A few years ago, Rupert Smith was complaining in frustration to a fellow writer about his inability to find a publisher for a second novel. “Have you ever thought of writing porn,” his friend asked.

Rupert Smith took on a new author name, James Lear, and started writing gay erotica. His first book was entitled “The Low Road”, which will become available again in September 2009.

His second book, recently republished, was The Palace of Varieties, for which Mr. Lear won the “Writer Of The Year Award” at the 2008 Erotic Awards in London.

His third book, which was first published in 2006, is a British Country House murder mystery entitled The Back Passage – my personal favorite of Lear’s current works.

The fourth James Lear novel was an American Civil War epic entitled Hot Valley which has a wealthy white young man with a black slave frequently sexually entwined.

I have recently enjoyed reading Lear’s latest work The Secret Tunnel, which is a parody of the “Murder on the Orient Express” – a sex-drenched comic whodunit that would have made Agatha Christie blush.

While The Secret Tunnel is not a sequel to The Back Passage, it allows author James Lear to bring back two wonderful characters, namely Mitch and Boy.

In The Back Passage, the handsome and muscular Edward “Mitch” Mitchell was a college student visiting an English country estate for a holiday weekend – which happened to include finding a body in a closet.

In The Secret Tunnel, school days are over and Mitch has begun to settle down to a career as a doctor in Edinburgh, living a life with his partner in the year 1928.

Accepting an invitation to London from his ex-lover Harry “Boy” Morgan, he jumps aboard the Flying Scotsman, hornier than ever, and the ride is anything but smooth.

A good crime novel follows a basic formula of crime, investigation and solution. The porn parallel formula would be encounter, seduction and sex.

While a whodunit plots this pattern across an entire book, James Lear must repeat it several times within one novel, he offering at least one orgasm per chapter. In The Secret Tunnel, the sex takes you along with the plot and becomes an integral part of the entire story.

The Secret Tunnel introduces a whole cast of colorful characters from closeted film stars, hairy legged kilt-wearing highlanders, fascist dowagers, bent coppers and gay royalty. Mitch’s new sidekick, a stowaway Belgian power-bottom Bertrand Damseaux, is supposed to vaguely remind readers of Hercule Poirot.

A dead body tumbles out of the train toilet and you have a magical mix of comedy, mystery and non-stop sex as the plot giddily does its own twisting and turning – piling up clues and theories.

The Secret Tunnel has an ensemble of memorable characters, well-defined settings with period detail and thoroughly likeable heroes – an excellent well-written story.

My favorite though remains The Back Passage with its feverish erotic detail.

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