If there is a confession to be made, Charles thinks, it’s less to do with the fact that he’s never kissed a man before and more to do with his erstwhile devotion to a certain children’s television program that aired from 1998-2001 and everything that devotion has since grown—mutated—into.

Like many classic mystery novels, this one has a detective/sidekick pair. The detective, Julian Ellsworth, is the former child star of an early 2000s program called Young Sherlock. The sidekick, Charles Shelley, is a former obsessive fan of the TV show. The problem: Julian hates when people talk about his past, so Charles hasn’t told Julian he used to watch his show. The problem part 2: once they start kissing, keeping that secret gets a lot more uncomfortable for Charles.

One key thing I’m trying to get at in the novel is the relationship between fantasy and real life, and the extraordinarily difficult process of disentangling the two when it comes to desire. What do you actually want, and what do you just want to imagine? How much of the love you feel for people and places and things comes from the idea you have of them in your head? What’s “real” anyway? And also, are you kissing the detective you just starting working for because you’re really attracted to him, or because he’s the representative of everything you loved and wanted to be and do in your childhood??

p.s. I made the poster above!