SOURCE: Walton, Priscilla L. “Form and Forum: The Agency of Detectives and the Venue of the Short Story.” Narrative 6, no. 2 (May 1998): 123-39.

[In the following essay, Walton argues that the short story anthology is an ideal medium through which lesser-known women crime-mystery-detective authors can gain a popular readership in an industry that often favors male authors.]

Long shot at that jumping sign,
Visible shivers running down my spine;
Cut to the baby taking off her clothes,
Close up of the sign that says “we never close.”
You snatch a tune and you match a cigarette;
She pulls their eyes out with a face like a magnet,
I don't know how much more of this I can take—
She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake.
She is watching the detectives,
He's so cute.
She is watching the detectives,
Then they shoot, shoot, shoot.

—Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello's song, “Watching the Detectives,” offers an amalgamation of media venues, and constructs a scenario that draws upon conventions made familiar through popular culture. The song focalizes a male subject, who is watching his female partner watch a detective film on television. Effecting a media mise en abyme, the song's filmic/televisual frame both extends into and encases its action, authorizing and engendering the male subject's behaviour.¹ In this fashion, Costello's text exemplifies the ways in which popular texts inform social agency, at the same time that, through its interplay of narrative layers, it draws attention to the divergent axis afforded by different media formats.

While, as “Watching the Detectives” suggests, the detective story performs as a platform for novelistic, cinematic, audio, and televisual productions, the diversity of the print media it inhabits (and engenders) is frequently overlooked. Also overlooked, as a result, are the literary forms that construct detective scenarios and often make them possible. Indeed, formula fiction as a whole has relied heavily on modes like the short story, which has provided for genre development at the same time that it has manifested a forum for cultural critique. The development of mass market short stories, consequently, is a crucial component in the evolution of and the political possibilities afforded by the mainstream print industry, and in the emergence of the hardboiled dick.

It is not coincidental, therefore, that the period which gives rise to the hard-boiled detective coincides with a pivotal moment in the development of literary publishing. In the early years of the twentieth century, publishing houses began to move into the realm of mass production, and to concentrate their attention on the broad audiences that comprised the popular market. The financial prospects of this market had been demonstrated during the Civil War by the advent of the “dime novel.” Attesting to the profitability of cheap reading material, this paper-covered and mass-produced artifact had become extremely popular with Union soldiers. The dime novel reaped high profits for its publishers, and served as an indicator of the popularity of westerns and detective stories in the mass market (Margolies 8).

The late nineteenth century witnessed a further change in publication practices. Shifting economic climes saw the demise of the dime novels to the rise of cheap magazines. As Edward Margolies explains:

Story papers began to decline in the late 1880s, due in part to the appearance of serialized fiction in Sunday newspaper supplements. Most dime novels had become prohibitive. … But formula fiction persevered in magazines produced from cheap wood pulp, the first of which, Argosy, was published in 1896.

(10-11)

The changes the critic outlines are extremely important to the interrelation of short story and formula fiction. Since dime novels were no longer affordable by the mass public, and serialized fiction available in the newspapers that were habitually purchased in any event, pulp magazines emerged as the most profitable form of popular reading material. The hardboiled detective made his appearance after World War I (I use the male pronoun deliberately here, since the early hardboiled dick was always a man), and became so popular that, by 1926, he merited a magazine devoted exclusively to his adventures: Black Mask, under the editorship of Joseph Thompson Shaw. Pulp magazines like Black Mask offered their readers a quick sampling of writing styles and relied upon writers who were able to produce quickly and on demand. As a result, the authors who emerged in this market were professional “hacks,” who did not conform to the romantic prototype of the lonely artist awaiting inspiration in a garret; such a romantic construction could not be borne by the pressures of the mass market. Clearly, formulaic works retailed a bottom line that appealed to publishers dependent upon financial success, and who, in turn, required their authors to churn out material for the market, a market conditioned to demand more as a consequence of the process of production. The pulp magazines, therefore, created employment for the writer, who produced the product for the consumer to consume.

SHE'S FILING HER NAILS

Pulp magazines were largely produced in the U.S.—which had emerged as the dominant proponent of mass market publications—and their subject matter reflected their American origin as well as the particular cultural moment in which they appeared. Evolving in the years following World War I (and partly in response to the global conflict), the pulps were propelled by concerns fostered during the Great Depression. That is, the era of the nascent hardboiled detective story is also the era of speakeasies, gangsters, and the proliferation of violent urban crime. It is a time in which the legal system was under attack and vigilante justice approved as a viable alternative. William F. Nolan's perspective on the period is worth citing, not only for the historical information it provides, but also for the atmosphere it creates:

Black Mask, and the fiction it printed, grew directly out of the era between the two world wars, when machine guns flashed fire from low-slung black limousines, when the corner speakeasy served rotgut gin, when swift rum-runners made night drops in dark coastal waters, when police and politicians were as corrupt as the gangsters they protected, when cons and crooks prowled New York alleys and lurked in trackside hobo jungles, when Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone made daily headlines and terrorized a nation.

The Black Mask boys wrote it as it happened. Their fiction captured the cynicism, bitterness, disillusionment and anger of a country fighting to survive the evils of Prohibition and the economic hardships of the Depression.

The stories in Black Mask were born of adversity, written to dramatize and delineate a nation in flux.

(13)

The violent subject matter that propelled hardboiled detective fiction is illuminated by the mode's location in this historical moment. Taking its impetus from the success of frontier or adventure stories, the mode both catered to and helped to create popular tastes.

The bulk of the pulp magazines comprised short stories, which had also provided the locus for the advent of the literary detective in general. From the introduction of Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin through the premiere of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, short stories had been the preferred forum for the production of the mystery genre. The production of the pulp magazines, in turn, allowed for a shift in the construction of the detective, occasioned by their form, their writers, and their audience.

The crime writing found in the pulp magazines offered a revisionary American egalitarian response to the class system inherent in earlier detective fiction. Significantly, up until the advent of the hardboiled narrative, detective stories had been dominated by country house “cosies” and puzzle mysteries. The British Sherlock Holmes, as detective extraordinaire, was both a quirky and somewhat marginal figure, and a man of status, whose class and the tastes resulting from it comprised essential elements of Conan Doyle's short stories.

Clearly, the literary “hacks” who grew to prominence in the pulp magazines had interests that differed from their literary forbears. Their “pulp fiction,” as a response to the British mode, did not cater to the presumed cultural tastes of elite (or wannable elite) readers, but was aimed at the masses, and took the corruption of the privileged for its subject matter. The hardboiled mode never features (wealthy) amateur detectives; instead, it concentrates on and works to create the professional private investigator, who is dependant upon his clients for daily subsistence. The detective is a working-class hero, whose venue is the street rather than the country house or the pied-à-terre.

Hardboiled detective story authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler played to an audience that was conceived as “mass” for one of the first times in literary history. The hardboiled mode, in fact, is synonymous with mass culture. Targeting the “average consumer” as the market for their texts, the pulp writers set their stories in the “mean streets” of major urban centres. Heroes like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe speak like “common men” and move in a world that requires urban savvy and street smarts. Conventionally, the hardboiled hero manifested a composite of the ethos of American individualism and pragmatism; he is a longer and a rugged individualist, and it is his “I” that coheres the fiction. This “I” incorporates an “eye” that sees systemic corruption and works to avenge it: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean; who is neither tarnished, nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything” (Chandler 398). Hence, the fiction provides portraits of the underbelly of twentieth-century urban life, and draws on the classically American tastes cultivated, at least in part, by the mythogenesis of the Wild West.

The similarities the hardboiled mode shares with the Western are apparent in the ideological bent of its subject matter. Like its frontier counterpart, the hardboiled narrative focusses on “man” vs. the elements, although the elements here comprise the corruption and greed that permeate big city life, and against which the detective must pit himself. The detective is by no means an untarnished avenging angel, but he is an angel, nonetheless, who represents decency and justice, and has the courage to administer it when the law and the legal system fail to perform their rightful duties. Violence is a staple of the hardboiled genre, for the detective must employ the apparatus of the crime in order to expose and avenge it. According to the logic of the hardboiled genre, the private eye cannot execute his own brand of retribution without resorting to violence.

The style of the hardboiled narrative is distinctive. The stripped-down prose of traditional exemplars of the mode draws significantly on the techniques of Modernist writers like Ernest Hemingway. Short pertinent sentences staccato the texts, which are generally written in the first-person, from the private eye's perspective. In turn, as a “Low Culture” response to “High Culture” Modernism, the texts are riddled with what have come to be called “hard-boiled conceits” (Porter 67) and terse one-liners. For example, in James M. Cain's “Cigarette Girl,” the protagonist reflects on a woman's smile: “A smile is nature's freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can't go back. Not that I wanted to” (128). Such metaphors proliferate throughout the texts and work to create a literary atmosphere that is earthy, moody, and above all else “gritty.” As mass-market productions, then, hardboiled narratives draw on the tenets of popular fiction. Accessible, purporting to provide a take on reality—which they represent in a “window on the world” fashion—these works construct the mean streets down which the detective walks, as much as they are constructed by them. But this world is not predicated unproblematically.

To return to Costello's “Watching the Detectives,” the song's chorus underscores the values embedded in the conventional depiction of the detective scenario, and demonstrates, if covertly, the ways in which hardboiled conventions reflect the mode's attitudes toward women: “she is watching the detectives / He's so cute / She is watching the detectives / Then they shoot, shoot, shoot.” As the song (in its entirety) implies, the originary hardboiled narrative arose in an era fraught with sexual tensions, since the advent of the Great Depression generated a backlash against shifting gender roles. Perhaps the best example of the disquieting tenets of the hardboiled narrative is found in a later avatar of the mode, Mickey Spillane, who himself is writing to and for an audience conditioned by the paranoia surrounding the Cold War of the 1950s. In Spillane's work, women are at best not to be trusted, and at worst, evil threats who must be eradicated. And the gratuitous violence against women that abounds in Spillane's pages throws into relief the more muted violence apparent in earlier prototypes. “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer,” one of Spillane's rare short stories, offers a passage typical of the author's writing. Here, Helen, the femme fatale, is caught out by Hammer, who unhesitatingly sentences her to death:

Mike: You're a great girl to love, Helen. A beautiful, talented louse. … So we were in love. Should it make a difference? So because I loved you I'll do you a favor, Helen. Nobody will ever know. They'll have to think Carmen got you and I got Carmen. Like it that way, Helen? …

Helen's Voice: Mike … you can't … (Suddenly choked off)

Mike's Voice: Don't pull your gun on me. So long, kid.

Camera catches Helen, her neck in Mike's hand, sinking … slowly on top of Carmen. Mike lets her fall, then flips cigarette on her back. Gun falls from her hand.

(Pronzini 338-39)

The gender codes of the hardboiled genre are integral to its make-up,² rendering it a curious phenomenon. While, on one level, the mode subverts the class structure of its British counterpart, on another, it inscribes an exclusionary gendered power dynamic. The hardboiled narrative is, thus, concomitantly subversive and coercive, a situation that is, at least to a certain extent, characteristic of popular culture in general. As Scott R. Christianson points out, the “problematical” nature of detective fiction: “seems to promote the subversion of, or resistance to, modern culture at the same time that it props up that culture. In the matter of its misogyny, hardboiled detective fiction undergirds the whole system of Western patriarchy. Yet writers like Chandler and Hammett, especially, have used the genre to criticize vehemently a system which is rotten to the core” (146).

Certainly, in light of contemporary revisions to the hardboiled genre, it is crucial to note that its originary manifestation is hardly female-positive. As Costello suggests, in the hardboiled tradition, when “he” is depicted, he is active (“I don't know how much more of this I can take”); if “she” is portrayed at all, she is dramatized as both passive (“She is watching the detectives”) and passive aggressive (“she's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake”). Indeed, “Watching the Detectives” highlights the male-focus and the male-oriented structure of early hard-boiled detective fiction (“They beat him up until the teardrops start, / But he can't be wounded coz he's got no heart”), wherein the world delineated was a world in which good triumphed over evil, in which men were men, and women were dangerous.

YOU SNATCH A TUNE AND YOU MATCH A CIGARETTE

I was brought up at a time when men were interested in men, and women were interested in men, and no one was interested in women. You know, you had to read Tom Sawyer in school, but you didn't have to read The Little House on the Prairie. And the literary voice was call me Ishmail, it was not call me Mary-Margaret.

—Linda Barnes

After World War II, economic growth precipitated a further alteration in the developing publishing market. With a wealthier populace, novels once again became the preferred mode of reading material; and, as the pulp magazines declined, the ever adaptable hardboiled detective simply moved away from his home in the short story journals and into formula novels. The short story form, nonetheless, continued to provide an important venue for the advent of new and revisionary voices.

While women had been writing detective fiction virtually since its inception (the names of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and others were synonymous with the so-called “Golden Age” of the genre), the hardboiled mode had proved a tough nut for women to crack. As noted above, this particularly “macho” mode included women either as good girls or femme fatales; it offered no space outside of that limited paradigm for the performance of female characters. When women did attempt to enter the world of the hardboiled detective story, they were often marginalized. In the 1940s, Margaret Millar enjoyed successful publication, and her success served to inspire her partner, Ross MacDonald, to take up his pen; ironically, however, it was MacDonald, rather than Millar, who claimed the mode as “his” own. Not until the 1970s did women turn to the hardboiled genre in numbers sufficient to challenge its construction, and to manifest what Maureen Reddy has called a “counter-tradition” (see Wallace, Sisters in Crime).

I SHOP THEREFORE I AM

In part, the advent of the female hardboiled detective story was enabled by a transition in gendered circumstances. By the 1970s, women had begun to enter the consumer market on a different level. No longer simply procurers of “household” artifacts, but paid members of the work force with disposable incomes, women's status as consumers inspired the shift from tough guy to tough gal hero. Hence, in “Murder Most Foul and Fair” (1990), Katrine Ames and Ray Sawhill note that the phenomenon of the active female detective arose as a result of female readers clamouring for strong women characters:

As the women's movement grew, so did the demand for female protagonists. Carol Brener, former proprietor of the Manhattan bookstore Murder Ink, remembers customers so desperate ‘they didn't even care if the killer was a woman, as long it was a strong character.’

(67)

Moreover, in an article in the Voice Literary Supplement, B. Ruby Rich comments on the appeal and the sales potential of the subgenre: “Women's and gay bookstores, from Old Wive's Tales in San Francisco to the new Judiah's Room in Greenwich Village, report that woman-detective novels are walking out the door as fast as they arrive on the shelves” (24). Rich's observation is confirmed by a 1990 article, “Crime Marches On,” in Publishers Weekly, indicating that:

the woman as tough professional investigator has been the single most striking development in the detective novel the past decade. “Books with a woman as central sleuth are very popular with us right now,” says St. Martin's Ruth Cavin. “For us at Walker,” says Janet Hutchings, “our biggest sellers last year were those with strong female characters.”

“Women writers in general are selling better than ever before,” says Susan Sandler of the Mystery Guild. … Having a woman detective puts special demands on the writer to be more imaginative.”

(28)

This trend would suggest that consumers, while the passive target market of industry, also play an active role as the purchasers of industry's products. Acting as consumer subjects (as opposed to marketing objects), readers can effect alterations in the form of generic conventions, alterations that contiguously affirm the subject position they have assumed: “Just the fact that these books exist feels like an achievement. … The woman-detective genre can take on anything currently being peddled at airport bookshops or supermarket checkout counters, accommodating any style or level of quality” (Rich 26).

Without a doubt, consumerism is a problematic space from which to construct subjectivity, but, with women buying books (as consumers) and demanding strong female characters (as subjects), their buying power influences the publishing industry's offerings. And such publication shifts can move to empower women and to ease their problems in entering what had been heretofore a “man's world.” As Rich comments: “The woman who's been happily seduced by years of soap operas, telenovelas, and romance novels now gets a different thrill—the old formulas turned inside out, with gutsy heroines instead of trembling maidens, yet with the same page-turning appeal intact. Each volume offers itself to the willing reader like a safe-deposit box of feminist possibilities, a place where real problems can be play-acted and strategies tested” (24). Rich's suggestion that formula fiction offers feminist possibilities is insightful, and points to how feminist subversion can (and does) take place in the mass marketplace.

In 1977, Marcia Muller broke ground with her private investigator, Sharon McCone, opening the door, as it were, to female detectives, who, once inside it, quickly occupied the building. The year 1982 proved to be important for the emerging feminist hardboiled narrative, since it witnessed the advent of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky on the publishing scene. Muller, Grafton, and Paretsky all began to recast the hardboiled dick of pulp magazine tradition. This trio of authors produced characters who were independent, self-reliant, and street savvy—Muller's Sharon McCone is a private investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco; Grafton's loner-detective, Kinsey Millhone, runs her own detective agency in Santa Teresa, California; and V.I. Warshawski, former public defender turned private eye, operates out of Chicago. The appearance of these protagonists began to revolutionize the hardboiled mode and to inspire other female authors to follow in their footsteps.

Entering the print industry, however, carried with it attendant problems. Although the hardboiled mode itself proved amenable to change, the female writers found the publishing world to be fraught with unforeseen difficulties. While women's works might get published, once in print, their texts were often ignored by major review publications, publications that could (and should) alert readers to their existence. Consequently, in 1986, Sara Paretsky founded “Sisters in Crime,” a communal support network and activist lobby group, which worked to promote and encourage female writers. As Ames and Sawhill summarize:

By 1986, probably a third of American mysteries were by women, but women were getting less than a fifth of the reviews. Sara Paretsky, concerned about issues including the number of books that revelled in “the graphic abuse of women,” founded Sisters in Crime. The watchdog and networking organization has more than 600 members. (Its self-help brochure: “Shameless Promotion for Brazen Hussies.”) Women are more frequently reviewed now. And Kate Mattes [of Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, Mass.] says, “Publishers are saying, ‘Gee, we ought to promote these women.’ They hadn't before. If I had a book signing, generally the author got herself here and paid for it.”

(67)

Sisters in Crime succeeded in generating more extensive promotion from publishers and began to put pressure on newspapers and journals for wider review coverage. The (non-)appearance of reviews has serious repercussions, since most public libraries require at least two reviews before they can consider the acquisition of a text. Without reviews, the librarians could not order the books, and, as a result, many mystery readers who depended on libraries for their texts could not gain access to them (Grant, “Interview”).

DIVERSITY BETWEEN THE COVERS

Another way to alert readers to the presence of female detectives is through short story anthologies. Single short stories, although still available in journals and magazines, no longer generate the mass market followings they enjoyed in the early part of the century; however, short story collections can and do provide a mainstream venue for women's writings. At the same time they can help female authors provoke the interest of publishers, and women writers often utilize the short story to introduce their writings to the public and to the publishing market. Linda Barnes's experience provides a case in point.

Barnes was a well-known mystery writer whose works featured a male protagonist, Michael Spraggue. She explains why she began with Spraggue, and the troubles she encountered when the sought to abandon him in favour of a female detective:

I had always wanted to write a woman detective, but I wanted to sell a book first. … So I really fell into writing Spraggue as a man. … And I thought he would be a one-shot deal. I'd sell him, I'd have a track record, and could say, “I have this woman that I want to write about.” But when I tried that, my editor and my agent said: “Noooooo, no one will buy a book about a woman detective.” This was in 1981, 1982. I was told that this was absolute death, that I could write it, but I couldn't sell it. … And in 1983, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I wrote a short story with Carlotta. And it took me three years to sell that short story. Well the short story kept getting sold, but it kept getting sold to magazines that would immediately fold. And I didn't get published until 1986 … and then it won all these awards. And I said “Yes! I am going to write this woman,” and that was the end of Spraggue. And I had a publisher who was convinced, by the showing of the short story, that I could make this switch.

(“Interview”)

As a means of cutting through some of the difficulties writers like Barnes faced in launching female protagonists, members of Sisters in Crime were motivated to produce short story collections. These anthologies opened a crucial forum for new authors, as they concurrently presented the works of more established writers. The collections work on a number of levels, since they compile diverse writings under one textual umbrella, and manifest a cooperative and communal writing endeavour. Working collectively, the authors of Sisters in Crime had more power, and they used that power for the advancement of women.

In 1989, Marilyn Wallace edited Sisters in Crime, which includes writings by many members of the activist group, although it is not directly affiliated with it. The anthology, nonetheless, works in tandem with the aims of the female crime writers' association, for it includes a variety of women writers, some high-profile, some not, and it brings together their writings in a mass market forum. In her Preface, Wallace describes the aims of the collection as well as its contents:

This anthology reflects some of the changes in culture and in literature that have shaped our lives and our work. As roles were redefined, beginning in the sixties, women (who already counted perseverance and resourcefulness among their talents) began to identify with other significant characteristics of the good detective: physical strength and agility; decisiveness; lack of encumbrances; independence. …

These, then, are truly tales for our time. They've been written by women who aren't afraid to take risks, women who thrive on the audacious act of transforming the chaos of the perceived world into a little bit of order. As writers, we use the magic and the music of language to tell a story whose primary goal is to entertain—in these pages, you'll find elegance and earthiness, compassion and contempt, sardonic commentary on roles and rules. Our methods differ; our intentions are diverse—Sisters in Crime is a celebration of that variety.

(xi)

Wallace's work was so successful that it spawned others (to date there are five volumes in the Sisters in Crime series), and inspired Sara Paretsky, the founder of Sisters in Crime, to provide another mainstream anthology series featuring women writers. In her Preface to A Woman's Eye (1991), Paretsky stresses the diversity that underpins her collection: “The one thing these stories [in A Woman's Eye] have in common is the message that there is no one way to view women. Nor is there one way women see themselves. What we have all learned in the last three hundred and fifty years is that the reading and writing of books are ‘such things as belong to women’” (xiv). In the Preface to her second volume, Women on the Case (published in 1996), Paretsky discusses some of the problems that continue to confront female writers. In the following necessarily lengthy quotation, she attempts to redress some of the oversights she now finds in the earlier A Woman's Eye:

Women today fight an uphill battle. After two decades of movement toward full partnership in many areas of human endeavor, we are under assault for wanting that partnership. Orthodoxy in Rome, Mecca, and Washington condemns women outside the domestic sphere as destroyers of the family, indeed the destroyers of all peace in society. … But you don't need to call yourself a feminist to know that the fundamental battle for human freedom begins with the written word. …

This collection is an attempt … to make it possible for women to broaden the range of their voices, to represent their age for women, to describe women's social position, their suffering—and their triumphs. …

The stories in this collection explore that multiplicity of voices, that multiplicity of choices, trials, errors, and recoveries. They come from women “who love their art” as Barrett Browning did, and who yearn for a world that will listen to them.

I am proud to present to you so many valiant writers. Those that you already know you can greet as old friends. For those that you've never met before, a pleasure awaits you. With this many women on the case, surely we will never again know another season of silence.

(vii-viii, xi-xii)

As Wallace and Paretsky indicate, yoking together short stories by women writers is an extremely important venture, since, through a short story collection, various authors can present their work, and the volumes provide a multiplicity of female voices to a wide spectrum of readers.

REVISING THE SCRIPT

While the short story anthologies offer a diversity of female crime writing (from amateur detective “cosies” to police procedurals), it is the female hardboiled narrative that significantly challenges the male crime writers' domain. Indeed, women writers's segue into the realm of the hardboiled detective story is an event of critical import. Seemingly coinciding with the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, the shift from femme fatale to hardboiled (female) dick has profound repercussions. The first-person voice of the hardboiled detective story itself presumes the assumption of a subject position—a position traditionally denied women, who have been conventionally cast as the object of the gaze. In order to usurp the “I”—particularly in the aggressive fashion demanded by the hardboiled narrative—the texts must appear in an era conducive to women's assumption of a subject position (a line of reasoning that would explain Margaret Millar's advent on the detective scene in the early 1940s, when women were being recruited for “male” jobs to help with the war effort, and would also account for the notable dearth of female detectives later in the same decade, when women were being shepherded back into domestic confines).

As discussed in previous segments, the “I” of the originary hardboiled story, establishing the hyper-macho male detective, affirms societal expectations of masculinity. When that “I” emanates from a woman, however, who is equally tough and aggressive, the agency of the narratives is redirected. Performing counter-discursively, these texts subvert cultural conventions that dictate a passive objectified womanhood. Theoretically speaking, the female hardboiled narrative constitutes a “reverse” discourse, in Michel Foucault's terms (100-101), for the appropriation of the “I” serves as a response to and a reconfiguration of traditionally prescribed gender roles; concomitantly, it comprises an effort to redress the lack of female agency in traditional hardboiled writing. Thus, when Shelley Singer's detective, Barrett Lake reflects on her past, she is literally “talking back” to a tradition that has excluded her. As the character recalls: “When I was a little girl, I was a bookworm-tomboy who wanted to grow up to be an explorer, a knight errant, Robin Hood, a pirate. I was very unhappy when I found out that I couldn't be any of those people because, first of all, I was a girl, and second, those job descriptions were pretty much a thing of the past. … [So] I got on my horse, so to speak, and went looking for a new career. Much to my amazement I found one” (51). Barrett's new career, of course, is private investigation. And, while she may be as streetwise as her male predecessors, her urban savvy occasions a social disapproval not levied at her male counterparts, for an aggressive and tough-talking woman must suffer and contend with charges of “stridency.” Nor is it solely the female characters who provoke cultural anxiety—their authors, too, must confront the fears that they and their progeny engender. When Sara Paretsky was asked in a television interview about her feminism, she quipped: “Just call me a strident bitch, but smile when you say it” (Richler). More explicitly, Paretsky “talks back” to the male tradition in the Preface to A Women's Eye where, on her “own turf,” she becomes a formidable advocate of women's rights:

It is the struggle to find a voice … to figure out what women really want, what our stories really are, that absorbs the energy of many women writers. The voices that tell us we can't do it, or shouldn't do it, continue to blare at us. They may be loud and raucous, like Norman Mailer, addressing International PEN a few years ago while head of PEN USA, and saying that it isn't possible for women to write as well as men. It's not hard to imagine what threat women present to Mailer's vision of his masculinity that drives him to insist that you “have to have balls” to write well; it is hard to understand why an organization dedicated to freeing imprisoned writers should elect him president.

(ix-x)

WOMEN WITH ATTITUDE

When a female voice speaks the “I” of the hardboiled narrative, the agency of the mode shifts, for “she” is not simply watching the detectives, but rather performing as a detective herself. Accordingly, the “eye” of the text is that of a woman, whose cultural location inscribes a view not generally focalized through male subject positions. The issues frequently backgrounded in male detective fiction, as a result, are often foregrounded in the hands of the female revisionists. The short stories within the female crime anthologies cover issues like abortion, prostitution, pornography, domestic violence, homelessness, child abuse, and racism. More often than not, these recurrent themes present the respective offenses as crimes against humanity, and thereby draw attention to the problematics of exclusionary systemic social structures. The narratives, thus, open spaces for the exploration of social and cultural problems.

The hardboiled detective story does remain violent in the hands of women, but its violence is usually problematised. The female detectives must be ready and willing to defend themselves from attack, and often resort to force in “righting the wrong” that confronts them; however, they are reflective about its use, and the narratives are less vigilante-driven than those of the tough guys. The tough gals frequently question their right to interfere, and the very tendency to “play God” becomes a regular motif in the short stories. Moreover, the account of violence often assumes a “personal” slant. In Carolyn Wheat's “Ghost Station,” for example, the protagonist is a recovering alcoholic fresh out of a treatment programme, who goes berserk on her first day back on the job. Her psychological hatred of herself propels her to vent her rage on an old drunk; yet, after assaulting her helpless victim, she surveys the wreckage she has wrought:

I took a deep, shuddering breath, looked down at the sad old man I'd brutalized. A hot rush of shame washed over me.

I knelt down, gently moving the frail, blue-white hands away from the near-transparent face. The fear I saw in the liquid blue eyes sent a piercing ray of self-hatred through me.

(368)

Although the protagonist's self-revelation does not mitigate the violence she has perpetrated, it does counter the performance of the traditional hardboiled detective story precisely because the female detectives do not take violence for granted. The “action,” as it were, is closer to home.

“Home” is a venue that is more developed by the female writers, whose works have been labelled “lifestyle texts.” Women authors do not stop at the depiction of the professional lives of the characters, but move on to detail the personal habits and domestic characteristics of their protagonists. For example, in Grafton's “Full Circle,” P. I. Kinsey Millhone admits to her pride in her “little VW [which holds] its own despite the fact that it's fifteen years out of date” (28). Linda Barnes's Carlotta Carlyle, in her debut in “Lucky Penny,” discusses her working space: “I've got rooms galore in [my inherited] old house, rent a couple of them to Harvard students. I've got my own office on the second floor. But I do most of my work at the dining room table. I like the view of the refrigerator” (295). Often, the narratives take on a confessional note. Julie Smith's Skip Langdon, for instance, is nervous about returning to New Orleans and to her past. The narrator explains: “As far as Skip was concerned, she was mismatched with everyone and everything in New Orleans—maybe she'd come back to ‘work out’ something. Who knew? It was a weird thing; she knew she didn't fit in, had never fit in, probably never would fit in, but when she'd decided to become a cop, she knew she had to do it in New Orleans” (175).

While the female dicks may have personal and domestic lives, their venue remains the mean streets of major urban centres. And the women who walk them “take back the night,” so to speak, by making the streets their own. Paretsky's Chicago is as rough as the settings of her male counterparts, but her presence in it engenders difficulties and problems that simply are not occasioned by the presence of male detectives. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (or Matt Scudder or Travis McGee) do not face a barrage of wolf whistles when they walk through a construction site. V.I. Warshawski does, but when she walks through that construction site, the reader is not exposed to the spectacle she provides for the construction workers, but rather to her reaction to their objectification of her. All of the short stories share an interest in placing women on centre stage, and, in the hands of the female revisionists, the women characters are not action—they are actors.

These female actors can be fearful, but they never shrink from confrontation. In Paretsky's “Publicity Stunts,” V.I. becomes the target of right-wing fanatics. After refusing a seemingly innocent body-guard assignment, she overhears a radio broadcast that directs the following diatribe against her: “We've got one of those femmunists right here in Chicago. Private investigator. You know, in the old stories they used to call them private dicks. Kind of makes you wonder what this gal is missing in her life that she turned to that kind of work. Started out as a baby-killer back in the days when she was at the Red University on the South Side of Chicago and grew up to be a dick. Well, it takes all kinds, they say, but do we need this kind?” (325). The male detectives rarely if ever face a political attack like this one, but V.I. refuses to be quelled by the radio evangelist and the monied associates who stand behind him. Instead, she acts, and, through her investigation, ironically discovers (and exposes) the right reverend's history as a child molester.

CIRCLES OF SISTERS

With women as the focus of the revisionary stories, male characters become secondary to the plot, a shift that puts pressure on cultural expectations of male dominance. Often, the female characters are loners and single. Yet, while the female P. I. is usually unattached, the construction of the family is a prominent feature in the stories, whether through the depiction of the difficulties some of the investigators face as single mothers and working women, or through an extension of the concept of “family.” The female dick, unlike her traditional male colleagues, very much depends upon communal help, and each of the investigators relies on friends and community for emotional support. The community, and sometimes the feminist community, play a key role in the detection of the crime.

Mary Wings's “Kill the Man for Me,” offers a unique twist on “sisterhood,” for it posits a trio of female characters who take revenge upon the man who has battered them. The unnamed protagonist literally shares space in the story with the female police officer assigned to her case, since the narrative is offered from their alternating first-person points of view. Within the tale, the protagonist (the current wife of the unnamed batterer, who is referred to throughout the story as “you,” or “he”), Rachel (the current girlfriend of the batterer), and Lee (the batterer's ex-wife) plot to kill their abuser. They do so successfully, and in the final scene, after the trial wherein the narrator is acquitted, the trio encounters the female police officer in a restaurant. The tale ends with the narrator's account of the meeting: “I did something I'd never done before. I looked her straight in the eye and raised my champagne glass to her. She spotted me and her eyes swept with mounting recognition across the faces of my luncheon companions [Rachel and Lee]. I saw her process the whole thing; she seemed to freeze. But then slowly she turned her back … and as she turned around I saw what was in her hand. A champagne glass, and she raised it toward me” (249).

In Wings's story, women work together to perpetrate murder; in others, parodic commentaries are offered on the voyeuristic pleasure shared by readers and writers alike by implicating readers in authors' literary “crimes.” Grafton's “Falling off the Roof” documents the ways in which the Santa Teresa Mystery Readers group are inspired to reenact their reading material. Kinsey reflects, when she solves the crime in question, “I knew as surely as I was standing there that the women of the Santa Teresa Mystery Readers had all pitched in. Susie Grissom had a problem, and they'd helped her out, providing her a surrogate killer and an alibi. I wonder how many other little domestic conflicts they'd resolved the same way” (229). The writings themselves, moreover, frequently acknowledge how writers of the subgenre are also its readers, and point to the cooperative venture in which authors/readers collude. On one level, the feminist hardboiled narrative performs as a locus for the commingling of writer and reader through the very creation of the short story anthology. Marilyn Wallace, the first editor of such a volume, is profuse in her thanks to the women authors who made the collection possible. As she notes: “I met many of the contributors—in person and in print—for the first time … [during the annual Bouchercon convention], and the impressive range of styles and subjects of these extraordinary women stayed with me. The notion of bringing such talents together in a single book sprang up fully formed from that fertile ground” (xii). Her final words in the Preface are for the volume's contributors: “I'm grateful to all the contributors for making my job as editor such fun; the developing friendships are a personal bonus for me” (xiii). Wallace's acknowledgement here serves a dual purpose: it expresses her personal indebtedness to her sister authors, and it also points to the growing community of female writers engaged in feminist detection.

On another level, the authors themselves often acknowledge each other in their fiction. In Linda Grant's “Hamlet's Dilemma,” for example, the protagonist admits: “I would far rather follow the investigations of V.I. Warshawski or Sharon McCone than explore my sister's death” (275). And, in Myriam Laurini's “Lost Dreams,” the hero pays homage to her foremothers: “I'm Miss Marple. Or Jessica Fletcher. I found the murderer, not them. This story's my ticket to the big time, the female cannonball” (292). By drawing attention to other female sleuths, the stories effect a self-reflexivity in the subgenre, which correspondingly points readers to alternative female dicks with whom they can compare the one they are reading.

References like Grant's, Laurini's, and Wallace's serve as reminders of the importance of the texts' communal enterprise, an enterprise that opens spaces for other female writers, as well as for female readers. And the political impetus that propels the short story anthologies furthers the endeavours of female writer/reader societies like Sisters in Crime to work together to bring the concerns of female readers and writers to the attention of the publishing market and the public. The ongoing efforts of female detective authors and their readers, then, designate the hardboiled short story as a collective site in which readers, writers, and characters meet. Indeed, the advent of the active female investigator has repercussions beyond the intervention of a woman into mainstream narratives, for her authorial presence there offers alternative realities to the readers who consume them, and whose purchasing power provides for the emergence of a new class of working women writers, who are able to support themselves through consumer's consumption of their fictive endeavours. This ongoing process is both exemplified in the interactive nature of the stories, and in the interactive community to which they give rise, a community that engenders an extended circle of partners—and sisters—in crime.

Notes

1. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Manina Jones, the co-author of our forthcoming book, Detective Agency: Women Re-Writing the Hardboiled Tradition, whose ideas underpin and permeate this essay.

2. It is important to note that the hardboiled detective story's treatment of race is perhaps less an inherent element of its composition than the constituted backdrop against which it plays. The racial Other is not as significant a concern in the mean streets of the 1930s hardboiled detective story as it was in the frontier-based Western, but the textual criminals often carry an ethnic “t(a)int.” Joel Cairo, in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (which, while a novel rather than a short story provides the best example of race and homophobia), is suspicious and untrustworthy precisely because he is foreign and “shifty.” The homophobia of the mean streets is also apparent here, since Joel Cairo is both racially and sexually encoded. As Spade observes: “Cairo, still muttering in the boy's ear, had put his arm around the boy's shoulders again. Suddenly the boy pushed his arm away and turned on the sofa to face the Levantine. The boy's face held disgust and anger. He made a fist of one small hand and struck Cairo's mouth with it. Cairo cried out as a woman might have cried and drew back to the very end of the sofa. He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and put it to his mouth. It came away daubed with blood. He put it to his mouth once more and looked reproachfully at the boy. The boy snarled, ‘Keep away from me,’ and put his face between his hands again. Cairo's handkerchief released the fragrance of chypre in the room” (427). Indeed, Joel Cairo is delicate and dandified, and his gender difference is emphasized through the “lavender-barred silk handkerchief” with which he wipes his face (343) and through his Greek passport. Both the passport and the handkerchief function as codes against which “good men” like Sam Spade are affirmed by and through their difference. The ethos of these narratives, then, in their White focus, is to defend the values of White society against the encroachers. Consequently, as it reveals the corruption of the urban streets and lays that corruption in the lap of the elite, the hardboiled narrative also works to create an atmosphere that is racially-exclusive in its systemic structure.

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