[In the following review, Glyde favorably assesses the Tales novels, discussing the difference in tone of the first three volumes with that of the last three.]

The daily column in the form of a story (no rumination allowed): it worked for Dickens, and Armistead Maupin, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, quickly saw an advantage in the agonizing hurry to get each instalment out on time. Current events and absurdities could be skinned and fictionalized immediately. What Maupin calls "defenders of serious journalism" complained, but to no avail. In this landscape, there are no expanses of contemplative and plot-wasting sky. Everything connects tightly and tantalisingly. There is much for lovers of fiction (and soaps): love, despair (but not for long), idiosyncrasy and the death of the really bad, carefully mixed with the preoccupations of real-life readers.

From cock-rings to cruets, from The Karmic Anchovy to thirtysomething, Maupin has described thirteen years in the life of a city and its people. Tales of the City begins in 1976, when the bath-houses of San Francisco still thrummed with the fearless frothings of the happy. Heads or tails, you might say, are the choices where sex and dope are the forces of life, followed, at a distance, by money. San Francisco also seems to be full of escapees from duller parts of the United States. Maupin's cycle intertwines the lives of the newcomers and their landlady, Mary Ann, Mrs. Madrigal, Michael and Dede, with the rich and established of the A-list.

Flirting with the sentimental, the stories are full of companionship, support and love, as if the heart of San Francisco were a kind of up-to-date paradise where hypocrisy, and drug raids, are unknown. This feeling is set against the occasional grey missive from Michael's parents, archetypal Christian bigots from the sticks. A story-book morality is definitely at work here. A child pornographer falls off a cliff. A really unpleasant character burns to death when his car overturns. But reality intrudes as San Francisco changes, over the years, from the Big Dildo into the Big Bleeper. Film showings are interrupted by a four-hourly shower of electronic alarms that remind the HIV-positive to take their AZT. "In this town", thinks Michael, "the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name almost never shuts up." His words have a sadder ring after he tests positive himself.

The first three books, Tales of the City, More Tales of the City and Further Tales of the City, run to 1981, indulging decadeist reflections on what was and can never be regained. Then follow two more, Babycakes and Significant Others, before Sure of You, the last in the series, which takes us up to 1989. By the final book, Maupin's style has mellowed into longer conversations, in which careers are more than just diversions. The atmosphere is far more domestic, with no more providential deaths and outrageous undercurrents. The story rests on the up-to-the-moment dilemma of Mary Ann. By now a successful local television chat show host and married to an ex-Barbary Lane housemate, she is offered the syndicated big time in New York. She takes it, leaving husband and adopted daughter behind. She barely struggles, with herself at any rate, to cast off the last twelve years, cutting loose from the seat of all her experience much as she left Cleveland as a young innocent desperate to see the world. Sure of You is less exciting than the earlier books but fittingly so, as the heroes fight, whine, laugh and hug their way into middle age.

The dialogue, which carries nearly everything, is witty but not self-consciously comic, and a far cry from the nebulous verbalizing of so much contemporary fiction. Cameos abound: Michael slow dancing with a construction worker in Reno, the mailboy sacked for xeroxing his genitals and two lonely people's binocular relationship through their apartment windows. Maupin also knows the important trick of using brand names for social comment, though to the uninitiated many of them are meaningless. Although Maupin had to make some revisions when putting his columns into novel from, the idea, in the first three books, of printing them in their daily chunks with titles works brilliantly. The story moves quickly back and forth, creating suspense by forcing us to wait six or seven installments before returning to the nail-biting truth. We are looking at a country which could cut the sound of Dustin Hoffman and his son peeing in the television showing of Kramer vs Kramer, but allows Freddy Krueger, the child-molester of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, to romp freely in the imaginations—and pockets—of every one of its children. Bizarre dualities of all kinds keep life going at 28 Barbary Lane. It is not coy to refuse to divulge the Tales' many plots. The surprises give such pleasure that it would be sadistic to take it away.