JAMES LEAR

 It’s story time for fans of gay erotic books: Once upon a time, a perfectly respectable British writer named Rupert Smith was complaining to a friend about how hard he was finding it to get his second novel published. Fortunately, the friend had in mind a surefire route to the bookshelves of readers everywhere: “Have you ever thought of writing porn?” Inspired, Smith wrote a very erotic gay-themed rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped called The Low Road. Thus Rupert Smith became James Lear, the pseudonymous writer of some of the smartest and sexiest gay erotic books and gay mystery books around. In his books The Low Road, The Back Passage, The Secret Tunnel and A Sticky End, James Lear combines period English atmosphere with page-turning gay mystery along with a healthy sense of humor and, of course, hot, hot sex. His goal: “Two orgasms per chapter.” He alternates gay erotic books written as James Lear with more traditional fiction written as Rupert Smith; the former have been known to outsell the latter, to his bemusement.