GEORGE BAXT – The Affair at Royalties. Scribners, hardcover, 1972. Intl Polygonics Ltd., paperback, 1988. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1971.

   George Baxt is best known for his Pharaoh Love trilogy — a series of murder mysteries written in the late 1960s and set in the underground of homosexual New York. The books feature a bizarre homosexual black police detective, Pharaoh Love. Another Baxt series features the popular detective duo Sylvia Plotkin and Max Van Larsen, a pair of wacky lovers and sometime partners in crime detection who run across like-minded wackos in the melting pot of New York City.

   The Affair at Royalties is no less interesting than the above, although certainly more conservative. A good-looking and brilliant young Englishwoman regains consciousness in what they tell her is her very own bed. She has suffered a total memory loss, nerve-racking in itself, but to make matters worse, she is also the suspect in a brutal murder of which, of course, she has no memory.

   She can’t even remember which of the men at her bedside is her husband, much less if she loves him or not, so she makes eyes at one of them anyway. Unfortunately, he turns out to be the local homicide inspector, and the relationship begins on a rocky note.

   As she slowly regains her memory, she finds she is a notorious mystery-story writer. We watch her put her extraordinary analytic mind (and loud mouth) to work solving the mystery of her own amnesia, risking- — with true “liberated” woman chutzpah — the possibility that she will, in the process, indict herself for murder.

   Good characters, plot, movement, and a particularly nice rendition of what happens when the strong female meets the strong male: Will they destroy each other or fall in love?

   Other notable Baxt titles are A Queer Kind of Death (1966), with Pharaoh Love, and “I!” Said the Demon (1969), with Plotkin and Van Larsen.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.