California teenager Alan Tarr, extraordinarily bright, has faced challenges in his short life: his father Eric, to whom he bears a striking resemblance ("small, and fair haired, and on the pretty side of handsome"), chose a career as a movie actor, rarely rising beyond bit parts. He lived a somewhat sordid life which ended suddenly when he fell off a balcony. Though his father was charismatic, he made a lot of enemies. One of his friends states: "Eric was a disease you don't recover from."

Alan was raised by his mother, Babe, a scraping-by-at-best piano bar entertainer; Eric had abandoned the family when Alan was just six months old; the boy only knew his father from late movie reruns. Trying to connect, Alan heads to LA for the funeral, hitchhiking his only means, and falls in with a pack of hippie musicians; he's befriended by a young woman and her jealous boyfriend. Late for the funeral, he encounters the first of several in the LA agent/actor circle who knew his father intimately. And so begins a journey to learn about himself, his father, and uncover if the death was accident, suicide ... or murder.

Much of the story is told in flashback: Alan begins his narration with two broken legs in heavy casts lying in a bed in a ramshackle beach house. He's a sitting duck if there is a murderer out there waiting to finish him off.

Hansen produced nearly 40 books including mainstream novels, including Backtrack, A Smile in His Lifetime, and Job's Year from the early 1980s reissued in 2025 by ReQueered Tales. His best known work, the Dave Brandstetter series of mystery novels, pioneered the genre for the LGBT community.

"Joseph Hansen has written a brilliant piece. His characters are splendidly fleshed out." — The New York Times Book Review

"In the tradition of Chandler and Hammett, Joseph Hansen writes with gritty fluency of the sordid side of West Coast life." — Washington Post Books

"Hansen's prose is lean: the dialogue relentlessly moves the story along and the novel teems with colorful characters." — Stephen W. Breedlove

"Backtrack is beautifully written with fully-realized (memorable) characters, exquisitely evoked mood, and biting humor." — Drew Brainard

"Backtrack is enriched by the judicious artistic effects that Hansen obtains through the use of his striking style." — National Review