matter-of-factual presentation of Strachey as an Albany private detective who happens to be gay, and in a lifetime partnership with an assistant to a female New York senator. They were written by an American, Richard Lipez, using the pen name Richard Stevenson, starting with the not-yet-filmed Death Trick, published in 1981 prior to Lipez coming out (with the father-of-two getting divorced in 1989). Ten other books followed, and Lipez became a gay activist in an open relationship with a sculptor.

Newfoundland-born Sebastian Spence has played Strachey's partner in all four films, and the latest was filmed in his home city of Vancouver. All four have been directed by Canada-born Ron Oliver, whose IMDb entry notes that his gay marriage of 2000 ended in divorce after three years. Plots of the novels have been similarly out. In Third Man Out, a notorious outer of gays received death threats, in Shock to the System Strachey solved the murder of a student while the screenplay examined social attitudes and gay conversion; the third film in the series involved an older lesbian couple.

Ice Blues, less focused on homosexuality, sees Strachey investigating whys and wherefores in the funding of one of his lover's favourite charity organisations for the city's youth. The short (80-minute) screenplay includes a runaway girl, a drug dealer making porn movies, a family's corrupt law firm, a vanished mother and murdered son, millions in bearer bonds, a romantic policeman, an English black thug and height-challenged Strachey's even shorter ethnic-Chinese sidekick.

By the time the plot reaches its denouements, after mediocre fisticuffs, and the detective and his slightly fey and whimsical partner have kissed a few times, it has become a gay-accented version of a B movie. Competently acted, professionally produced, almost totally forgettable.