Murder by the Book?

MURDER BY THE BOOK? Murder by the Book? is a critical overview of the wave of feminist crime novels which appeared during the 1980s. Both British and American novels by women authors are studied in order to examine emerging generic conventions which have enabled the expression of new sexual and gender politics. Sally Munt asks why the form has proved so attractive as a vehicle for oppositional politics; whether the pleasures of a notionally conservative genre can be truly transgressive, and why the dyke detective is striding forth as a new superhero for today. This is an enticing book, both for teachers and their students, and for any crime fiction addict. Sally R.Munt is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is the editor of New Lesbian Criticism (Columbia/Harvester 1992) and the author of a number of articles in the areas of feminist theory, contemporary culture, and lesbian and gay studies. NARRATIVE FORMS AND SOCIAL FORMATIONS (Formerly published as Reading Popular Fiction) General Editor: Derek Longhurst The enjoyment of thrillers, romances or Westerns is no longer the secret vice that it used to be. Narrative Forms and Social Formationsoffers a polemical, challenging and provocative contribution to our understanding of popular fiction and the pleasure it gives to its readers. Each volume draws on contemporary critical theory, historical contexts and the nature of readership and production to address key questions concerning the relationship between popular narrative and issues of class, gender, race, nation and regionalism. In the same series: EMPIRE BOYS Adventures in a Man’s World Joseph Bristow GENDER, GENRE AND NARRATIVE PLEASURE Edited by Derek Longhurst MURDER BY THE BOOK? Feminism and the crime novel Sally R.Munt LondonandNew York First published1994byRoutledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada byRoutledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 ©1994Sally R.Munt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Munt, Sally. Murder by the book?: feminism and the crime novel Sally R.Munt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Detective and mystery stories, English—History and criticism. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism. 3. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 5. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 6. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 7. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 8. Feminism and literature—United States—History—20th century. 9. Women and literature. 10. Crime in literature. I. Title. PR888.D4M87 1994 823'.0872099287–dc20 93–49588 ISBN 0-203-35999-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-37255-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN0-415-10918-3 0-415-10919-1 (pbk) To my Mother Rosa Dorothy Firth (1920–87) Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 MASCULINITY AND MASQUERADE OR ‘IS THAT A 1 GUN IN YOUR POCKET?’ Mainstream women crime writers 2 THE NEW WOMAN—A SHEEP IN WOLVES’ 29 CLOTHING? Liberal feminist crime fiction 3 A CASE OF ‘DEATH BY POLITICAL CORRECTION’? 57 Socialist feminist crime fiction 4 ‘A CHANGE IS GONNA COME’? 81 Race politics in crime fiction by women 5 THE INVERSTIGATORS 117 Lesbian crime fiction 6 MURDERING THE INNER MAN? 143 Psychoanalysis and feminist crime fiction 7 ‘WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SING “SOMEWHERE OVER 165 THE RAINBOW” AND RELEASE BALLOONS?’ Postmodernism and the crime fiction of Sarah Schulman 8 AN UNSUITABLE GENRE FOR A WOMAN? 187 Notes 203 Fictional bibliography 233 Critical bibliography 239 Index 251 Acknowledgements I wish to thank Stuart Laing and Jenny Bourne Taylor for their insightful and supportive suggestions in the process of completing this work. A number of people kindly read through and commented upon individual chapters, and hence I am grateful to the following for their contributions: Razia Aziz, helen (c)harles, Graham Dawson, Janet Harbord, Reina Lewis, Eva Mackey, Graham McPhee, Lois McNay, Marcus Roberts, Linda Rozmovits, and finally Sandra Freeman and Elaine Hobby who examined the text as a doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex, 1993. viii 1 Masculinity and masquerade or ‘Is that a gun in your pocket?’ Mainstream women crime writers When we see a tall, dark man walking down a damp, shadowy street wearing a snap-brim hat, trench coat, and gun and hear the melancholy note of a blues trumpet wail up and over the sound of his footsteps on the wet pavement, we know everything we need to know about him. He is the man who goes unafraid down mean streets, the man who is the best in his world and yet is good enough for any world: the detective hero.1 Robert Skinner’s cameo encapsulates the essence of the hard-boiled dick. The low-lit, monochromatic, American film noir of the 1940s springs to mind, with its city of mystery and shadows, violence and vengeance. Through the mist steps the messianic ‘man in the mac’, dispenser of commonsense justice, alone in his mission. The image is archetypal—the warrior knight, the tough cowboy, the intrepid explorer—he is the representative of Man, and yet more than a man, he is the focus of morality, the mythic hero. He is the controlled centre surrounded by chaos, and an effective reading must involve identification with this mediator of action, truth, and finally pleasure and relief through closure. Both the form and the content of this scenario are iconically masculine, in a literary and cultural sense. The popular cliché survives now through parody, in such figures as Sellers’ Clouseau, but the image endures as one of the folk heroes of modern popular culture. The fact that the detective hero transferred so easily on to film resulted from his position in fiction as reified spectacle, his knowing, evaluative gaze centred the text for consumption by a subservient reader/viewer. The origin of the detective story stressed the romantic, transcendentqualities of the criminal: Eugène François Vidocq (1775– 1857), the first chief of the Sûreté and instigator of the first detective agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements, commented in his own autobiography Mémoirs : 2 MURDER BY THE BOOK? In every million men there are ten who put themselves above everything, even the law, and I am one of them.2 According to Julian Symons in Bloody Murder 3 the ‘undisputed father’ of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), was inspired by Vidocq to write the five short stories which when combined supplied most of the elements of the subsequent genre. He invented the first fictional detective, C.Auguste Dupin, first appearing in the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) as a man of supreme intellect and arrogance. Poe also supplied the conventional foil whose relationship to the detective forms the narrative centre of the story in that its progression, and our response to it, is judged and mediated by a figure who reveres the hero and therefore concretizes his eminence. With the appearance of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in 1891 the figure matured into archetype. A Study in Scarlet was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, and The Sign of Four, which owed a great debt to Collins’ The Moonstone, in 1890. Holmes too is a man of the city and of darkness, ‘wrapped in tobacco smoke and London fog’,4 accompanied by the awe-ful and faithful Watson, the reflective side-kick. Holmes was based on Dr Joseph Bell, a consultant surgeon at Edinburgh, but the mythical Holmes transcended his human prototype, becoming a representation of the ‘Nietzschean superior man’. Doyle felt his readers needed ‘a man immune from ordinary human weaknesses and passions’.5 Culturally Holmes exudes and exalts a specifically upper-middle-class Victorian masculinity based on cool rationality and intellect. The formal detective story, the whodunit, replicated itself a thousand times before World War II, hardly deviating from the prescribed structure distilled by Ronald A.Knox in A Detective Story Decalogue (1929).6 In North America authors such as S.S.Van Dine, Rex Stout, and Ellery Queen were becoming established. In the diverse and entre-preneurial USA, the spirit of individual achievement rendered the class-bound British country-house murder inappropriate. The tradition radically diverged into a more indigenous product, the hard- boiled detective story, which has become the more dominant form. Characterized by action, violence, colloquialism and an ethically Manichaean ‘quest’, its initial medium was the pulp magazine, themost famous of which, Black Mask, spawned the formative novelist Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961). The private eye works outside the social order with his own moral purpose. He is tough, stoic, honest, loyal to his own values, fighting a lone battle against urban chaos, a contemporary crusader/knight. The perceived social order is inherently corrupt, ‘fallen’, and the outsider represents the harbinger of MASCULINITY AND MASQUERADE 3 truth and justice amongst hostility: in fact the hero is no radical but represents the paranoia of the dominant hegemonic Christian/patriarchal order, the assertion of values very traditional, and our identification with the hero places him firmly back in the centre, ‘our’ values elevated and restored to common-sense status.

Load more