Boy of the West End (The Adventures of Gil Graham and Mike Smith, 5) Paperback – 27 Feb. 2014

Boy of the West End is a prequel to Boys of Vice City and the rest of the `Boys Of` series of books written and illustrated by Roger Kean and Zack the Artist. The book serves to expand the characters that we met in Vice City and fills in the blanks of the dramatic narrative that are the circumstances that lead to Mike Smith and Gill Graham meeting and falling in love in Rome, and their subsequent adventures in Disco City, Two Cities and the Fast Lane. However, Boy Of The West End is in itself a standalone story where we follow Mike as a Grammar School boy through his formative gay years as a questing teen in want of experience, finding out the hard way what it is to be an attractive youth equipped with a leanly muscled swimmers build and a near overwhelming sex drive.Roger Kean whose experienced hand in writing shows an innate sense of capturing this adventure from a boys perspective, and has in Boy of the West End squeezed the ripened fruit of Gay liberation that was the hedonism and sexual exploration of the 1970s and has splattered the pages of Boy of the West with these juicy sexual shenanigans that take Mike on a journey from callow youth to kept boy toy of a Hollywood Film Producer. In between we find out about how our handsome teen`s good looks lead him in to one sexual scrape after another, be it the BBC studios of Top Of the Pops, or London`s Piccadilly Circus, finding and losing a chance for lasting love along the way; Mike learns hard and fast his trade in pleasuring men before falling prey to the predatory James Rosen who deposits him in Rome to await his exclusive pleasure in 1980.Again Roger Kean and Zack have used their considerable talents to write and illustrate a moment in time, and this book is packed with details of the period and the very real emotional turmoil of coming out, in any age, for a boy finding sex, then love, losing it, and finding true love and companionship after many mishaps and adventures along the way, played out in this first chapter of the overarching saga of two boys thrown together by chance and the sometimes cruel whim of fate.

Mike, before he met Gil.