In This Essay, I Will Discuss Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum
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PLUM’STHEGIRL!JANET EVANOVICH AND THE EMPOWERMENT OF MS COMMON AMERICA THEO D’HAEN In this essay, I will discuss Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series – thirteen instalments to date, from OnefortheMoneyin 1994 to Lean Mean Thirteen in 2007,1 and undoubtedly many more to follow – in the light of some recent theorizing on American crime writing, and particularly on the various forms of empowerment involved. For a long time, crime writing in general and detective fiction in particular were regarded as merely escapist forms of popular litera- ture, as cheap entertainment for the masses, unworthy of serious con- sideration, or, worse, as distractions on the road to the cultured appre- ciation of true or good Literature. In recent years, though, the insight has dawned that, just like its more glamorous high literary counterpart, popular literature too can do what Jane Tompkins has memorably termed “cultural work”.2 Tompkins coined the term primarily with regard to a nineteenth-century American popular genre, sentimental domestic fiction, written by and for women. Specifically, she argued that this kind of writing, rather than the mere drivel it was branded as by contemporary male writers, actually constituted a form of female empowerment. Sean McCann, in Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled 1 Janet Evanovich, One for the Money, London: Penguin, 1994 and Lean Mean Thirteen, New York, St Martin’s Press, 2007. See also Two for the Dough, London, Penguin, 1996; Three to Get Deadly, London, Penguin, 1997; Four to Score, London, Pan, 1999; High Five, London: Pan, 2000; Hot Six, London: Macmillan, 2000; Seven Up, London: Headline, 2002; Hard Eight, London: Headline, 2003; To the Nines, London: Headline, 2004, Ten Big Ones, London: Headline, 2005, Eleven on Top, London, Headline, 2006, Twelve Sharp, London: Headline, 2007. 2 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 146 Theo D’haen Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism,3 makes a convincing case for classical American hard-boiled crime fiction doing the same thing for working-class white male Americans be- tween the two World Wars and beyond. For McCann, New Deal Liberalism posits America, or the United States, as a society where all men, each in his own right, are equal, and where it is the state’s busi- ness to make sure that this is so. Realities, however, often being differ- ent, it is the hard-boiled detective’s task to correct reality where deficient, so as to make sure that the common American gets a fair (New) Deal. At the same time, the hard-boiled detective acts as a representative man of common America. That is why he is a pro- fessional, and not, as so often with his British counterpart, a gifted amateur. In other words, he is a working stiff, not a member of the leisured class. In fact, more often than not it is precisely the idle rich that the hard-boiled detective has to contend with – most markedly, of course, in Raymond Chandler’s early novels. Physically, the detect- ive’s toughness and his ability to take it, coupled with his rugged good looks, constitute the working man’s idealized rejoinder to the leisured man’s supposed softness. Verbally, the hard-boiled detective’s famous wit deflates all uses of language as an instrument of power, whether it be that of the arrogant rich who think they own him because they employ him, of the official representatives of power such as the police professionals he usually is at odds with and who support the powers that be, or of the criminals that threaten him with physical violence. The hard-boiled detective’s role as representative New Deal liberal (in the traditional – that is, economic – sense of the word) individual also explains why he is a loner, with neither family nor friends. The hard- boiled detective, in other words, is Mr Common American cast in the role of urban super-cowboy. With a term he borrows from the political scientist Robert Dahl, in A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), McCann characterizes the breakdown of New Deal social solidarity under the pressures of Fifties consumerism as minorities rule. This indicates the change from a political system where the state supposedly directs things for the benefit of all, to one whereby the state limits itself to being the arbiter 3 Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000..