SOURCE: Christianson, Scott. “Talkin' Trash and Kickin' Butt: Sue Grafton's Hard-boiled Feminism.” In Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction, edited by Glenwood Irons, pp. 127-47. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Christianson maintains that Grafton's hard-boiled detective novels challenge the notion of male domination and avow female liberation.]

Sue Grafton's series of hard-boiled mystery novels, featuring the female private investigator Kinsey Millhone, challenges patriarchy and asserts feminine autonomy.¹ As the narrator of Grafton's stories, Millhone talks tough and cracks wise—and occasionally cracks skulls and other parts of her antagonists’ anatomies in the true tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction. Like her many male counterparts—Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Spenser—Millhone attempts to order her chaotic and violent experience in a careful narrative which, above all, tries to remain true to her experience even when she cannot make sense of what exactly is happening to her. She talks dirty, she talks tough, and she talks smart as she moves through a diverse cultural milieu in which she—a working-class woman—figures all too often as an outsider, an ‘other.’ Unlike her male counterparts, however, Kinsey Millhone seldom relies on a dominant rhetorical device in hard-boiled narrative: the ‘hard-boiled conceit,’ the kind of poignant metaphor or simile which peppers the writings of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker as frequently as bullets and shots of booze. Millhone nevertheless reveals a similar ‘complex sensibility’ which is at once hard-boiled, feminist, and working class. Unlike several contemporary women (and men) detective novelists, Grafton is not an academic slumming in the streets of popular culture and social activism, and her detective Millhone is neither a pampered amateur solving crimes for fun nor a fantasized idealist saving the world through political correctness. Millhone is a flawed realist: joyfully single and lonely at times, sexually active in between long spells of celibacy, a liar by choice and habit who struggles to tell the truth about herself and her experience. Sue Grafton uses language to gain a little power within a patriarchal culture which still denies it to women, minorities, and members of the working class.

As hundreds of books and articles testify, the study of ‘popular’ as distinct from ‘serious’ fiction requires no defence—which is not to deny the historical and theoretical significance of the marginalization of popular fiction, which over the centuries has been written overwhelmingly by women. What deserves mention, however, is that popular fiction is definitively generic. Formerly an indictment of all popular fiction, the title ‘generic,’ or ‘genre fiction,’ can actually be seen as one of its more critically valuable features. Contrary to ‘popular’ belief—in this case, the belief of critics preferring ‘high’ or ‘serious’ culture—readers of popular fiction are critically comparative readers. For whatever reasons and with whatever outcomes, readers of popular fiction are highly cognizant of the forms and conventions of the genres they read. Far from the limited view that such readers will tolerate only those works which ‘correctly’ conform to the rules of formation of their favoured genres, the proliferation and development of popular fictional genres suggests that playing off and even violating norms of genres are essential aspects of reader enjoyment. The popularity of Sue Grafton, as well as of Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, and other women writing within the specific genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, suggests that much of the pleasure derived from such works by women writers arises from comparisons made with traditional (and male) norms. Thus, what some feminist critics have often demanded but seldom got, a ‘radical comparativism, in which texts by male and female authors working within the same historical conditions and genres are set against each other’ (Showalter 5), has been a consistent feature in the writing and reading of women's hard-boiled detective fiction.²

TOUGH TALK AND WISECRACKS

In an Armchair Detective interview from 1989, Sue Grafton says, ‘When I decided to do mysteries, I chose the classic private eye genre because I like playing hardball with the boys’ (Taylor 12). I will be ranging over all nine Kinsey Millhone novels published to date (1992) and attempting to let Grafton teach me to read as a feminist, to see the world of her novels through her feminist perspective.³ For as the affirms in the 1989 interview, ‘I am a feminist from way back’ (11). Grafton plays hardball with the boys through her appropriation of hard-boiled language—her use of tough talk and wisecracks—and in the process transforms the classic private eye genre into a place from which a woman can exercise language as power.

The distinguishing feature of the hard-boiled detective genre of fiction since its inception has been its language. As Dennis Porter observes, ‘The language chosen is a mode of address, a style of self-presentation, and an affirmation of American manliness’ (139). Porter is writing about Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and does not discuss women hard-boiled writers, of whom there were not many in 1981, and who obviously are not concerned with affirming ‘American manliness’; but his focus on language as mode of address—how and to whom one is speaking—and style of self-presentation—who is speaking, the kind of person narrating—is important. With few exceptions, hard-boiled detective stories—novels and short stories—speak in the first person. The narrator is the hard-boiled detective him herself, who talks all the time to the reader in direct, evocative, colloquial language that represents the hard-boiled hallmark of the genre. Hard-boiled language or style is a generically distinctive combination of active verbs and fast-moving prose, of tough talk, wisecracks, and the often crude vernacular or colloquial idiom familiar to readers of the hard-boiled tradition, who will recognize its deployment in Grafton's novels.

Through Kinsey Millhone, Grafton comments self-referentially on a mode of address and exhibits in microcosm her hard-boiled style of self-presentation. In ‘B’ Is for Burglar, the second novel in the alphabetical series, Kinsey Millhone writes, ‘I start by asserting who I am and what I do, as though by stating the same few basic facts I can make sense out of everything that comes afterward’ (1). In ‘A’ Is for Alibi at the outset of the series, we learn that who she is is a private investigator who has recently killed somebody, and that the subsequent narrative is her attempt to sort through that experience since the official reports don't say ‘quite enough’ (1). Seven of the nine novels begin in the same way, and all tell us early on who Kinsey Millhone is and what she does. Interestingly, in only the first three novels does Grafton have Millhone comment directly on why she is writing her narrative: in the first two, as we have seen, to make sense of her experience; in the third, ‘C’ Is for Corpse, for that reason and as a memorial and final full report to her dead client, Bobby Callahan. We are apparently supposed to read the novels as elaborated case reports, suspending our disbelief that so long a narrative should be written to serve that professional purpose. Subsequent novels do not try to maintain this ‘fiction,’ and like most hard-boiled detective novels they assume that readers do not need a firmer anchor in ‘reality’ for such long-winded ‘reports.’ The important point is that these long first-person narratives have been ‘written’ by Kinsey Millhone as an attempt to make sense of her experience, and that the first three novels self-consciously and self-referentially acknowledge that fact.

Overwhelmingly in hard-boiled narratives, the style of self-presentation and language is tough—tough-talking and tough-minded. A character in Hammett's Red Harvest describes the Continental Op: ‘You're a great talker … A two-fisted, you-be-damned man with your words. But have you got anything else? Have you got the guts to match your gall? Or is it just the language you've got?’ (Hammett 9).⁴ The hard-boiled detective/narrator always has the guts to match his or her gall, as readers familiar with the genre know. He or she talks tough, talks smart, and talks all the time to the reader in an attempt to assert personal autonomy, to make sense of experience, and to exercise language as power. Tough talk is a prominent feature of the hard-boiled style and is an important, character-defining element in Grafton's narratives. Like her male counterparts, Kinsey Millhone talks tough as an exercise of power—the power to express her emotions and sensibilities, and power over situations and circumstances.

Kinsey Millhone talks tough, and occasionally she backs up the tough talk with violence or the promise of violence—a promise, we are made aware, she is able to keep.⁵ A vivid example is found in ‘H’ Is for Homicide, when Kinsey—after chasing down a violent criminal who has essentially held her hostage for days and just shot her close friend from childhood—lands with her knees on his back, gun drawn: ‘He turned over as I raised the barrel of the gun and placed it between his eyes. Raymond had his hands up, inching away from me. For ten cents I would have blown that motherfucker away. My rage was white hot and I was out of control, screaming “I'll kill your ass! I'll kill your ass, you son of a bitch!”’ (285). This is literally tough talk with a vengeance, the link between the talk and the violence, in Kinsey's word, ‘white hot’ and apparent. Similarly, in ‘G’ Is for Gumshoe, Kinsey has been toyed with and threatened by a hit man contracted to kill her; although seriously afraid for her life—and not afraid to admit she needs the protection of the (male) bodyguard she has not-quite-hired to protect her—she tells him: ‘Lighten up and let's figure out some way to kill his ass. I hate chickenshit guys trying to shoot me. Let's get him first’ (211). The tough talk here shows toughness to be a combination of tough-mindedness in the face of physical danger, a willingness to exercise violence if necessary, and both vulgarity and a sense of humour. ‘Lighten up,’ she tells her bodyguard, not exactly in a situation which calls for that laid-back phrase. ‘I hate chickenshit guys trying to shoot me,’ she says with humorous vulgarity and matter-of-factness, as if it happens all the time and is merely annoying. The blend of vulgarity, humour, and toughness is characteristic of hard-boiled language or tough talk.

As noted earlier, we know from the outset of the series that Kinsey's tough talk is ultimately backed up by the promise of violence: she announces in the third sentence of ‘A’ Is for Alibi that she killed someone, and in typically hard-boiled style she is matter-of-fact about it, bringing into the same first paragraph details about who, how, and where she lives. That novel closes, prior to the epilogue, with Kinsey killing the murderer from a garbage can in which she is hiding from him; as he lifts the lid, peering down at her, she sees a butcher knife in his hand and writes, ‘I blew him away’ (214). In the most recent installment, ‘I’ Is for Innocent Kinsey is shot by the murderer near the end of the novel yet bravely talks to her would-be killer about his crimes as she tries to figure out how to kill him first; as the killer discovers her hiding place in the deserted office, he says, clowningly, ‘Are you prepared to die?’—to which she responds, in characteristic hard-boiled style, ‘I wouldn't say prepared exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised.’ ‘How about you?’ she asks, ‘Surprised?’ With that, Kinsey writes, ‘I fired at him point-blank and then studied the effect’ (282). My point is that the ‘posture promising violence’ is established from the outset and figures throughout the series. Kinsey Millhone's ‘tough talk’ is ‘of the kind’ of hard-boiled language found throughout the genre.

If talking tough is one way of exercising ‘language as power’—over one's self in violent situations, and over one's antagonist as the threat or overture to violence—the hard-boiled detective has also invariably talked smart through glibness, humour, and wisecracks. Again, Kinsey Millhone is no exception. In ‘I’ Is for Innocent as just discussed, Kinsey keeps up a patter of glib talk, along with the tough talk, with her would-be killer, and at one point she cracks wise in response to his philosophizing about killing people, who, he claims, are no more than ants: ‘Jesus,’ Kinsey says, ‘This is really profound. I'm taking notes over here’ (279). Similarly, albeit in a non-violent situation in the first novel, Kinsey wisecracks to an unresponsive witness, ‘Try to keep your answers short so I can get ‘em on one line’ (‘A’ [‘A’ Is for Alibi] 107). A wisecrack is a characteristic remark from a ‘wise guy’—as Dennis Porter says, ‘someone who is no respecter of authority, wealth, power, social standing, or institutions’ (166). A fundamental feature in Chandler's style, according to Porter, the wisecrack is also ‘an ideal form of the vernacular characterized by its tough mindedness and its terseness’ which figures throughout the hard-boiled genre (166). It is usually reserved, in hard-boiled fiction, for dialogue, for presentation to an audience who will fail to appreciate it. But it is linked with vulgar language and humour generally, as aspects of hard-boiled language which reveal the narrator's complex sensibility and attitude towards experience.

Porter calls the wisecrack, specifically, ‘the maxim of the American working classes’ which ‘combines at its level the quintessence of style with the body of wisdom’ (144), but I think wisecracks join vulgar language and humour to provide that function in hard-boiled fiction. It's all humorous smart talk from a ‘smart alec’ who doesn't respect convention or authority. Kinsey Millhone cracks wise, from time to time, as we have seen. She also makes humorous observations about things which, though not technically wisecracks, contribute to the hard-boiled style of her language in similar ways. In ‘D’ Is for Deadbeat, Kinsey writes, ‘Even with low-heeled pumps, my feet hurt and my pantyhose made me feel like I was walking around with a hot, moist hand in my crotch’ (138). Remembering summer camp as a child—a less than positive experience—Kinsey details: ‘The horses were big and covered with flies, hot straw baseballs coming out their butts at intervals … Nature turned out to be straight uphill, dusty and hot and itchy. The part that wasn't dry and tiresome was even worse’ (‘H’ [‘H’ Is for Homicide] 240). Apparently horses made a big impression on Kinsey, for in the next novel she comments, about the stable she is in, ‘The air smelled faintly musty, a blend of straw, dampness, and the various by-products of horse butts’ (‘I’ [‘I’ Is for Innocent] 153). Like the wisecrack proper, such remarks are maxim-like, relying for their effects, in Porter's words, on ‘the shock of the vernacular’ (but not, as he claims, on ‘cynical irreverence,’ though irreverent they certainly are) (144). They reveal a sensibility that is not only irreverent but humorously thoughtful—which insists that thoughtfulness is not monopolized by the higher classes or their more highfalutin, proper language. About the inadequacy of her report to the attorney employing her to prove his case in ‘I’ Is for Innocent, Kinsey reflects philosophically, ‘Small comfort to an attorney who could end up in court with nothing in his hand but his dick’ (98). The remark not only conveys knowledge of what lawyers need in court but offers an oblique and vulgar comment on what they usually rely on.

The wisecrack and related humorous, maxim-like remarks help reveal the hard-boiled narrator's complex sensibility—a streetwise knowledge-ability about the world and its workings combined with the verbal facility to encapsulate that knowledge in pithy, humorous utterances. In other words, we are talking about language as a form of power to articulate a complex understanding about and attitude towards experience. The wisecrack and related forms are similar to but definitely not synonymous with another rhetorical device, one which, as I have claimed elsewhere, is the feature of hard-boiled language which becomes a structuring device of great importance in much hard-boiled language which becomes a structuring device of great importance in much hard-boiled fiction. That device I call the ‘hard-boiled conceit,’ a particularly pointed or extended metaphor or simile which is usually serious, and which is spoken to the reader directly to convey the detective/narrator's complex sensibility. On this functioning of the hard-boiled conceit, I disagree with Porter, who conflates it with the wisecrack and, while acknowledging that it structures the hard-boiled detective novel (144), limits its significance to a ‘digressive effect,’ an example of Barthes's ‘playful excess’ enjoyed only at ‘the level of pure language.’⁶ I contend that the hard-boiled conceit is a more serious and evocative device used by the narrator to communicate his complex sensibility directly to the reader.

First, some examples from the male tradition. From Chandler alone, Porter provides a lengthy list: ‘nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men’ (64); hair ‘like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock’; ‘lower than a badger's balls’; ‘smart as a hole through nothing’; ‘a face like a collapsed lung’; ‘a mouth like a wilted lettuce’ (66). Not found in Chandler alone, the hard-boiled conceit appears throughout the tradition. In Robert B. Parker's latest novel, Double Deuce, Parker has Spenser ‘set up’ a hard-boiled conceit describing a housing project through a parody of the smart talk of a different—and ‘higher’—class of people: ‘The urban planners who had built it to rescue the poor from the consequences of their indolence had fashioned it of materials calculated to endure the known propensity of the poor to ungraciously damage the abodes so generously provided them’ (24). Hard-boiled PI Spenser then offers the hard-boiled conceit describing the housing project: ‘Everything was brick and cement and cinderblock and asphalt and metal. Except the windows. The place had all the warmth of a cyanide factory’ (245). The final line is delivered like a punch-line for the reader alone, carefully prepared for first by the high-falutin language parody, then by the terse descriptive language also characteristic of the hard-boiled style.

In Sue Grafton's novels, we find metaphors and similes—often, I have noticed, animal-related—but only occasionally a full-blown hard-boiled conceit. In ‘C’ Is for Corpse, Kinsey describes the hospital morgue: ‘The temperature was cool and the air was scented with formaldehyde, that acrid deodorant for the deceased’ (71). The closing metaphor has the vivid, maxim-like quality of the hard-boiled conceit. Locating an aged missing person in a nursing home in ‘G’ Is for Gumshoe, Kinsey observes that ‘the truncated shape of her skull gave her the look of some long-legged, gangly bird with a gaping beak. She was squawking like an ostrich, her bright, black eyes snapping from point to point’ (60). Here we have the extended metaphor, another version of the hard-boiled conceit, which links with a briefer version on the following page. When the commotion in the ward finally awakens two other elderly patients, Kinsey notes that they ‘woke up and began to make quacking sounds’ (61). Later in the same novel, Kinsey compares herself to the attractive ex-wife of the hitman contracted to kill Kinsey: ‘In her presence, I felt as dainty and feminine as a side of beef. When I opened my mouth, I was worried I would moo’ (290). Humorously, Kinsey here worries that the hard-boiled conceit—the simile comparing her to a side of beef—will become literal reality. As these few examples show, Grafton appropriates an important feature of hard-boiled language style, though generally the hard-boiled conceit figures much less prominently in her hard-boiled style than it does in that of male practitioners of the genre (especially Chandler, Macdonald, and Parker). Nevertheless, this feature of Grafton's style demonstrates—as do the examples of tough talk and wisecracks—that she is aware of the linguistic conventions of the genre, and more important, that she adopts the hard-boiled style in order to accomplish what she has affirmed is her goal in writing mystery novels: ‘What I hope to do is engage in a kind of truth-telling about what I see’ (Taylor 12). Such truth-telling, of course, represents an important use of language as power in Grafton's novels, and throughout hard-boiled detective fiction.

The desire or intent to ‘engage in a kind of truth-telling’ about what one sees accounts in Grafton's novels for a final kind of hard-boiled ‘smart’ talk found throughout the genre. Grafton herself has observed, ‘I view the mystery novel as a vantage point from which to observe the world we live in’ (Taylor 12). An integral part of Grafton's use of language, found throughout the hard-boiled genre, is a form of philosophical commentary that counterpoints the tough talk, wisecracks, humour, and vulgarity. In ‘C’ Is for Corpse, we can see the counterpoint in action. Following the death (later revealed to be murder) of her client, Kinsey expresses her grief in a quick sequence that constitutes a hard-boiled conceit: ‘Something in her face spilled over me like light through a swinging door. Sorrow shot through the gap, catching me off-guard, and I burst into tears’ (88). That comment ends a chapter, and the first sentence of the next chapter reads, ‘Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point’ (89). The sentence is clearly a maxim, and the two contractions enhance the colloquial style; it is direct and poignant, especially following immediately the more emotional and verbally evocative hard-boiled conceit.

One other example must suffice to detail this stylistic feature found throughout Grafton's novels. In ‘I’ Is for Innocent, Kinsey writes something like a hard-boiled conceit but, I think, discernibly different—perhaps more philosophical than hard-boiled. She is describing a woman she has just arrived to interview, and the description leads purposefully up to the philosophical comment:

Francesca was tall, very slender, with short-cropped brown hair and a chiselled face. She had high cheekbones, a strong jawline, a long straight nose, and a pouting mouth with a pronounced upper lip. She wore loose white pants of some beautifully draped material, with a long peach tunic top that she had belted in heavy leather. Her hands were slender, her fingers long, her nails tapered and polished. She wore a series of heavy silver bracelets that clanked together on her wrists like chains, confirming my suspicion that glamour is a burden only beautiful women are strong enough to bear. She looked like she would smell of lilac or newly peeled oranges.

(154)

The description of Francesca is subtly elaborate, like Francesca's carefully constructed appearance, and leads to the punch-line, which, I think, is not as ‘punchy’ as such lines can often be in hard-boiled narrative. The maxim is neither cynical nor resentful but conveys a matter-of-fact truthfulness. Only a page later, the ‘strong enough to bear’ is recast in more powerful terms: Francesca explains that she got into designing headwear for cancer patients—the activity she engages in while talking to Kinsey—during her own battle with breast cancer two years previously. Francesca reveals her own brand of toughness: ‘One morning in the shower, all my hair fell out in clumps. I had a lunch date in an hour and there I was, bald as an egg. I improvised one of these from a scarf I had on hand, but it was not a great success. Synthetics don't adhere well to skulls as smooth as glass’ (155). Commenting on how this got her started in business, Francesca delivers a maxim of her own: ‘Tragedy can turn your life around if you're open to it.’ She then asks Kinsey, ‘Have you ever been seriously ill?’ to which Kinsey (sort of) wisecracks: ‘I've been beaten up. Does that count?’ Kinsey observes: ‘She didn't respond with the usual exclamations of surprise or distaste. Given what she'd been through, merely being punched out must have been an easy fix’ (155).

VOICE AND AUTONOMY

I have discussed the foregoing scene at length because it offers, in microcosm, the distinctive and original quality of Grafton's hard-boiled style, and I will return to this scene shortly. To this point in my analysis of that style, I have pointedly not referred to Grafton's ‘feminism.’ I have tried to show that Grafton's style is ‘of the kind’ of hard-boiled language found in the male-dominated portion of the tradition. My position differs from that of other critics, who feel that Grafton's style or voice is unlike ‘the cynical, detached one typical of male creators of hard-boiled novels,’ that the similarities are superficial, or that any similarity of language is merely a ‘digressive effect’ which does not offset the basic ideological difference between Grafton's hard-boiled novels and the male-dominated genre of hard-boiled detective fiction (Reddy Sisters 120).⁷ Generally, the view seems to be either that Grafton essentially transforms the hard-boiled style or genre for her feminist purposes, or that her feminism is vitiated by her appropriation of generic characteristics inherently marked by the male gender and its hard-boiled ideology. In my view, Grafton appropriates hard-boiled language for feminist purposes as an exercise of language as power; in Foucauldian terms, she seizes the ‘rules of formation’ for the ‘discourse’ of hard-boiled fiction, thereby occupying a space or ‘subject position,’ formerly reserved for men only, from which she may speak with power as a woman. In plainer terms—offered by Grafton herself—she plays hardball with the boys, on what had been their own turf. To claim otherwise, I believe, is to deny Grafton her sense of what she is doing in her novels, and to enforce a narrowly ‘essentialist’ notion of feminism as the only feminism that really counts.⁸

To return to the scene between Kinsey and Francesca: without making Francesca hard-boiled—I have already demonstrated the difference in style between the two women—Grafton reveals her to be as tough in her own way as Kinsey is in hers. As a perceptive feminist observed to me, ‘Toughness is being willing to do the hard stuff no matter how hard it is to do’ (Huber). We have seen Kinsey humorously remark, ‘Glamour is a burden only beautiful women are strong enough to bear.’ As the scene unfolds, we learn that glamour had indeed been a burden Francesca had had to bear—her identity had been almost exclusively defined by her beauty, and by her need to use it to attract a husband who remained infatuated with his previous wife. Facing the assault on life—as well as beauty—of breast cancer, Francesca made the symbolic gesture of designing a turban to cover her bald head, fighting first for beauty but turning that fight into self-actualization. She tells Kinsey she will probably leave her husband: ‘Now I realize my happiness has nothing to do with him … I woke up one morning and realized I was out of control’ (157). She says a page later, about her whole life, ‘I woke up one day and thought, What am I doing?’ (158). Now she has begun to see with ‘great clarity’: ‘It's like being nearsighted and suddenly getting prescription lenses. It's all so much clearer it's astonishing’ (160).

Waking up and seeing more clearly, I think Grafton is saying, is possible for women in the world now. Doing the hard stuff no matter how hard it is to do is the real measure of toughness, not just macho posturing, backing up the tough talk with a posture promising violence. Grafton problematizes hard-boiled toughness throughout her novels—which is not to say that she radically transforms male hard-boiled attitudes and languages or manages to avoid them altogether. She appropriates hard-boiled style and works through it to articulate her own brand of feminism. Throughout her narratives, Kinsey Millhone reflects on what it means to be tough. In ‘A’ Is for Alibi, as we have seen, she voices her struggle with having killed a man. In ‘B’ Is for Burglar, she discusses that killing briefly with her octogenarian landlord, Henry Pitts, and tries out the self-justifying posture of someone unwilling to be a victim any more; but as Henry points out to her, and as she agrees, trying to turn the killing into a philosophical statement just doesn't ring true, and Kinsey notes the surprising unsureness in her voice as she asks, ‘I'm still a good person, aren't I?’ (77). The point isn't that Kinsey denies that there are victims, and that they are often women victimized by men, but that she is willing to explore what it means to be tough and hard-boiled. In ‘E’ Is for Evidence, her integrity as an investigator is being challenged by an accusation of her complicity in insurance fraud; the people she must investigate—and with whom she is implicated—are of a much higher class, and her dealings with them leave her disconcerted; she is caught in a power game in which she doesn't know the rules, and which causes her to question her strength and integrity—all exacerbated by her solitary personal life, which has left her completely alone at the holidays. She soliloquizes: ‘It's not my style to be lonely or to lament, even for a moment, my independent state. I like being single. I like being by myself. I find solitude healing and I have a dozen ways to feel amused. The problem was I couldn't think of one. I won't admit to depression, but I was in bed by 8:00 p.m. … not cool for a hard-assed private eye waging a one-woman war against the bad guys everywhere’ (63). Or as she writes in ‘I’ Is for Innocence, ‘I wanted to feel like the old Kinsey again … talkin’ trash and kickin’ butt. Being cowed and uncertain was really for the birds’ (221). She is a hard-assed private eye, she is tough—tough-talking, tough-minded, willing to do the hard stuff—but she is also willing to explore her toughness as she explores, generally, her autonomy, her existence as a woman in a male-dominated profession in a male-dominated world.

Hard-boiled language is a matter of voice, and Grafton makes the hard-boiled voice her own. Grafton acknowledges: ‘Voice is a big issue. Until I found the right voice for Kinsey Millhone, I wasn't in business. Voice is about gettin’ connected to your stuff. A sense of authenticity or truth. A writer's voice is that unique blend of viewpoint and language that echoes a writer's soul, if that doesn't sound too lofty or pretentious’ (Taylor 10). Kinsey Millhone's voice, talking non-stop through nine novels, represents ‘a blend of viewpoint and language’ which is discernibly ‘hard-boiled’ at the same time it is individual; in other words, it is ‘of the kind’ of voice or language found throughout the hard-boiled genre even as it is distinctive, original.

According to Porter, the language style of the genre allows for ‘a perfect match between language and behavior, speech and ethics’ (138), and he claims further that it represents what V. N. Voloshinov calls ‘behavioral ideology,’ which, in the case of hard-boiled detective fiction, Porter interprets as ‘an affirmation of American manliness’ against—specifically—English gentility, formality, and high culture (139). As Porter says in relation to hard-boiled fiction, ‘In a novel, speech makes the man who is offered up for the reader's evaluation’ (138-9). Seemingly contradicting Grafton's claim that ‘voice’ is a matter of finding a style to match the writer's soul, Porter—through Voloshinov—asserts that speech or voice ‘makes the man’ in hard-boiled detective fiction.

Obviously problematical here is Porter's assumption that the hard-boiled style is definitively male. In fairness to Porter, he does not discuss women writers within the genre, and he is writing specifically about its originators, Hammett and Chandler. But his close linking of ‘voice’ or speech with ‘behavioral ideology’—‘that atmosphere of unsystematized and unfixed inner and outer speech which endows every instance of behavior and action and our every conscious state with meaning’ (139)⁹—must give us pause as we analyse the voice of a hard-boiled narrator whose speech does not, literally, ‘make the man.’ The implication of Porter's formulation, his linkage of voice and ideology, must be either that adoption of the hard-boiled voice makes the female detective/narrator a man, or that a female narrator is proscribed from adopting such a voice, such a gender-marked style of language and self-presentation. In short, with the female hard-boiled narrator we have either a case of cross-dressing or a style which cannot, by definition, be hard-boiled. In my view, neither implication or conclusion is applicable to the novels of Sue Grafton.

Let me return briefly to Voloshinov, whose ‘constructionist’ position—that individual consciousness is a social structure, rather than innate—is close to the poststructuralist view that consciousness is structured like and by language.¹⁰ Writers, it seems to me, are generally pretty resistant to such a formulation, and Grafton seems to be no exception when she claims that ‘voice’ is ‘that unique blend of viewpoint and language that echoes a writer's soul.’ Voloshinov actually writes that ‘it is a matter not so much of expression accommodating itself to our inner world but rather of our inner world accommodating itself to the potentialities of our expression, its possible routes and directions’ (91; italics in original). For my purposes, I am going to seize on the equivocal nature of Voloshinov's statement: ‘it is a matter not so much of.’ While asserting that we accommodate our inner world to ‘the potentialities of our expression’—to a style of self-presentation through language—Voloshinov's equivocation indicates that we do not exclusively do so. In plainer terms, we not only form ourselves according to the forms of expression available to us but, reciprocally, form our expression according to who we are. That my own formulation is in keeping with Voloshinov's is seen in his affirmation that individual consciousness which has entered ‘into the power system of science, art, ethics, or law’ becomes ‘a real force’ for change in the world. In Grafton's fiction, her adoption of the hard-boiled style allows her to pursue ‘possible routes and directions’ in the production of a distinctive ‘voice’ that, in turn, transforms the style into something unique and feminist.

This first-person exercise of language as power, I contend, works in a way described by the anti-essentialist feminist Monique Wittig. At this point I want to address how, in theoretical terms, Sue Grafton teaches me to read as a feminist.

For when one becomes a locutor, when one says ‘I’ and, in so doing, reappropriates language as a whole, proceeding from oneself alone, with the tremendous power to use all language, it is then and there, according to linguists and philosophers, that the supreme act of subjectivity, the advent of subjectivity into consciousness, occurs. It is when starting to speak that one becomes ‘I.’ This act—the becoming of the subject through the exercise of language and through locution—in order to be real, implies that the locutor be an absolute subject … I mean that in spite of the harsh law of gender and its enforcement upon women, no woman can say ‘I’ without being for herself a total subject—that is, ungendered, universal, whole.

(Wittig 80)

Against ‘essentialist’ theories that predicate distinctive ‘women's ways of knowing,’ Wittig insists, with Simone de Beauvoir, that ‘one is not born a woman’ (9 ff.). Yet, while ‘language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise,’ gender works ‘to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being—subjectivity … The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech’ (80-1). Wittig's conclusion: ‘Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I,’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor’ (81).

Glenwood Irons has described Sue Grafton's hard-boiled fiction as ‘gender-bending’ and has claimed that ‘Grafton actually reinvents the “rugged individual”—as woman’ (‘New Women Detectives’ 135).¹¹ If we follow Wittig's formulation, I think we must perceive Grafton's hard-boiled feminism as ‘gender-busting.’ Through the hard-boiled voice of her narrator, Grafton inserts Kinsey Millhone into the position of locutor who, through her point of view and through abstraction, can lay claim to universality and can become ‘a total subject—that is, ungendered, universal, whole.’ However much this is a ‘fiction,’ and however challenged ‘universal subjectivity’ has been by poststructuralist thinking, I respond to Kinsey Millhone as if this is what happens in her narratives. To conflate my terms with Wittig's, Grafton—through Kinsey Millhone—exercises hard-boiled language as power in order to become an absolute subject; it is through speaking non-stop to the reader in hard-boiled language that Kinsey Millhone becomes an ‘I.’ She attains, in Wittig's terms, the ‘most precious thing for a human being—subjectivity.’ Grafton accomplishes what Carolyn G. Heilbrun demanded of women writers over twelve years ago: ‘We must ask women writers to give us, finally, female characters who are complex, whole, and independent—fully human’ (Heilbrun 34).¹² Significantly, as I have shown, she accomplishes this on the turf of hard-boiled detective fiction, playing hardball with the boys.

Heilbrun contends: ‘Woman has too long been content to accept as fundamental the dependent condition of her sex. We avoid aggressive behavior, fear autonomy, feel incomplete without the social status only a man can bestow’ (29). The result has been a relative handful of successful women who have actually been ‘honorary men,’ who have succeeded by ‘preserving the socially required “femininity,” but sacrificing their womanhood’ (29). As my discussion of her hard-boiled voice has shown, Kinsey Millhone does not avoid aggressive behavior (though she problematizes, not celebrates, it); she explores autonomy; and she does not feel incomplete without a man (though she is not averse to having a good one around, like the bodyguard Robert Dietz in ‘G’ Is for Gumshoe). Most important, Kinsey Millhone is not an ‘honorary man’ in Heilbrun's terms. Finally, Grafton teaches me to read as a feminist by having Kinsey Millhone explore what it means to be a woman with the emphasis on a woman, who happens to be a hard-boiled private detective.

In Reinventing Womanhood, Heilbrun observes that she learned from her mother ‘the importance of autonomy for women,’ and she goes on to describe her mother's ‘lasting gift’ and ‘remarkably clear’ message: ‘Be independent, make your own way, do not pay with your selfhood for male admiration and approval: the price is too high’ (16-17). In ‘D’ Is for Deadbeat, Kinsey describes what she learned from the aunt who raised her after her parents died in a car crash: ‘Rule Number One, first and foremost, above and beyond all else, was financial independence. A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent on anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused … Any feminine pursuit that did not have as its ultimate goal increased self-sufficiency could be disregarded. “How to Get Your Man” didn't even appear on the list’ (107-8). The similarities between the advice given Heilbrun by her mother and the advice given Kinsey by her aunt are unmistakable. Grafton echoes Heilbrun, which should not be surprising from a self-proclaimed feminist who has probably read this feminist scholar who is also the detective novelist Amanda Cross. Grafton, in short, accomplishes Heilbrun's dictum ‘Womanhood must be reinvented.’ Grafton approaches the writing of detective fiction as an opportunity to reinvent herself; as she says in the Armchair Detective interview: ‘I don't just make this stuff up, you know. Because of Kinsey, I get to lead two lives—hers and mine. Sometimes I'm not sure which I prefer’ (Taylor 10). If, as Grafton says, Kinsey Millhone is a ‘stripped down version’ of Grafton herself (Taylor 10), Kinsey also comments throughout the series on inventing and reinventing herself. In ‘A’ Is for Alibi, Kinsey reflects that she knows more about other people's lives than her own, and speculates, ‘Perhaps, in poring over the facts about other people, I could discover something about myself’ (132). In ‘F’ Is for Fugitive Kinsey is hired to prove the innocence of murder of a man who walked away from prison seventeen years ago: ‘Curious, I thought, that a man can reinvent himself. There was something enormously appealing in the idea of setting one persona aside and constructing a second to take its place’ (11). And in ‘H’ Is for Homicide Kinsey gets an actual opportunity to reinvent herself as an unwilling undercover agent in an insurance fraud gang: about her assumed identity as ‘Hannah’ Kinsey writes, ‘I was making up Hannah's character as I went along, and it was liberating as hell. She was short-tempered, sarcastic, out-spoken, and crude. I could get used to this. License to misbehave’ (142). A ‘license to misbehave’ is as good an expression as any to describe Grafton's hard-boiled feminism throughout the Kinsey Millhone series. Grafton invents and reinvents herself and Kinsey Millhone in an attempt to exercise hard-boiled language as power.

Notes

1. See especially Faludi. Faludi's hard-boiled journalism is a lot like Grafton's hard-boiled feminism, and reading Faludi's thoroughly researched book was important in my thinking about Grafton's fiction.

2. For a man to ‘do’ feminist criticism requires a critical tiptoeing through a theoretical minefield. Showalter in ‘Introduction: The Rise of Gender’ (Showalter 6-7) uses the memorable phrase ‘Some “male feminism” looked a lot like the old misogyny dressed up in Wolf's clothing,’ illustrating that such male feminism is not ‘genuine self-transformation’ but an ‘intellectual appropriation’ involving ‘the mastery of the feminine’ which ‘has long been a stance of masculine authority.’ Men's enthusiasm for ‘essentialist’ feminism—theories that assert essentially feminine or female qualities of women, women's distinctive ways of knowing and being—seems too much like the long-standing habit of thinking through ‘sexual analogy,’ described and denounced by Ellmann (2-26) twenty-five years ago. Moi's discussion of Ellmann underscores, I believe, the continued relevance of Ellmann's early and ground-breaking study; see Moi 31-41.

   That kind of thinking has dichotomized the sexes and resulted in the egregious sex and gender stereotypes that have sustained (if not necessarily caused) women's subjugation. But men adhering to a poststructuralist mistrust of all essentialism (an essential mistrust of essentialism, it should be noted) have tended to ignore the gendered nature of human experience; in their deconstructions of binary oppositions—including ‘male/female’ and ‘man/woman’—male poststructuralists have effaced women's experiences and reduced différence to a textual effect which can be ‘deconstructed’ but which leaves women's oppression in the world intact. For discussions of feminists’ problems with poststructuralist theories, especially ‘anti-essentialism,’ see Fuss 6-18 (on the essentialism/anti-essentialism controversy) and 23-37 (‘Reading like a Feminist’). Balbus specifically discusses the problems of applying Foucault to feminism. Sawicki's response to Balbus (‘Feminism’) underscores the problems of male feminists appropriating essentialist feminism and argues strongly in favour of a Foucauldian feminism. Sawicki includes this response in her book on Foucault and feminism (Disciplining Foucault), which presents a sound case for an ‘anti-essentialist,’ poststructuralist, Foucauldian feminism, and the ideas of which have profoundly informed this paper.

   As the feminist psychoanalyst and critical theorist Flax notes, ‘Male scholars tend not to read feminist theories or to think about possible implications for their own work’ (24). Important as it has become, as Showalter has noted (1-11, quoting Flax 2), to think and talk about gender, it has still been left largely to women critics and theorists to do the thinking and talking—often at the risk of having this important work ‘devalued or segregated from the “mainstream” of intellectual life’ (Flax 24). While having benefited greatly from the diversity of feminist criticism as well as from the controversies within feminism, I am less interested in taking a position on those controversies than in making use of insights wherever I can find them. Accordingly, I have brought to bear feminist theories which help illuminate what is ‘there’ in the text.

3. See Reddy ‘The Feminist Counter-Tradition’ 176. Reddy writes about Grafton and three other writers, ‘By writing as feminists and by creating feminist detectives, all four novelists teach their readers to read as feminists, to look on the world—at least temporarily—from a feminist perspective.’ As I will explore later in this chapter, the problem with Reddy's analysis is the singular designation in ‘a feminist perspective.’ Grafton's feminist perspective shares features with other feminisms but her individual working through of her perspective deserves specific attention.

4. My brief discussion here of tough talk and wisecracks in the male branch of the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction derives from my longer treatment of the topic in ‘Tough Talk and Wisecracks.’

5. From this point on, I will usually refer to Kinsey Millhone by her first name, as Grafton does in the Taylor interview. (As noted in one of the novels, ‘Kinsey’ is the detective's mother's ‘maiden’ name.) I found that the impersonal reference ‘Millhone’ simply did not suit a narrator who reveals herself so personally—and who usually introduces herself as ‘Kinsey’ and never refers to herself as ‘Millhone.’

6. See Porter's discussion, 53-6, and my response, ‘Tough Talk’ 156-9 and Irons Gender 147-51. I have discussed the relation of the hard-boiled conceit to the larger project of literary modernism in ‘A Heap of Broken Images,’ where I also discuss the ideology of hard-boiled detective fiction and its appropriation by the popular audience.

7. See also Reddy ‘The Feminist Counter-Tradition’ 174-6. As noted, Porter finds the language to be a digressive effect in hard-boiled fiction, and discusses the ideology of the genre generally (115-29) and the language and ideology of hard-boiled detective fiction specifically (133-45). Klein concludes that being a hard-boiled private investigator is ‘an unsuitable job for a feminist,’ and that the feminism of writers like Grafton is severely compromised by their adoption of the hard-boiled genre—that their novels ‘demonstrate a triumph of the genre over feminist ideology’ (200-21). Ogdon goes so far as to say that ‘there is a hard-boiled ideology’ that is white, heterosexual, and male, and that ‘describes a specific way of speaking and seeing’ which is different in kind from that employed by ‘detectives from the margins’ (those who are not white, male, and heterosexual) (71). Klein and Ogdon seem to read novels like catalogues of ideological markers or effects, and with Humm, Stigant, and Widdowson I think we must ‘avoid a functionalist sociology which insists upon mechanically reading off ideological effects from the formulae ossified in a “lesser tradition” of popular fiction’ (10). Palmer's recent analysis of gender, genre, and ideology is more thorough and less categorical than the studies mentioned but still suggests that ‘the elements of thriller structure … make central female roles within this genre difficult to sustain’ (14g). See also my discussion on the relation of ideology and reader response to hard-boiled detective fiction in ‘A Heap of Broken Images.’

8. Works by Foucault which inform my approach include The Archaeology of Knowledge; Politics, Philosophy, Culture; and, in particular, two essays/interviews, ‘Truth and Power’ and ‘The Subject and Power.’ Although I favour feminisms which align themselves with Foucault and other poststructuralist ‘anti-essentialist’ theories, I am not indicting ‘essentialist’ feminisms put forward, for example, by Reddy in her book and article and represented, variously, by Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, and others. As I have noted, however, I am leery of any ‘essentialist’ feminism put forward by male critics and do not want to make pronouncements about ‘the nature of women’ as it might appear in Grafton's fiction.

9. Porter cites Voloshinov's discussion (Voloshinov 91), to which I will turn shortly.

10. See Fuss xi-xii, 1-6.

11. Irons usefully describes the problematic nature of ‘toughness’ for women writing in the hard-boiled genre, and I would be one of those that would argue, as he says one could, ‘that Kinsey Millhone's narrative space in the discourse of feminism may be less problematical than that of the more consciously feminist V. I. Warshawski’ (135). I think, however, that Grafton ‘busts’ rather than ‘bends’ gender, and that she reinvents woman as rugged individual rather than reinventing the rugged individual as woman—but there I may be splitting hairs.

12. For a discussion of how well Heilbrun in her Amanda Cross novels fulfils her own requirements for creating women characters and writing feminist fiction, see Roberts, reprinted and extended in this volume.

I must acknowledge the invaluable assistance throughout my work on this project (and in pretty nearly everything else I do) of one of the most astute feminist thinkers I know: Randee Huber, my wife. I have benefited greatly from her knowledge of feminist criticism, her perceptive readings of Grafton's fiction, and her sage advice on this paper.

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