SOURCE: Rabinowitz, Peter J. “‘Reader, I Blew Him Away’: Convention and Transgression in Sue Grafton.” In Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, edited by Allison Booth, pp. 326-44. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

[In the following essay, Rabinowitz examines “A” Is for Alibi, its entry into the world of hard-boiled detective fiction, and its role as a feminist text.]

The sex was very good and very strong but the fact remained that I was still in the middle of an investigation and he still had not been crossed off my list. … I couldn't really afford to take the chance. Unless, of course, I was just rationalizing my own inclination to hold back. … Was I really just sidestepping intimacy? Did I long to relegate him to the role of “possible suspect” in order to justify my own reluctance to take a risk?

—Sue Grafton, “A” Is for Alibi

A DOUBLE INTRODUCTION

In “A” Is for Alibi, the first in Sue Grafton's alphabetical series, detective Kinsey Millhone's landlord, Henry Pitts, offers her a preview of his newly composed crossword puzzle, one built on doubles: “‘Prefixes—“bi,” “di,” “bis,” “dis.” Twin. Twain. Binary. Things like that.’” For instance, “‘“Double meaning.” Nine letters. … “Ambiguity.”’”¹ Given the novel's self-consciousness, it's no surprise that the puzzle in the novel turns out to mirror the puzzle of the novel, a novel that stars a twice-divorced detective, hired to expose the killer of the slimy but sexually magnetic twice-married lawyer Laurence Fife—the second wife, Nikki, falsely convicted of his murder; the first wife, Gwen, in fact guilty. (Indeed, Gwen wishes she could double her crime: “‘Killing him once just wasn't enough. I wish I could kill him again’” [p. 188]). Laurence is himself doubled by a second villain, his slimy but sexually magnetic partner, Charlie Scorsoni. And in her search, Kinsey gets some help from Garry (the double R stressed in the text [p. 83]) Steinberg, who works for a firm that should have the double name “McNiece and McNiece” (p. 84), and who is himself an amiable double of Charlie (weight loss is similarly central to their current identities, and they once shared an interest—although for profoundly different reasons—in the same woman). Not coincidentally, it's while laboring over Pitts's puzzle, having worked out such words as “disloyal” and “two-faced” (p. 180), that Kinsey suddenly sees through the mystery and realizes that the murdered accountant Elizabeth—appropriately surnamed Glass—is mirrored by another Elizabeth. This leads in turn to her discovery that what appears to be a single plot strand is, in fact, a double series of imitative murders. The novel is formally double as well, for it has a double ending, a dramatic confrontation in which Kinsey dispatches the villain with the climactic line “I blew him away” (p. 214), and—on a separate page, in different typography—a brief and reflective Chandlerian coda, where she recognizes her solitude and the fact that she can trust no one but herself.²

In the spirit of that puzzle within a puzzle, I'm going to offer a double reading of Grafton's dead-serious generic playfulness, two ways of viewing the novel as an answer to a single broad question: To what extent are generic narrative patterns a prison house that confines the scope of women's action? Specifically, I want to stake out the intersection between convention and transgression with an eye toward discovering how far Grafton has in fact succeeded in resisting the traditions she is playing with, and what this can tell us about genre more generally.

My point, following Henry Pitts, is that there are two answers, depending on how you conceptualize convention. My essay is thus split: the first half, a reading of liberation, traces the ways in which Grafton uses (abuses?) hard-boiled traditions to provide a space for female transgression; the second, a reading of liability, shadows the ways in which narrative structure continues to assert power over both author and character. Of course, there's problem in presenting two readings in a linear essay; for whichever reading gets the final position is apt to be privileged by the audience. But then, detective stories, as a genre, have a similar way of devouring multiplicity, of fusing alternatives into single solutions. So if my essay offers up a double interpretation only to end up taking one away, at least it respects the spirit of its subject. And it respects the power of its subject as well: for part of my point is that the resilience of genre, its resistance to revisions, may hide out in places where authors have little control.

“L” IS FOR LIBERATION

On the most immediate level, Alibi is a refreshingly liberated, “feminist” text, in the limited sense that the author declares herself “a feminist from way back”³ and her narrator openly espouses mainstream feminist positions. Kinsey is a woman who's “never been good at taking shit, especially from men” (p. 174); she steadfastly refuses to flirt (p. 10), even when flirting is the fastest way to get ahead; and she engages in a profession that lets her break out of traditional roles. As B. Ruby Rich puts it, “Being a gumshoe gives a girl the right, like a passport, to cross borders previously closed, to unfix definitions, to ramble through society with a mobility long considered exclusively masculine.”⁴ More significant, Alibi generates much of its emotional power through sympathetic narratives of the ways in which women are brutalized by men—for instance, its account of how Gwen learned that being a “good wife” to Laurence meant transforming herself into a Barbie doll (p. 31), and how that experience ultimately evolved into homicidal impulses. Then too, not only in the world within the novel, but in the very act of writing the novel, Grafton—with such colleagues as P. D. James, Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller—strikes a blow for women; for by writing in the hard-boiled tradition, rather than the more genteel classical tradition favored by most earlier women detective novelists, she stakes out a claim on a formerly male preserve. Grafton, as she herself puts it, likes “playing hardball with the boys”;⁵ and it's no accident that the novel is dedicated to her father, Chip Grafton, himself a practitioner of the hard-boiled art.⁶

But Alibi is brazenly transgressive on a deeper level too. Granted, some critics have questioned Millhone's success in Alibi. Kathleen Gregory Klein, for instance, insists that it's hard for us to respect Kinsey, since the novel's conflicts stem largely from her “errors” and “misjudg[ments],” including her “trust[ing] and sleep[ing] with a murderer who is trying to keep her from the truth.” Similarly, Rosalind Coward and Linda Semple, writing about Grafton and Paretsky, raise an important issue when they point out that, even though the heroines are “sympathetic” and “independent,” “their acceptance of the individualistic and machismo codes of violence are highly problematic.”⁷ And these criticisms make good sense on the level of the narrative audience, the level on which the reader pretends to treat the characters as real. On the level of the authorial audience, however—where the novel is seen not so much as a story about real characters but as a highly charged example of a particular generic pattern of repeated formal narrative features—we get a somewhat different picture.⁸ Indeed, as is appropriate in a novel about doubles, Grafton transgresses against the generic traditions in two separate, even opposing, ways that simultaneously liberate and obliterate the hard-boiled novel. Let's follow each trail in turn, starting with obliteration.

First, following a lead offered by one of the many meanings of Millhone, Grafton sharply grinds down the genre through parody. Lest I appear to be forcing a confession from an unwilling text (indeed, my colleague Carl Rubino suggested that I call my essay “‘O’ Is for Overreading”), let me point out that the novel is quite self-conscious in its generic gaming, often making its points by playfully literalizing metaphors. Thus, for all the detective stories with wild-goose chases, this is the only one I can recall where the detective is actually chased by geese (technically domestic geese, but wild enough to pose a substantial threat). No surprise, then, that Alibi is full of explicit and implicit digs at Grafton's hard-boiled brothers. Hammett, for instance, makes his bow as a dog named Dashiell who's just stepped into his own “little accident,” which, in an arch debunking of Sam Spade, has to be “scoop[ed]” up with a paper towel (p. 29). Similarly, when Kinsey acts in the tough manner of the Mickey Spillane whose name her own echoes, she criticizes herself for the cowardice motivating her bravado (“Tough. I'm tough, scaring the shit out of some dumb kid” [p. 197])—and Grafton makes sure that there's a hammer lying on the ground lest we fail to see Mike Hammer specifically as her literary target (p. 195).⁹ Spillane's Charlotte Manning too (as well as the vacuum cleaner on which much of I, the Jury's solution turns) is echoed in the name of Laurence's former lover, Charlotte Mercer, who, like her namesake, insists on real men who don't “fawn.”¹⁰

More important, Grafton rewrites these classic texts in a way that both exposes and explodes their violent misogyny. Indeed, the very choice of a female detective seriously disrupts the sexual politics of the genre.¹¹ As I hardly need point out in the context of this collection, Victorian literary convention—indeed, Western literary convention back through Spenser to the Greeks—postulated that transgressive women must either be tamed (her transgression neutralized, usually through marriage) or punished (often through death); and this tradition was taken up and further codified in the American hard-boiled detective novel. Every critic, of course, has his or her own sense of the genre; still, while everyone might not list Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Chandler's The Big Sleep, and Spillane's I, the Jury as their basic trinity, it's certainly not an idiosyncratic inventory of the model texts in the hard-boiled canon. And it's certainly not incidental to the history of the genre that all three lean heavily on the traditional thematics of the unnatural, sexually aggressive, and socially insubordinate woman.¹² Granted, what Stephen Cooper aptly calls the “genre's commitment to the physical and emotional mistreatment of women” has a different meaning for each author.¹³ Thus, for instance, Stephen Knight suggests that the misogyny of Chandler's Marlowe has physical roots (he is “perturbed by those who can get to his body in some way,” which explains why doctors stand with women and homosexuals among the major threats), while Gary Day sees an almost philosophical drive behind Hammett's negative depiction of women, at least in the earlier Continental Op stories.¹⁴ Still, for all their psychological and political differences, these novels achieve both their emotional power and their formal coherence at least in part by concluding with the death or incarceration of the alluring female predator.¹⁵ In this regard, Laurence Fife is an emblem of the genre itself: he didn't like women, because “‘he was always expecting to be betrayed’” and he believed that “‘women were the people who did you in’” (p. 56).

Of course, for this pattern to perform its cultural work most effectively, it needs to remain under wraps. In particular, as two decades of feminist criticism have made increasingly clear, our culture has masked the gender specificity of the most familiar plot patterns that we live with by treating them as universal. Thus, in the case of the hard-boiled detective story, the overt narrative of exposure is but a front for a covert narrative of concealment, as the formula masks violent misogyny by disguising it as a generalized and gender-neutral form of justice. But once the formula is held up to its opposite—once we see, for instance, the pattern with the genders reversed—the resulting surprise and discomfort make clear how much gender is inherent in the original version, and thus bring its ideological function into focus. That's what Thelma and Louise does to the male buddy films of the Butch Cassidy type; and that's what Grafton's parody does to the hard-boiled detective novel.

For Alibi is, on at least one level, an annihilating cross-dressing of the genre. Indeed, the theme of cross-dressing is explicitly held out: when Charlie admits to his former obsession with candy bars, “his tone was caressing and he sounded like he was confessing to a secret addiction to wearing panty hose” (p. 51);¹⁶ when Garry Steinberg talks of his eating disorder, he shows Kinsey an old photo in which he “looked a bit like Arlette [the obese manager of the Hacienda Motor Lodge] might if she decided to cross-dress” (p. 123). Thus here, it's a sexually aggressive and socially disruptive male who threatens the independence of a lone female detective. Indeed, Charlie is introduced as a typical romantic hero of the Rochester type: “He had thick, sandy hair, receding at the temples, a solid jaw, cleft chin, his blue eyes magnified by big rimless glasses. His collar was open, his tie askew, sleeves rolled up as far as his muscular forearms would permit. … His smile was slow to form and smoldered with suppressed sexuality” (p. 23). But the contradictions in that heroic persona are mercilessly exposed. His raw animal sexuality, like that of Hammett's Brigid O'Shaughnessy, can be turned “off and on like a heater” (p. 24). And Nikki explicitly compares him to the kind of hero described on “‘the blurb of a paperback: “stepping over the bodies of those he loved”’” (p. 40). Furthermore, Grafton concretizes those bodies, making Charlie a literal lady-killer who has murdered three women by the time we reach the final scene, where he tries to do in our heroine. It's no surprise, then, that this novel achieves both its emotional power and its formal coherence at least in part by concluding with the death of this alluring male predator. Under the circumstances, it's hard not to see the closing line of the first ending—“I blew him away”—not only as a reference to Charlie himself, but to the whole tradition he stands for. When she kills Charlie Scorsoni, she's killing not only an individual but an imprisoning romantic cliché.

But at the same time that she pulverizes the genre, Grafton also uses it as a vehicle to express women's rage. For despite the comedy of Grafton's generic play, there is serious anger at work here. Indeed, according to Grafton herself, the novel is at least partly an act of revenge; and through her alter ego Kinsey—who Grafton sees as a “stripped down version” of herself¹⁷—the author gets away with murder.

“A” Is for Alibi … is partly based on a little scheme I came up with to kill an ex-husband of mine. He put me through three custody battles. He taught me how to fight, I'll tell you that. I learned it from an expert. I'd lie awake at night, feeling helpless and frustrated. In the process, I came up with an idea for doing him in. Of course, I knew I'd get caught at it and I'd have to spend the rest of my life in a shapeless prison dress. … Disgracing the very children I was fighting to keep. So I decided to put the murder plot in a book and get paid for it, and thus have the best of all possible worlds.¹⁸

The tone may be light, but Grafton's remarks bear witness to Alibi's assumption of heavy personal psychological weight. And if we view genre traditionally, as a set of common features found in a grouping of texts, it would appear that, while obliterating the genre, Grafton has still managed to twist it to serve her own ends.

Specifically, since men have used the genre as a way of venting antifeminism in a socially acceptable manner, Grafton writes Alibi to make space for her rage against at least one man in her life. Thus, not only for what it does to the genre, but also for what it allows her to say about her former husband, it's doubly appropriate that the novel closes in a parodic reversal of a locus classicus of hard-boiled misogyny, the final scene of I, the Jury. The reversal is wide-ranging: just as Mickey Spillane makes concrete the name of his villain Charlotte Manning (“‘You no longer had the social instinct of a woman—that of being dependent upon a man’”),¹⁹ so Grafton shows the meaning behind Charlie Scorsoni's name—derived not only from score but also from scorse, “to chase”—as he pursues Kinsey along the beach. Spillane's literal exposure of the villain—in the form of a slow striptease—is here replaced by the desperate disrobing of the detective; and as Spillane ends with his detective shooting the alluring female predator and former heartthrob as she is attempting to seduce and kill him, Grafton, as we've seen, replays the scene with the genders reversed. Under the circumstances, it is hard not to hear the ending line “I blew him away” not only as a farewell to the romantic cliché of the Rochester type but more specifically as an echo of Mike Hammer's famous last words in I, the Jury: “It was easy.”²⁰ The effect is electric: for whatever Kinsey's doubts on the level of the narrative audience (doubts she expresses in the coda), there's little question that with this dramatic closure Grafton has succeeded, for the authorial audience, in finding a concrete representation for her own rage against her former husband. That she blows him away from a position inside a trash bin has multiple symbolic resonances. Kinsey's first homicide case put her up against a woman who suffocated her own children in a garbage can—and that experience “cured” Kinsey of “homicidal urges” as well as “any desire for motherhood” (p. 112). But on another level, her final position only serves to remind us that even the trashiest literature can, if taken over and remade, serve as a site of empowerment.

“L” IS FOR LIABILITY

But, as I've argued elsewhere, there's another way of considering genre. In a subplot of the novel, Kinsey tries to protect California Fidelity Insurance Company from a trumped-up liability claim filed by one Marcia Threadgill. Kinsey manages to expose the fraud with photographs; but in the end, the insurance company refuses to read them the way she does. The pictures expose not only the crime but also the breasts of the well-endowed Threadgill; to company representative Andy Motycka, they're more valuable as pornography than evidence, and he decides it's not worth fighting the claim in court (pp. 156-57). In some ways, genres are no different from liability claims—they often take on an interpretive life of their own, despite attempts to limit them.

Specifically, literary conventions lie as much in readers as in texts; that is, they can be seen not only as repetitions of concrete literary elements, but also as shared interpretive strategies for making sense of the books we read. And genres can thus be seen not only formally, as sets of features, but from the reader's perspective, as packages of interpretive procedures for unlocking literary secrets through a process of transformation. These procedures include what I've called rules of notice (which tell us where to direct our attention), rules of signification (which allow us to draw the meaning from the details we notice—for instance, to draw psychological meaning from facts about a character or to draw sexual innuendos from specific textual features), rules of configuration (which permit readers to put together disparate elements into a larger formal pattern, and hence develop expectation and a sense of closure), and rules of coherence (which allow us to ascribe generalized meaning to the completed experience of the work). From this perspective, reading is always “reading as”: reading Moby Dick “as” an adventure story produces a significantly different interpretive experience from reading it as a symbolic novel.²¹ Just as Kinsey operates by tacking index cards on a bulletin board and “telling myself the story as I perceive it” (p. 20), so readers in general create their own literary experiences. This is not to say that reading is a random process of subjective association. People read differently, but not necessarily idiosyncratically. For while the procedures we use to produce the texts we live with may not be firmly fixed, they are still explicitly taught and widely shared.

Thus, one can conceptualize the hard-boiled detective story not simply as a collection of texts with a reiterated plot pattern. One can also conceptualize it as a predisposition on the part of readers to take whatever texts are already labeled “hard-boiled novels” and interpret them according to a familiar preexisting set of interpretive rules. Let me clarify with an example. Critics often testify that hard-boiled detectives gain moral stature—indeed, a moral stature so potent that we are able to accept their acts of violence—because they represent a code of decency that raises them above the moral trash bins in which they find themselves. “Down these mean streets,” as Chandler's oft-quoted phrase has it, “a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid … a man of honor.”²² I would argue, however, that this way of putting things reverses evidence and verdict. Private eyes do not in fact earn their stature; the reason we accept their violence is not that they concretely incorporate values that raise them above the criminals. Rather, the reader applies a rule of signification that we might call the Rule of Gumshoe Honor. This way of reading imbues the plot function of the detective with moral quality. That is, the reader assigns a positive valence to the values that detective heroes hold because he or she comes to the text with a prior predisposition to read the novel as if the detective's values, whatever they are, are in fact so admirable—so untarnished—that violent defense of them is not only acceptable, but commendable, even necessary. Honor sticks to the detective, almost regardless of his actions. Indeed, one of the major subgenres consists of texts, such as James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere, or the films Black Widow, Cop, The Big Easy, and Internal Affairs that push this line: how far can the detective go, how much become like the criminal, before the reader will refuse to apply this rule of signification?

From this perspective, Mike Hammer doesn't earn the respect of the authorial audience (that is, Spillane's assumed readers) by convincing it of the validity of his eye-for-an-eye code of justice, any more than Travis McGee earns the respect of John D. MacDonald's (rather different) authorial audience for his environmental concerns. Rather, the authorial audiences accept the validity of the codes because, due to their prior experiences with detective fiction, they come to the novels already ready to accept, at least during the course of reading, whatever code the detective espouses, unless there is strong pressure to do otherwise. To use an increasingly popular computer metaphor, the validity of the detective's code is the default position of the authorial audience.

It's on this level, I'd argue—on the level of convention as the resilient rubber sole on which the reader travels through the text—that Grafton remains a victim of convention. For especially when a convention serves important ideological functions, it may well be used as an interpretive key even when there is good reason to believe that the author did not intend it to be applied. Specifically, if the novel is going to work either as an obliteration of the genre or as a vehicle for the expression of rage, Kinsey cannot be tamed or punished, cannot suffer the fate of either Marianne Dashwood or Daisy Miller. But in fact, despite Grafton's efforts, she is both tamed and punished. That's because of the interaction of a number of rules that readers of detective stories are used to applying: the Rule of Gumshoe Honor and several rules of parallelism.

First, and more obvious, Kinsey is apt to be tamed by readers, both through justification and through esteem. Thus, Maureen Reddy may quite well be right in her analysis of the thematics that emerges when the novel is viewed from a traditional formalist perspective, as a set of concrete textual features: “The novel's central theme is women's position in marriage. … The crime of passion committed by the woman pales in comparison to the man's cold determination to destroy anyone who gets in his way.”²³ Nonetheless, the genre as a set of strategies provides the means to neutralize this transgressive thematics, encouraging us to redraw the boundaries so that Kinsey is tamed by redefinition.

We can see, for instance, the domesticating effect of the Rule of Gumshoe Honor in the tendency, on the part of many readers, to vindicate Kinsey's killing of Charlie as an act of self-defense. Looked at logically and legalistically, self-defense seems a curious description of the novel's culminating act of violence. Granted, Charlie chases Kinsey and threatens her life, but she's got a gun, he's only got a knife. More important, before that final moment, Kinsey has several miles of beach on which to hide, and her self-described overpowering “urge to flee” (p. 211)—especially given its crackling of erotic electricity and its climactic striptease—seems motivated by attraction as much as by evasion. That is, their “little cat-and-mouse” (p. 213) might just as well be seen as a relentless pursuit of a showdown in the Ludlow Beach parking lot; indeed, she finds herself “searching for Charlie” (p. 212) as Charlie is waiting for her. But literarily speaking, the self-defense plea seems a reasonable (indeed, almost irresistible) application of traditional generic rules, especially once we get evidence and conclusion properly sorted out. It's not that the killing is vindicated because it's an act of self-defense; it's that it's considered an act of self-defense because, according to the Rule of Gumshoe Honor, the climactic killing of the villain has to be vindicated, and self-defense is the only rubric under which we can interpret this particular killing so that it fits our generic strategies.

Esteem operates in a similar way. In an analysis of four canonical hard-boiled films, Stephen Cooper has argued that “For all the putative personal integrity and independence ascribed to him by [Chandler], … the detective in fact does align himself implicitly with the very forces of repressive power against which he struggles.”²⁴ Some critics have argued, however, that the hard-boiled feminists have disrupted precisely this traditional alignment of the detective with repressive authority. Lyn Pykett, for instance, claims that these new crime novels question “conventional assumptions about detection and about the authority of the detective. In the new women's crime novel the female investigator does not usually possess the detective's traditional superior perspective and moral authority.”²⁵ But the view of genre I'm proposing suggests that “superior perspective” is like honor: what Chandler calls “a range of awareness that startles you”²⁶ is not “possessed” by the detective so much as assigned by the reader. That is, except in those rare cases of entirely inept detectives (Wallas in Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes), readers are apt to grant authority to the detective, whether she deserves it or not, and even (or perhaps, in a neatly Socratic paradox, especially) when she says that she does not deserve it. For expressions of nonauthority are, especially in our postmodern world, the most authoritative statements one can make. Thus, for instance, the fact that Charlie's death “weighs heavily on [Kinsey's] mind” (p. 1)—a sense reiterated in the nostalgic, self-critical coda of the novel—only serves to make it that much more acceptable and less transgressive, especially since that kind of self-deprecation plays into traditional gender typings for women.

To put it in other terms, one possible resonance of Kinsey's last name is the once-common drug Milltown—and there's a sense in which the reader familiar with the novel's generic antecedents is apt to tranquilize its more radical implications.²⁷ That is, our store of reading strategies provides us with means for smoothing over the cognitive dissonance potential in this novel, since our familiarity with the genre—in particular, the male models she seems to be attacking—provides interpretive techniques that allow us to define her act as not a transgression at all. Whatever Grafton's intentions, then, readers may well find themselves casting the novel so that Kinsey does not really step over the line at all. True, she's not married, as Marianne Dashwood is; indeed, in traditional gumshoe fashion, she comes to realize that “all you have left is yourself” (p. 215). But instead of children, she gets the respectability of a series of her own. Grafton's use of circular form only serves to reinforce this sense of a return to traditional, conservative order: the novel begins at the end, with Kinsey Millhone introducing herself as a person who “make[s] ends meet,” right after she has telegraphed the climax: “The day before yesterday I killed someone” (p. 1). And surely, another overtone in her resonant last name is mill in the sense of “to move in circles.”

Second, and more important, Kinsey receives punishment through parallelism. Parallelism, of course, is central to the novel, for Grafton makes her dramatic point precisely by disrupting a fundamental configurative rule of parallels. According to this rule, readers of narrative—especially detective fiction—can usually approach the text on the assumption that apparently divergent plot strands will, following literature's frankly non-Euclidean treatment of parallels, in fact turn out to be intertwined. Thus, Austen's Emma (a detective story of sorts) achieves closure when the interconnection of its apparently disconnected plot events is revealed; even the apparently chaotic events of The Big Sleep turn out to be part of a single web. Grafton's novels frequently disrupt this expectation—“G” Is for Gumshoe, for instance, chronicles both Kinsey's historical search into the dark past of a family oddly named after the Brontë's, and her current attempt to escape from a killer who has her on his hit list; but while the events of the two plots overlap, the stories themselves remain separate. Alibi plays with this convention in a more consciously disruptive fashion. We have what at first appears to be a single strand of killings. This “false assumption” that “same M.O.” means “same murderer” (p. 192) leads Kinsey into a dangerous relationship; for since Charlie has no apparent reason for having killed Laurence, Kinsey fools herself into thinking he's probably innocent of the other crimes as well. As we've seen, it is her discovery that this apparently single plot line is in fact double that allows her to solve the case.

But in playing with this rule of configuration, Grafton has tangled herself in a connected rule of signification. Kinsey wryly quotes a friend as saying “‘Wherever there is sex, we work to create a relationship that's worthy of it’” (p. 178). A similar thing happens in reading: wherever there is a potential for parallelism, we work to create a reading that will actualize it. That is, elements that can be treated as parallel should be treated that way, especially when they are introduced under the rubric of parallelism: that's why we know to read Anna Karenina so that the Anna story and the Levin story stand as mutually illuminating mirrors of each other. And just as we're invited to see Laurence and Charlie as brothers under the skin, so we are apt to see Gwen and Kinsey, the two women who kill them, as sisters as well. They are both, after all, divorcées, and they both kill the men they sleep with; they're the two final targets of Charlie's string of killings. Gwen's dog salon (K-9 Korners) and her assistant Kathy can be read (especially in a novel whose title highlights the alphabet) as a bridge to Kinsey, as well. Then too, Kinsey describes Gwen with an envy that parallels the envy in Grafton's own description of Kinsey. In discussing her creation as her alter ego, Grafton wistfully notes, “She'll always be thinner and younger and braver, the lucky so-and-so.”²⁸ The sentiment is echoed when Kinsey says of Gwen: “I … hoped to hell I could look that good in another ten years” (p. 35).

The connection between the women is especially strong for contemporary readers familiar with the traditional nineteenth-century novelistic conventions—as Grafton's extensive use of the Brontë family history in “G” Is for Gumshoe suggests that she expects her readers to be. Literary texts, after all, take on a large part of their meaning according to the intertextual grid against which they're placed, the other texts that we have in our mind as we read and against which particular details stand out, either as echoes or as deviations. And a reader who has learned to read Bertha Mason, for instance, as the repressed representative of Jane Eyre's more sexual, less socially responsible side, or who has learned to read Rebecca and Rowena, or Marianne and Elinor, as fragments of a single personality, is apt to read Grafton's novel so that it recapitulates the same pattern.

In other words, familiarity with these traditional interpretive rules encourages readers to see the two women as representatives of one another. And Gwen, we shouldn't forget, is dead at the end of the book. Granted, she's neither captured by the police nor mowed down in an act of vengeance; rather, she's the last in Charlie's panicky string of murders.²⁹ Still, there's a rule of coherence operating here, the Rule of Damned if You Do: deaths of transgressive women (whether it be Catherine Barkley's death in childbirth or Maggie Tulliver's drowning or Daisy Miller's death from Roman fever) are to be read as punishment.

My point is not that Grafton has engineered this parallelism between the two women. On the contrary, Alibi depends, for its radicalizing effect, on minimizing the connection between them. Rather, my claim is that our predisposition to create cohering analogies in situations of parallelism makes us look for ways to connect them, and we're likely to use the traditional interpretive technique of displacement to fit it all together in a way that exposes Kinsey's success as a scam. In this regard, it's worth noting that the homicidal intentions motivating Grafton's text have been divided up between these two women. For while it's Kinsey who has the pleasure of blowing away a predatory male, it's Gwen who, eight years before the novel begins, actually carries out the crime that Grafton wanted to commit—and it's Gwen who manifests Grafton's motivation of revenge, not only in the actual killing but in the affair she has with her ex-husband just prior to the murder (p. 187) and even in such small actions as her choice of colors for the house (p. 38). And once we interpret Gwen's punishment as a form of displacement, our satisfaction at Kinsey's transgression suddenly becomes less secure. It's not that she's really succeeded in blowing away the predatory male; it's simply that someone else has taken the rap. Word hunters may thus find particular resonance in the title, especially since Grafton has opened up the door to various kinds of doubling: for alibi comes from the Latin meaning “elsewhere”—in other words, an alibi is a literal displacement.³⁰

In the end, then, when we treat genre as a set of strategies, our reading of the text may be both overdetermined and contradictory, since Kinsey can be interpreted as a woman tamed and a woman punished. But however she oscillates, she never quite finds a new position in which to stand, and this transgressive novel suddenly finds itself springing back into the same familiar trajectories.

A SINGLE CONCLUSION

What's at stake here, of course, is not so much my interpretation(s) of this particular novel—there are other ways to read it, and I've read it in other ways myself. It would be interesting to see, for instance, whether readers who don't share my background as a white male academic apply similar or different strategies to the text. But regardless of our differences in interpreting this particular text, the general principle at stake remains the same. The intersection of gender and genre has increasingly become a hot spot of critical activity, and a great deal of theorizing is devoted to questioning the ways in which generic patterns limit our perceptions and our possibilities. The answers to those questions, of course, have hardly begun to be explored: but I hope that my argument here will encourage us, as we start to walk down these mean streets, to recognize the importance of considering genres not only as features but also as strategies. For it may be in readers, rather than in texts, that the real repressive power of genre is felt.

Notes

1. Sue Grafton, “A” Is for Alibi (1982; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 150. Subsequent quotations from this edition will hereafter be cited parenthetically by page number.

2. In a paper on doublings, generic interconnections, and lack of authorial control, it is perhaps appropriate that I discovered, when I presented a version of this paper at the Narrative Conference in Nice during the summer of 1991, that my title unintentionally echoes that of an earlier paper by Dale Bauer (“Reader, I Buried Him”), given at the Narrative Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989. I appreciate Dale's gracious relinquishment of the title, as well as the helpful commentary by Patricia Cholakian, Ann Coiro, Bonnie Krueger, Deborah Pokinski, Nancy Rabinowitz, David Richter, Carl Rubino, Nancy Warren, and Tamara Williams.

3. Bruce Taylor, “G Is for (Sue) Grafton: An Interview with the Creator of the Kinsey Millhone Private Eye Series Who Delights Mystery Fans as She Writes Her Way through the Alphabet,” Armchair Detective 22, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 11. It's worth noting, however, that Grafton distinguishes feminism and separatism: “I despise gender-segregated events of any kind” (p. 12).

4. B. Ruby Rich, “The Lady Dicks: Genre Benders Take the Case,” Village Voice Literary Supplement, June 1989, p. 24.

5. Taylor, “G Is for Grafton,” p. 12.

6. Of course, the history of women detective novelists is longer and more complex than this simple dichotomy would suggest. For more detailed accounts, see Jane S. Bakerman, ed., And Then There Were Nine—More Women of Mystery (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1985); Earl F. Bargainnier, ed., Ten Women of Mystery (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1981); Faye M. Blake, “Lady Sleuths and Female Detectives,” Turn-of-the-Century Women 8, no. 1 (1986): 29-42; Rosalind Coward and Linda Semple, “Tracking Down the Past: Women and Detective Fiction,” in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World, ed. Helen Carr (London: Pandora Press, 1989), pp. 39-57; Kathlyn Ann Fritz and Natalie Kaufman Hevener, “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman: Female Protagonists in the Detective Novel,” International Journal of Women's Studies 2, no. 2 (1979): 105-28; Kathleen Gregory Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988); and Maureen T. Reddy, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Continuum [A Frederick Ungar Book], 1988). Indeed, Jane S. Bakerman makes the argument that the genre is made for women: “The traditional male private-eye shares a number of characteristics with female heroes,” she argues, pointing specifically to the private eye's “disenchantment with the establishment, … insistence upon his concept of integrity, [and] distrust of all who reflect her [sic] professional attitude,” she concludes that “the hard-boiled subgenre and feminist fiction are amazingly well suited for one another” (Jane S. Bakerman, “Living ‘Openly and with Dignity’—Sara Paretsky's New-Boiled Feminist Fiction,” Midamerica 12 [1985]: 126, 124). And even Kinsey herself tries this ploy: “The basic characteristics of any good investigator are a plodding nature and infinite patience. Society has inadvertently been grooming women to this end for years” (p. 27). Still, historically, the hard-boiled genre has been dominated by males, both as authors and as detectives, and it's therefore no surprise that there are no chapters on women novelists in, for instance, Brian Docherty, ed., American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).

7. Klein, The Woman Detective, p. 204; Coward and Semple, “Tracking Down the Past,” p. 46.

8. For a fuller discussion of the difference between narrative and authorial audience, see Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 96-104.

9. There are also explicit references to Spillane in “B” Is for Burglar (New York: Bantam, 1986), e.g., p. 103. Thanks to Alison Booth for pointing out the connection between the names.

10. Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury (1947) (New York: Signet, n.d.), p. 61. One might point out as well that Charlotte Mercer is married to a judge; Charlotte Manning talks of marrying a man who's a jury.

11. See Sue Ellen Campbell's discussion of the “generic shift” that results “at least partly” from “the presence of a heroine—a figure for whom there is no established formula and who consequently forces both characters and plots out of their usual molds” (“The Detective Heroine and the Death of Her Hero: Dorothy Sayers to P. D. James,” Modern Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 [Autumn 1983]: 498).

12. James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice is often considered a fourth key text in the tradition. I have not listed it above because it is not exactly a detective novel; but it is worth noting that it, too, follows the same pattern as its brothers.

13. Stephen Cooper, “Sex/Knowledge/Power in the Detective Genre,” Film Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 26-27.

14. Stephen Knight, “‘A Hard Cheerfulness’: An Introduction to Raymond Chandler,” in American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, ed. Brian Docherty (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), p. 79; Gary Day, “Investigating the Investigator: Hammett's Continental Op,” in American Crime Fiction, pp. 39-53.

15. See James F. Maxfield: “One thing Hammett's heroes have in common is that, according to Karen Horney's formulations, they are all neurotics of a certain type. … whose idealized self is that of the master or dominator. … What better profession for a person who distrusts others and needs to feel superior to them than that of the detective?” (“Hard-Boiled Dicks and Dangerous Females: Sex and Love in the Detective Fiction of Dashiell Hammett,” Clues 6, no. 1 [1985]: 109). In this regard, mistreatment of women is not simply incidental: “Emotional vulnerability is a far greater menace than physical vulnerability. … Sexual desire is possibly the greatest threat to the Hammett hero's invulnerability” (p. 111). See also Robert L. Sandels on Spillane: “The most serious threat to the detective's effectiveness in his war on crime is not the female as criminal but the deflecting power of women's sexuality. … The typical Spillane hero … was an anomaly for a man of his time: a real man capable of solving two of modern life's most perplexing problems—crime and women's feminization and domestication of men” (“The Battle of the Sexes,” Armchair Detective 20, no. 4 [Fall 1987]: 154). For a fuller discussion of the female predator in The Big Sleep, and the way she has been misread by generations of readers, see Rabinowitz, Before Reading, chapter 6.

16. One could devote a whole essay to the role of underwear in Grafton; thanks to Victor Rabinowitz for this observation.

17. She continues: “She's the person I would have been had I not married young and had children. … Her biography is different, but our sensibilities are identical. … Because of Kinsey, I get to lead two lives—hers and mine. Sometimes I'm not sure which I prefer” (Taylor, “G Is for Grafton,” p. 10).

18. Ibid., p. 8.

19. Spillane, I, the Jury, p. 167.

20. Ibid., p. 174.

21. For a fuller discussion of this view of reading, see Rabinowitz, Before Reading.

22. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), in his The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Pocket Books, 1952), p. 194.

23. Reddy, Sisters in Crime, pp. 108-9.

24. Cooper, “Sex/Knowledge/Power,” p. 24.

25. Lyn Pykett, “Seizing the Crime: Recent Women's Crime Fiction,” New Welsh Review 2, no. 1 (Summer 1989): 26. The hard-boiled women novelists resist traditional patterns of authority in another way as well, for they have developed female characters who can survive without male help (something that Sayers and Cross, for instance, were not always able to do). See, for instance, Roberts: “In almost every case where Kate [Fansler] needs help she calls on a man” (Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Feminist Murder: Amanda Cross Reinvents Womanhood,” Clues 6, no. 1 (1985): 9. For further discussion of authority, see also Campbell, “The Detective Heroine.”

26. Chandler, “The Simple Art,” p. 194.

27. In this regard, I'm less optimistic than Godard in her discussion of Canadian fiction: “Feminist writers are using certain popular and highly coded genres such as science fiction, fantasy, whodunits and utopian fictions because these forms free writers—and readers—from the constraints of realism, free them to hypothesize alternative realities. … These texts contest the privileging of a single discourse. … [and] refuse the comfort and stability of a fixed subject position to their readers. Refusing to smooth over these contradictory discourses, the text invites answers to the questions it raises, producing its reader as an active participant in the construction of meaning. In this, the text deploys devices to draw attention to its textuality, so undermining its illusionist characteristics” (Barbara Godard, “Sleuthing: Feminists Re/writing the Detective Novel,” Signature: A Journal of Theory and Canadian Literature 1 [Summer 1989]: 46-47). See also Coward and Semple, “Tracking Down the Past.”

28. Taylor, “G Is for Grafton,” p. 10.

29. It's quite possible that this was simply an easy way out for Grafton—she didn't have to decide what to do with this fairly sympathetic murderer. But if so, that shows a limitation of the genre, which doesn't really have a comfortable space for such situations, even though several practitioners have, with strenuous generic revision, managed to let their murderers escape. No examples can be given, unfortunately, without ruining the surprise of good texts.

30. Thanks to Barbara Gold for her instructive commentary on this line. If we accept Maxfield's analysis of P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman—specifically his contention that Cordelia is working out her own relationship to her dead father—then a similar form of displacement can be seen in that novel as well (James F. Maxfield, “The Unfinished Detective: The Work of P. D. James,” Critique 28, no. 4 [Summer 1987]: 211-23).