[In the following essay, Johnson investigates the trope of sex and betrayal in the hard-boiled detective fiction of Grafton and Sara Paretsky.]

This essay focuses on the updating and feminization of a basic trope that has appeared in traditional, male, hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir ever since Sam Spade met Brigid O'Shaughnessy: the professional detective who becomes sexually involved with a suspect who then turns out to be implicated in the crime. This occurs in several recent novels by female writers, in particular Sue Grafton's first Kinsey Millhone mystery, A Is for Alibi (1982), and Sara Paretsky's fourth V. I. Warshawski mystery, Bitter Medicine (1987), and I am interested in locating the differences that appear when female writers place female detectives in this classic situation of sex and betrayal. For both male and female detectives, these cases suggest a number of issues: the relation and conflict between personal feeling and professional duty; stereotyping and distrust of the other sex; and the many connections between sex, on the one hand, and power, danger, and violence, on the other. The problems that this situation creates for the writers and for critics such as myself are striking. Both Grafton and Paretsky define themselves as feminists and both are seen as feminists by critics, yet both create female detectives who imitate a male model almost to a tee—the hard-boiled male detective, emotionally and financially independent, a loner, divorced without family. Like the male detectives, Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski define themselves through their profession which deals with issues traditionally seen as male: violence, crime, and power. Are these novels, then, simply a misguided attempt to appropriate a form inherently sexist? Or can there emerge a different relation both to the form and the issues of violence, crime, and power? The sex and betrayal plot strikes at the root of these issues of gender and gendered issues.

Critical opinion on the issue of whether female detectives can successfully assume the stance of the hard-boiled seems evenly divided. On the one side are absolutely negative evaluations such as that given by Victoria Nichols and Susan Thompson in their survey of crime fiction by women entitled Silk Stalkings: When Woman Write of Murder:

the world really does not need any more stereotypical, hard-boiled private eyes … qualities such as tenderness, empathy, and nurturing are often set aside in favor of a macha bravada we find detrimental and counterproductive not only in the cause of feminism but humanism as well.

(216)

In The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre Kathleen Gregory Klein largely agrees with this assessment, stating that “adopting the [hard-boiled] formula traps their authors” (201).¹ On the other side, critics such as Jane S. Bakerman and Maureen T. Reddy see real advantages if female rewritings of the hard-boiled. Bakerman finds that “Sara Paretsky has reformulated and reenergized an old literary pattern by recognizing the value of combining the hard-boiled detective novel with feminist fiction” (135), and Reddy similarly concludes that “[e]very feature of male hard-boiled detective novels is transformed in women's novels (120).

What I find interesting in this debate is exactly where and in what manner a female protagonist could be seen as disturbing to the hard-boiled detective formula. Does the writer have to adopt certain strategies in order to unsettle the assumptions of the form or would the very fact of making the detective female disrupt it? I think one way of explaining the difference that readers experience what they read female hard-boiled detective fiction is to think through the archetypal material that the formula draws upon. Many critics have argued convincingly that American hard-boiled fiction is deeply archetypal, drawing on hero and quest motifs that reach back at least to the Middle Ages (See, for example, Geherin 1; Margolies 84; and Lehman 25). Further, along with the hero archetype come some striking, and strikingly negative, female archetypes. As William Marling explains, for example, Dashiell Hammett's portrayals of the femme fatale draw upon the archetype of the “succubus, a female demon who has sex with sleeping, helpless men” (67). I would like to suggest that the tensions readers experience with female detectives lies in the ways that they, not reverse, be decenter some of the archetypes, male and female, that the form has constantly structured itself around. Thus the traditional male detective's reaction to the plot of sex and betrayal is that 1) he does not investigate or question the nature of his sexual attraction to the suspect; and 2) most of the disturbing aspects of the relationship are assigned to the female suspect. More importantly, however, the disastrous conclusion of the relationship, when the guilt of the other party is revealed, does not challenge the detective's sense of himself as professional and powerful.² I do not want to gloss over either the differences between male detectives involved in such situations or the levels of disturbance that such an involvement puts into motion in even the most hard-boiled of stories. But the femme fatale is granted a Circe-like power over men, relieving them of responsibility for their actions, and second, the man who can break the grip of that power, like Ulysses, is granted an heroic status.

How different the situation is when a female detective becomes involved with a male suspect is demonstrated by the two contrasting treatments that this plot receives in Sue Grafton's “A” Is for Alibi and Sara Paretsky's Bitter Medicine. Detectives Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski have deliberately defined themselves against most cultural norms of the feminine, yet, at the same time, their authors want us to know that both are feminine and not only feminine but (hetero)sexually desirable and active. Thus the sexual relationship with a male suspect violently threatens a self-definition based on a precarious balancing act. First, traditional romance places the woman in a passive position (she is courted, she is asked out). Second, the sexual double standard (which still insists the woman risks more than the man in a sexual or potentially sexual relationship) and the cultural tendency to read male sexuality as a sexual/physical violence exert a pull over power relations, shifting them in the male's direction. Third, the sexual relationship breaks down the barriers between private life and professional life that the detective has struggled to build. Therefore, in contrast to the male detective, cultural traditions and archetypes are against the female detective. Yet, finally and paradoxically, I will argue that this creates an advantage for Grafton and Paretsky.

First, a brief survey of the two novel's plots: In “A” Is for Alibi detective Kinsey Millhone becomes sexually and emotionally involved with lawyer Charlie Scarsoni whom she meets while investigating a murder. In Bitter Medicine detective V. I. Warshawski has a brief relationship with doctor Peter Burgoyne while she is investigating the hospital he works for. In both cases the lover is the key to the mystery. Charlie Scarsoni is the murderer Kinsey is seeking, and he commits two more murders during the investigation in order to cover his tracks. Finally, he attempts to kill Kinsey herself when she discovers the truth; in self-defense, Kinsey shoots and kills him. Peter Burgoyne is a co-conspirator in both his hospital's malfeasance and a cover-up which results in the murder of another doctor. He is wooing V. I. in order to keep tabs on her investigation. When she solves the case by exposing him, he confesses his part in the conspiracy, exposes the hospital's administrator as the murderer, and commits suicide by shooting himself in front of V. I. and other witnesses.

The unique aspect of Grafton's “A” Is for Alibi is its stark analysis of the issues inherent in the sex and betrayal plot. It's important to remember that Grafton and Millhone are at the beginning of the alphabet here and some of the long-term survival skills of the hard-boiled have not yet been learned. The gusto with which Kinsey responds to her sexual attraction to Charlie Scorsoni and the openness with which she shares her emotions with her reader are risky, so risky that they won't happen again. Kinsey's relationship with Scorsoni brings several contradictions buried in her character and, in fact, inherent in the basic plot, to the surface. First, she responds to and becomes consciously aware of a confusion, or, more threatening, a connection between sexual excitement and violent danger. When Kinsey first meets Scorsoni she responds to him strongly, but she is unsure of how to interpret her response. In hindsight it becomes clear that Scorsoni's mystery and his violent underside are what Kinsey is homing in on. It is as if he were sending her electronic signals which excite her and which a part of her wants to decode as sexual and another part as clues to some mystery, a mystery that turns out to be the answer to the case she is investigating. For example, she says, “My early-warning system was clanging away like crazy and I wasn't sure how to interpret it. It's the same sensation I have sometimes on the twenty-first floor when I open a window—a terrible attraction to the notion of tumbling out” (52). Later, when Scorsoni takes Kinsey out to dinner, she comments, “There was something else about him, too, smoldering and opaque, the same sense I'd had before of sexuality that surfaced now and then. Sometimes he seemed to emit an almost audible hum, like a line of power stations marching inexorably across a hillside, ominous and marked with danger signs. I was afraid of him” (144). But as the dinner proceeds and Kinsey finds herself responding more and more intensely, she hits the nail on the head—it's not a confusion of messages but precisely their mixture that draws her: “the look he laid on me then was oddly sexual, full of strange, compelling male heat as though money and power and sexuality were all somehow tangled up for him and fed on one another. There was really nothing open or loose or free about him, however candid he might seem, but I knew that it was precisely his opacity that appealed to me” (147). In Scorsoni Kinsey finds sex, danger, violence, power, and mystery all wrapped around each other, a private relationship that adds physical passion to the very qualities that bind her to her profession.

But once Kinsey begins a sexual relationship with Scorsoni, a power imbalance becomes activated. Though at first Kinsey describes their love-making in the more egalitarian, electronic terms that had dominated the first phase of their relationship—she says, “it was as though a channel had been opened between us, sexual energy flowing back and forth without impediment” (148)—the balance of sexual power almost immediately shifts in Scorsoni's direction. Part of this is because Kinsey herself shifts to traditional images of male sexuality. She describes their first sexual encounter as “All of the emotional images were of pounding assault, sensations of boom and buffet and battering ram until he had broken through to me, rolling down again and over me until all my walls were reduced to rubble and ash” (148). And Scorsoni clearly intends to use this traditional sexual role-playing as a psychological weapon with which to control Kinsey. In fact, he tries to flaunt his power over her, emphasizing what he defines as her dependence on him and her lack of sexual self-control. This appears in a striking and humiliating image that he applies to Kinsey, shortly before they have sex for the second time. He compares her to a dog, saying she needs sex like a dog needs to be walked. At this point Kinsey seems to be far gone in a dangerous and confused relationship that will force her into a more and more powerless position.

Despite Scorsoni's sexual and emotional power over her, however, Kinsey demonstrates that she can pull back from the relationship. She can still locate and reestablish the line between private relationships and professional responsibilities. Just after Scorsoni makes his comments on dogs, he criticizes and tries to limit Kinsey's thinking about her case, complaining about her probing memory of things he has said about it. Kinsey's response is immediate anger, and she storms out. Though Scorsoni follows this fight with an apology and another night of lovemaking, he has crossed the line between private life and professional commitment in a way that Kinsey cannot tolerate. Though the sex still exerts a strong power over her, Kinsey decides that she must stop seeing Scorsoni until she has solved the case. When she asks for a respite, Scorsoni threatens her with a complete break, and this pressure has the opposite effect from what he had hoped. Instead of bringing her to heel, it triggers her suspicions about the nature of his involvement with her.

This overview of the case suggests that, given the basic plot, Kinsey has acted quite reasonably. She is strongly attracted to Scorsoni yet she has kept the sex firmly separate from her professional commitments and puts the relationship on hold when she recognizes that it is having an impact on her investigation. Yet, interestingly, despite the fact that she has acted so well, the case carries a disturbing amount of unassimilated emotional residue. This is apparent in her final confrontation with Scorsoni after she has uncovered his guilt. He pursues her at night along a deserted beach and to hide from him Kinsey crawls into a garbage can. This final, resonating image from the case remains unaddressed by Kinsey, but the reader can assume that, despite solving the case, Kinsey feels like garbage. The sexual/emotional relationship with the murderer Scorsoni has contaminated both her private and professional life. Her summary of the case admits as much. The novel concludes with this statement: “I'll recover, of course. I'll be ready for business again in a week or two, but I'll never be the same. You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself” (215).

Paretsky's Bitter Medicine approaches the same plot from the opposite direction, but, in the end, confirms Grafton's sense that sex with a suspect sets the detective adrift in a confluence of desire and power and leaves an ongoing emotional residue. Bitter Medicine differs because of Paretsky's double-barreled approach to containing the issues of sex and power that Grafton, by contrast, releases. Paretsky as author's contribution is the demonstrable weakness of Peter Burgoyne, lover and suspect, as a character. He is presented as nondescript, boyish, and unsure of himself. V. I.'s neighbor, Mr. Contreras, confirms this assessment by describing Burgoyne several times as “a lightweight” (114, 258) and, more aggressively and problematically, “that pansy doctor” (180). Burgoyne himself seems to agree with this assessment when he points out that he is descended from General Burgoyne, Revolutionary War loser: “Did I ever tell you I was descended from the General Burgoyne who did so badly for the British at Saratoga? I know just how he felt. The Americans fought dirty, and he got squeamish” (133). He follows this confession by referring to V. I. as “General Washington” (133). And Burgoyne's status as a loser is confirmed by his every action (with the important exception of his relationship with V. I.), from his selling his ideals out for money in his job with Friendship Hospital, to his weak-kneed agreement to help cover up a murder he feels guilty about, to his final act of suicide. V. I. fully cooperates in Paretsky's debunking of male power by describing the sex between herself and Burgoyne as an exercise in technique: “For the next hour or so he demonstrated the value a good knowledge of anatomy can have in the right hands. My detective experience came in handy, too” (91). It does not appear to be any more emotionally significant than a jog around the lake. Their relationship is treated so casually that it is hard to determine exactly how much V. I. sees of him. She says, for example, “I continued to see Peter Burgoyne, somewhat sporadically” (118) and, later, when V. I. describes a trip to Peter Burgoyne's house during which he arranges for evidence to be removed from her apartment, she vaguely admits, “I'd been to Peter's a few times already. The dog seemed to know me and was almost as glad to see me as him” (138). Thus Burgoyne as a character is set up to avoid the threatening male power that Scorsoni represents so palpably in A Is for Alibi.

Such a strategy seems reasonable and effective but it leaves two unanswered questions: 1) if Burgoyne is such a lightweight and the sex between them is an exercise, why does V. I. bother to get involved with him at all? and 2) if Burgoyne is not powerful or dangerous in any way, then why does he manage to outsmart V. I. on several occasions, as, for example, when he arranges the theft of crucial evidence from her apartment?

Unlike Kinsey, V. I. never openly questions herself or analyzes why she has become involved with Burgoyne. Perhaps it is not surprising that this most hard-boiled of female detectives seems in all this emotional invulnerability to model herself on her male predecessors.³ Yet elements in the novel make it clear that she cannot quite pull the imitation off. V. I.'s strength depends on her ability to repress or skate over the emotional depths in the situation. But that she cannot fully repress the disturbance that Burgoyne represents is revealed on several levels. Throughout this novel, as well as in many others, V. I. is troubled by disturbing dreams, dreams that reveal the emotions she refuses to claim in her conscious life. In Bitter Medicine whose plot is put in motion by a hospital's mistreatment of a pregnant mother as a result of which both mother and infant die, V. I. significantly has frequent nightmares about a baby. Thus the first time that Burgoyne is admitted as a threat is in a dream where he is seen trying to steal crucial evidence from a baby with V. I.'s name:

I saw Peter Burgoyne come up behind the baby. He grabbed at the folder and tried to take it from her, but her grip was too strong. He let go of the file and began strangling her. She made no sound, but watched me with piteous eyes.

I woke sweating and choking, disoriented.

(146)

Another piece of V. I.'s repression is that as she begins to suspect Burgoyne, she begins to experience stomach aches and indigestion. Finally, but only after she has discovered the full extent of Burgoyne's complicity, she admits to her close friend and mother-confidante, Lotte, “Oh yeah, I'm okay. Just a little bruised in the ego. I don't like having affairs with people who are using me. I thought I had better judgement than to let it happen” (227). Lotte responds, “So you're human, Victoria. Is that such a bad thing?” (227) Interestingly, V. I. cannot let even that judgement on her behavior pass. She thinks, “Human, huh? Maybe she was right, maybe not such a bad thing … It sounded good—a page out of Leo Buscaglia. But I didn't believe it” (228).

Why does V. I. feel the need to deny she is human and fallible? The reasons for her repressions are made plain in the plot, for every opponent she has from her ex-husband to the murderer himself will try to use her emotional involvement against her. Her ex-husband, who is the high-priced attorney defending the establishment murderer, counters V. I.'s accusations by saying, “I believe Ms. Warshawski, while a well-meaning investigator, probably got carried away by her emotional involvement with the doctor who unfortunately took his own life earlier today” (250). The murderer also attacks her testimony to the police by emphasizing her personal relationship to Burgoyne: “After all, you're the person who probably saw the most of him the last few weeks” (243). V. I. operates in a world that puts emotion and truth, caring and professionalism, in opposing categories.

Thus it becomes quite clear why V. I. strenuously represses those sides of herself, even to the point of going after Burgoyne and exposing him as the weak link in the chain. But the emotional residue is still present, as with Grafton. At the end of the book the reader learns, by accident and with no commentary or explanation, that V. I. has adopted Burgoyne's dog, Peppy, left homeless after his suicide. In the last scene she is on the beach still denying to Mr. Contreras that she is upset about Burgoyne but playing with Peppy all the while. On the surface, V. I. enacts the traditional hard-boiled detective's typical response to the end of a case—that combination of satisfaction at having asserted personal mastery and post-case exhaustion caused by the unrelenting evil of the world. As V. I. puts it, “By rights I should be on top of the world … So why did I feel wrapped in a cocoon of lethargy, barely able to keep awake?” (258). But the setting—the beach, not some seedy office—the presence of her neighbor, Mr. Contreras, and, most of all, Peppy, suggest there is something else there as well, something that V. I. will not consciously lay claim to. She comments, “I couldn't put my feelings into words” (257). But Mr. Contreras, who always has plenty of words, points out the difference in V. I. She has brought something out of the case that a traditional hard-boiled detective never would have. As Mr. Contreras concludes his summary of the case, he says, “At least, you got a dog” (259). Again, therefore, there is the implication that the relationship has had a permanent impact on the detective's life. V. I.'s continuing denial of this only serves to make it clear how threatening to her sense of herself as a detective that involvement with Burgoyne has been.

Thus we have one basic plot and two contrasting approaches to it. My point is not to argue that one is better than the other, to play Grafton off against Paretsky or vice versa. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Grafton's advantage is her frank analysis of the situation, an analysis that shows a certain amount of emotional and intellectual courage. Her disadvantage is that Kinsey may have risked and exposed too much, become too vulnerable. A series detective cannot invest so much emotion in a single case if she hopes to survive. Paretsky's advantage is in her strengthening V. I. to face a system that will exploit a woman's emotions and use them to discredit her if it can. Her disadvantage is that the repressions of emotion that this forces on V. I. will surface, sometimes in unexpected places. What most emerges, however, is the fact that, though each path is different, they reach parallel conclusions. There is in each novel something left over, some overamount, some unassimilated and unassimilatable residue, the loose end that refuses to be tied up. That residue is the mark of sexual difference.

Notes

1. Interestingly, while Nichols and Thompson are in agreement with Klein on some of the basic problems of feminist adaptations of the form, they are at odds in their assessments of the specific examples offered by Grafton and Paretsky. Nichols and Thompson find Grafton's Kinsey Millhone an appealing detective and include their condemnation of the form as a whole in their summary of Paretsky's work. Klein comes to the opposite conclusion, reading Grafton as compromised and Paretsky as successfully undercutting the sexism of the form as a whole.

2. As James F. Maxfield argues in “Hard-Boiled Dicks and Dangerous Females,” “Such an individual has to believe that he is in control at all times” (109).

3. Maxfield states that for Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detectives “[e]motional vulnerability is a far greater menace than physical vulnerability” and that “sexual desire is possibly the greatest threat to the Hammett hero's invulnerability” (111).

Works Cited

Bakerman, Jane S. “Living ‘Openly and with Dignity’—Sara Paretsky's New Hard-boiled Feminist Fiction.” Mid-America 12 (1985): 120-35.

Geberin, David. Sons of Sam Spade: The Private-Eye Novels in the 70s. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.

Grafton, Sue. A Is for Alibi. New York: Bantam, 1987.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1988.

Lehman, David. The Perfect Murder. New York: Free, 1989.

Margolies, Edward. Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross Macdonald. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982.

Marling, William. “The Hammett Succubus.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 3.2 (1982): 66-75.

Maxfield, James F. “Hard-Boiled Dicks and Dangerous Females: Sex and Love in the Detective Fiction of Dashiell Hammett.” Clues 6.1 (1985): 107-23.

Nichols, Victoria, and Susan Thompson. Silk Stalkings: When Women Write of Murder. Berkeley: Black Lizard Books, 1988.

Paretsky Sara. Bitter Medicine. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.

Reddy, Maureen T. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Continuum, 1988.