I was skeptical a few years back when here! TV CEO Paul Colichman announced that his fledgling gay TV network wouldn’t just be offering the usual “coming out” fare, but would also be giving us gay genre programming — science fiction adventures and supernatural thrillers and mysteries.

But after a few years of shows like Dante’s Cove and movies like the gay asteroid movie Deadly Skies (2005), it’s now clear that Colichman was telling the truth.

Quality has been spotty on some of these projects (for the life of me, I still can’t sit through a whole episode of Dante’s Cove). And sure enough, here!’s first foray into the mystery genre, a 2005 movie adaptation of Third Man Out, one of Richard Stevenson’s Donald Strachey mystery novels, was disappointing on almost all counts.

Things got considerably better on the mystery front with the second Donald Strachey entry, 2006’s Shock to the System — and better still with this year’s Kiss Me Deadly, the Robert Gant-starrer that here! billed as “a gay James Bond” (though “a gay Bourne Identity” was a more accurate description).

And now, their latest Donald Strachey Mystery, On the Other Hand Death, is easily the network’s best mystery to date.

Even though the local authorities are none too enamored of him, private investigator Donald Strachey (Chad Allen) is the go-to guy for gay-related crimes in Albany, New York. In this latest installment, he finds himself helping an older lesbian couple (Margot Kidder and Gabrielle Rose), the apparent victims of a hate crime. The two have been together forever, and they’re as comfortable as an old quilt. But now they’re being terrorized by someone upset with Kidder’s character, a high school teacher who recently came out and who is becoming increasingly outspoken on the subject of GLBT rights.

Meanwhile, there’s a sexy new guy in town, the clean-cut Andrew, to give the lesbian couple a hand with their increasingly dangerous situation. He’s a former student of Kidder’s and, oh, yeah, he just happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Donald’s partner Timmy (Sebastian Spence).

Margot Kidder (left), Sebastian Spence & Chad Allen (right)

Of course, this being a mystery, no one is exactly who they appear to be. Before long, the not-so-clean-cut Andrew is naked in the moonlight, trying to seduce Donald away from his partner. “Don’t tell me you’re monogamous,” he says disdainfully when the private investigator turns him down.

The best part of On the Other Hand Death is its mystery, which is the series’ tightest so far — complicated enough to surprise, yet easy enough to understand once all the pieces are revealed.  A good mystery looks so simple and obvious in retrospect — so much so that the writers almost never get the credit they deserve. But decades of hackneyed TV series like Murder, She Wrote prove that writing a good television mystery is lot more difficult than it looks.

Previous Donald Strachey installments, which have been more or less faithful to the Stevenson novels that were written in the 80s and 90s, suffered from a clunky approach to some seemingly dated gay issues and references. That isn’t a problem here.

As Strachey, Chad Allen is terrific — sexy, funny, confident, and almost immediately in way over his head.

As for the supporting players, it’s wonderful to see familiar faces in these here! films — Sean Young in Third Man Out and Morgan Fairchild in Shock to the System. But Margot Kidder is the best of the bunch. Quite a few years have passed since she starred as Lois Lane in the Superman films, but she’s lost none of her famous spunk.