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• The rose exterminator : a novel
  This gay sado-masochistic mystery novel was the third and final work of fiction by William Carney (1922-1987), after ‘The Real Thing’ (1968) and ‘A Year in a Closet’ (1974). If it seems a niche subgenre, it was one Carney carved out for himself successfully, alongside employment as a university teacher of French – ‘The Real Thing’ was influenced by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century epistolary novel ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ – and as a restorer of Victorian and Edwardian houses. As well as being a guide to the S/M lifestyle and the first generation of West Coast ‘leathermen’, Carney’s books provide an insight into late 1960s and 1970s gay life in San Francisco more generally. Carney’s papers are now held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.