Published in 2017/2018, Jeff Stookey’s Medicine for the Blues trilogy—beginning with Acquaintance and continuing through Chicago Blues and Dangerous Medicine—is not exactly a new series, though its themes feel timelessly relevant. Set across the 1920s, the trilogy is an LGBT epic that follows Carl Holman and jazz musician Jimmy Harper and their tumultuous relationship over the years. With each book sitting at roughly 300 pages, it’s an impressive achievement both in terms of the series’ historical scope and the moving story at its heart.
The three books are framed as Carl’s memoirs, written late in life after Jimmy’s death, although Carl largely tells the story more like a traditional novelist than a diarist, with few interruptions from the framing device itself. Carl is the main protagonist, though Jimmy increasingly becomes a co-lead, especially in the second volume. I was initially a bit confused about how Jimmy’s POV parts would be explained given it is supposed to be a memoir, but apparently Carl is imagining Jimmy’s perspective based off what he reported to him.
What struck me immediately was the scale of the project. LGBT fiction produces relatively few works that feel this expansive. Stookey attempts something closer to an old-fashioned literary saga, tracing how queer people got by in the twentieth century before the language of modern gay identity fully existed. It reminded me less of contemporary LGBT fiction and more of sprawling twentieth-century literary epics where personal lives unfold alongside enormous social and political change.
The three novels build on each other, focusing on different stages of Carl and Jimmy’s relationship:
Acquaintance
The first book, Acquaintance, focuses mainly on Carl and his “acquaintance” and increasing feelings for Jimmy in 1920s Portland. Carl is already cautious by the time the novel begins. He has seen more liberal attitudes while in Europe after the First World War, but he has returned to Oregon understanding exactly how much risk attaches to being discovered. Jimmy enters his life through music and social gatherings, and the relationship develops slowly and believably.
Even if one never continued beyond Acquaintance, the first novel alone would still be worth reading simply for a taste of Carl and Jimmy’s beautiful relationship. The sequels expand the historical scope and deepen the themes considerably, but the emotional core is already fully present in the opening volume: two intelligent men cautiously learning how to trust one another in a society that offers them very little language or safety with which to do so. The author does not rush intimacy or reduce the relationship to tragedy or sex alone. Instead, he allows affection to emerge naturally like real people had to in this period, where merely telling someone your sexuality carried risks.
Overall I really enjoyed Acquaintance, and found it to be a lovely introduction to the series. It’s the type of book that ought to be adapted into a series like Fellow Travelers. Carl’s narration is intelligent and introspective without becoming overly ornate, while the contrast between his personality and Jimmy’s gives their conversations a natural warmth and charm.
Chicago Blues
Chicago Blues shifts focus more heavily toward Jimmy. He travels to Chicago with the Diggs Monroe Orchestra hoping for success as a musician, finds himself drawn into speakeasies, organised crime, drag culture and the nightlife of the Jazz Age. The second book is broader and more atmospheric than the first. Chicago is depicted as exciting but unstable, full of performance and reinvention. Jimmy encounters a queer world much larger and more varied than the relatively restrained environment of Portland, though always shadowed by the fear of being found out.
The strongest parts of this volume are its depictions of performance culture and nightlife. Stookey clearly enjoys writing about the period. Jimmy’s experiences also broaden the trilogy’s treatment of sexuality and gender. The novel includes gender nonconforming characters without reducing them to novelty or comic relief. Jimmy himself becomes more interesting here because he is separated somewhat from Carl’s perspective, and his character goes through development during his experiences in Chicago.
Chicago Blues is probably the loosest book structurally. Certain sections feel episodic, and some secondary characters disappear almost as quickly as they arrive. Still, it expands the trilogy effectively and prevents the overall story from becoming too confined to Carl. It also gives the series a stronger sense of scale by showing how differently queer life could exist from city to city during the period.
Dangerous Medicine
The final volume of the series, Dangerous Medicine ends things strongly, as the book returns more strongly to Carl’s perspective and deals heavily with ageing and historical change. Later sections are where the trilogy’s historical interests arguably become the most explicit. The book is as usual thoroughly well-researched, particularly regarding Pacific Northwest history and the treatment of homosexuality in the twentieth century.
What distinguishes Dangerous Medicine from the earlier books in my opinion is the maturer atmosphere. The relationship between Carl and Jimmy feels most fully realised in this final volume, as Stookey focuses less on secrecy and more on companionship and the sad realities of being gay in this time. The title Dangerous Medicine is fitting as Carl faces both the limits and harms of the medical establishment he once trusted, a profession which at the time viewed homosexuality as something unnatural, and treats him as such.
The dialogue throughout the trilogy is consistently strong and believable. Conversations rarely feel overly modern, yet they also avoid sounding stiff or theatrical. Carl and Jimmy’s exchanges in particular carry an awkward intimacy that suits two men trying to navigate feelings they have spent years suppressing. One strong line comes in the first chapter when Carl reflects, “I watched for a time, pretending to be more seduced by the music than the maker,” a moment that captures the taboo atmosphere in the books.
The era where the books are set was obviously a time where homosexuality was medicalised, criminalised and rarely discussed openly. Stookey does a great job of bringing this period to life, showing the different ways people would have understood homosexuality, with reference to the Greeks and Oscar Wilde. Carl reflects on medical terminology surrounding “inversion,” and throughout the novels there is an awareness that even educated people often lacked a coherent framework for understanding same-sex attraction, outside shame or pathology. The books are particularly effective at depicting how secrecy shaped ordinary behaviour, from friendships to careers to innocent social interactions.
The prose in Acquaintance is accessible and readable, while still sounding rooted in the period. Characters use phrases like “Johnny-on-the-spot,” casually refer to “Negro jazz,” discuss silent movie stars and speak with assumptions appropriate to the 1920s without sounding like caricatures. Stookey understands that historical fiction works best when period detail feels absorbed into everyday life rather than paraded in front of the reader.
It also has to be said Carl and Jimmy aren’t the only strong characters in the books. The side characters are also pretty compelling. Gwen and Charlie in particular gradually become some of the most interesting female figures in the trilogy. Stookey also populates the novels with figures from across the social spectrum, creating the sense of an entire hidden social network. Even some of the more unpleasant characters linger in the memory, particularly those connected to the Ku Klux Klan movement like Dr Gowan and the reactionary politics surrounding it.
The author is very well read and not especially shy about showing it. Carl fairly often digresses into reflections on topics like medicine, classical literature, psychology and anatomy, and the epigraphs are a nice touch. The passage where Carl describes touching Jimmy’s skin through the language of epidermal layers and nerve endings is unusual, oddly philosophical, and genuinely beautiful writing:
“Just above a basement membrane of fibrous material, lies the stratum germinativum, where the basal cells reside — the only living cells of the epidermis… Slowly these cells mature, creating a protective barrier, a boundary between the body’s inside and its outside, between the self and the non-self. The boundary between my hand and Jimmy Harper’s neck.”
Passages like this could easily have become pretentious in another writer’s hands, yet here they fit Carl’s narration perfectly.
Most importantly, the trilogy gives sustained attention to a period of queer history that is often either ignored or simplified, and would be very useful to anyone interested in learning about this period of history. These books are less interested in dramatic public events than in how historical pressures shape private lives. Carl and Jimmy are not presented as symbols or modern people awkwardly transplanted into the past. They feel shaped by their own era, including its limitations and blind spots, and like real people you could meet if you had a time machine.
In sum, Medicine for the Blues works both as an LGBT romance trilogy, and as a character study and historical novel. The era is convincingly rendered, and the characters and their relationships are engaging enough to carry the three books. By the second book, I bet you will find yourself rooting for Carl and Jimmy to get the happy ending history rarely allowed men like them.
Final verdict: For fans of The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Little Life and Maurice, Medicine for the Blues is an immersive, deeply researched historical epic. By the end, Carl and Jimmy feel less like fictional protagonists and more like long lost friends, the surviving traces of lives history preferred not to record.
You can get your copy of the Medicine for the Blues Trilogy here!
