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2008 She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as Serial Killer in 1950s American Leslie Anne Jennings

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SHE HAD TO BE BAD: THE FEMME FATALE AS SERIAL KILLER IN 1950S AMERICAN PULP FICTION

BY

LESLIE ANNE JENNINGS

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of English

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008

Copyright © 2008 Leslie Anne Jennings All Rights Reserved

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Leslie Anne Jennings on April 16th, 2008

______Christopher Shinn Professor Directing Thesis

______Barry Faulk Committee Member

______Linda Saladin-Adams Committee Member

Approved:

______Stan Gontarski, Chair, English Department

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………. iv

INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………… 1

1. THE SCIENCE OF DETECTION ……………………………………………….. 14

2. THE FEMME FATALE ………………………………………………………….. 28

3. COMPLICATED MASCULINITY ………………………………………………. 51

EPILOGUE …………………………………………………………………………… 64

REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………….. 73

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………. 77

iii ABSTRACT

My thesis, “She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as Serial Killer in 1950s American Pulp Fiction,” considers the femme fatale in light of popular fiction and the characterization of female criminals in popular culture. It does not address the role of the femme fatale in film, as that has been covered extensively in many critical texts. Instead, it reviews select pulp of the hard-boiled from the 1950s in order to understand the femme fatale’s role in U.S. popular fiction. ’s, The Maltese (1929), Cornel Woolrich’s, The Bride Wore Black (1940), ’s, I, the Jury (1947), and ’s, The Long Goodbye (1953), are examined specifically because pulp fiction and American literature in general changed drastically after World War II. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to investigate the femme fatale, who has now become a standard figure in popular culture, and to note how she begins to trouble the categories of gender and sexuality according to the new science of crime and the modern discourse of psychopathology. The femme fatale, who committed homicide, primarily for monetary gain, became the symbol of female criminality and evil. The representations of women in popular culture show criminals as antithetical to the image of female domesticity, and murderous crimes became an index for that departure. The act of committing a crime placed the perpetrator at odds with organized and lawful society. Not satisfied with simply living up to the expectations of her gender as wife and mother, the femme fatale does not disrupt contemporary expectations: she destroys. She is not different; she is deviant. This act of transgression, while against social codes, becomes sensationalized through mass media, creating a sense of pleasure through the fetishization of crime. The media obsession with killers, especially serial killers, is heightened when a woman commits homicide. The who graced the covers of the hard-boiled fiction acted as both fantasy and nightmare to the predominately male-reading population. Ultimately, the goal of this thesis is to redeem the femme fatale from her status as a sexual object who is simply a tool of patriarchy. The significance of the femme fatale is that she occupies the role of a serial killer while cunningly concealing her criminality through the mask of domesticity. The femme fatale manipulates, maneuvers and ultimately forces her way into America’s consciousness without giving up her image as a sexually independent woman. Many would say that because the femme fatale is a murderer, she cannot be a redeemable figure and offers a negative image for feminists. However, because the crimes of the femme fatale indicate

iv her as a cold and calculating serial killer rather than as a hysteric subject that one would find in Freud, the murderous vixen actually creates a newly imagined space that had not been previous occupied by women because of outdated notions of science and criminology.

v INTRODUCTION

Instead of slowly biding her time and hoping for new roles for women, the femme fatale aggressively imposed a new place for herself within American culture in the late 1940s and 1950s. The 1950s is often thought to be a defining era in which women were positioned in the home after a period of relative freedom brought about by the Second World War. Thus, the 1960s is assumed to be the decade that is associated with second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement. Many scholars identify the 1950s as a time in which a minority of women entered the workforce and an active feminism slowly began to emerge.1 The femme fatale, however, did not simply step into a new role for women; she erupted into the literary and cultural scene, forcing America to acknowledge her presence. By becoming criminals and literally destroying the men in their path, femme fatales created a role in which women could be violent and aggressive, throwing into crisis the very definition of traditional gender roles. In Femmes Fatales, Mary Ann Doane claims that the femme fatale is not “a heroine of modernity” because she is not in control of her own image (2). Doane suggests that because of her highly sexual image, the femme fatale becomes a “function of fear” for a mass culture that is driven by patriarchy (2). Doane’s beliefs, however, pertain to the image of the femme fatale as she appears in of the 1940s and 1950s. While Doane may be correct in her assertion that the stylized image of the femme fatale has been exploited in American culture, the femme fatale who appeared in the popular pulp novels of the 1950s functioned as a much more radical and subversive subject than has previously been credited. In The Noir , Lee Horsley explains that during the noir period, Hollywood was “constrained not only by the Hays Code but by conventional expectations about the ultimate repression of the sexual, aggressive woman,” which “tended to package the femme fatale narrative in ways that limited the ‘progressiveness’ of the cycle and confirmed popular prejudices by figuring the defeat of the independent female and the reassertion of male control” (130). Therefore, it was difficult for film producers to explore the film fatale as she appeared in popular fiction.

1 Breines, Wini. “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls.” Dunar, Andrew J. America in the Fifties. Gilbert, James. Another Chance: Postwar American, 1945-1968. Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill.

1 My thesis, “She Had to Be Bad: The Femme Fatale as a Serial Killer in 1950s American Pulp Fiction,” will not address the role of the femme fatale in film, as that has been covered extensively in many critical texts.2 Instead, I will review select pulp novels of the hard-boiled genre from the 1950s in order to understand the femme fatale’s role in U.S. popular fiction. I will focus on novels from the late 1940s and 1950s specifically because pulp fiction and American literature in general had changed drastically after World War II. I will examine Dashiell Hammett’s standard detective , The Maltese Falcon (1929), followed by Cornel Woolrich’s lesser known tale, The Bride Wore Black (1940), Mickey Spillane’s seminal novella, I, the Jury (1947), and Raymond Chandler’s classic work, The Long Goodbye (1953). Ultimately, the goal of this project is to investigate the femme fatale, who has now become a standard figure in popular culture, and to note how she begins to trouble the categories of gender and sexuality according to the new science of crime and the modern discourse of psychopathology. While pulp magazines had an immensely popular following, the books themselves were given little respect by literary critics. The prominent literary critic Leslie Fielder, for instance, postulates in his influential 1960 book, Love and Death in the American Novel: Not only in the cruder and more successful books of Mickey Spillane, but in the more pretentious ones of Raymond Chandler, the detective story has reverted to the kind of populist semi-pornography that once made George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall a black market best-seller (477). During the 1950s, Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler were subjects of direct and often harsh scrutiny from both literary critics and moralists alike. Spillane was often critiqued by literary critics as “common and low.” His books were often equated with trash and considered to be only books that low-minded, blue-collared men would enjoy. Despite this criticism, Spillane was the most popular author of his time, selling “over 15 million copies of his books by 1953” (Horsley 109). Leslie Fielder wrote in the 1960s of his disgust with the current “low-brow” obsession with Spillane and Chandler, whom he believed to be “anti-feminist” (477). Fielder asserts that the hard-boiled genre “insists … on undressing its bitches, surveying them with a surly and concupiscent eye before punching, shooting, or consigning them to the gas-chamber” (477). Fielder’s views on both Spillane and Chandler’s chauvinistic and sadistic tendencies are

2 Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film theory, Psychoanalysis. Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller.

2 well founded when it comes to their detectives’ acts of violence. Mike Hammer and Philip Marlowe do indeed have violent sexual relations with women, which often turns to a sexually violent end of the femme fatale when she is destroyed by her lover/detective. However, the women in the texts are often the initiators of sadomasochistic and aggressive impulses into the bedroom, revealing a woman who is both knowledgeable of her own sexual pleasure and a force of raw power and strength. The femme fatale has been a subject of debate and often contempt for feminists. The femme fatale functions simply as an object of patriarchy that is useful only in her ability to satisfy men sexually and to present a figure that appears strong, although she is not. In Femmes Fatales, Mary Ann Doane, for example, analyzes the femme fatale who appears in film noir and literature through the lens of film theory. Doane believes that the femme fatale is a powerful figure, although the character herself is not conscious of her power, nor her ability to be powerful. As Doane observes, “Her power is of a peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject to her conscious will, hence appearing to blur the opposition between passivity and activity [italics mine]” (2). While Doane concludes that the femme fatale is unwillfully powerful, I argue that the femme fatale is not only knowledgeable about her fate and deeds but that she is actively pursuing her appropriation of power. Doane persists, stating, “It would be a mistake to see her as some kind of heroine of modernity” as “she is not the subject of feminism but a symptom of male fears about feminism” (2-3). This argument only addresses the femme fatale as she appears in film, where her image is often sensationalized and objectified. By claiming that the femme fatale can not be the master of her own fate, Doane fails to recognize her possession of a self- authorizing power. The femme fatale is not a symptom of male fear: she is the cause of that fear. The fact that she must be destroyed in the end only proves that she has created and caused problems so severe that patriarchy could not simply punish her: they had to destroy her. While the 1960s is usually considered to be the decade where great social movements and change took place, nearly all of these radical movements began to emerge in the 1950s. The civil rights movement began in 1955, arguably with the death of Emmett Till and just before Brown versus the Board of Education, and it continued on into the 1960s. In 1957, Betty Freidan began to write about “the problem that has no name” which began to incite action within the feminist movement. The image of a conservative 1950s was used in popular television shows like Leave it to Beaver and The Honeymooners, which created an idealized image of

3 domesticity.3 Women’s magazines that were published at that time also promoted the concept of a ‘normal’ family life where the mother stayed home with her children, as opposed to the ‘bad’ mothers who went to work.4 The image of the mother on television was promoted by mainstream media, and it attempted to suppress an emergent and potentially dangerous counter culture. As Andrew Dunar claims, “Popular culture in the early fifties reflected the larger society as a whole: calm on the surface, turbulent below” (267). The evidence supporting this undercurrent of subversive behavior can be seen, for instance, in Bettie Paige’s S/M pin-up shots in the 1950s, which were highly risqué at the time, yet had an instant following in underground journals and magazines. Just as these so-called pornographic images were regarded as filth for lewd and lascivious consumers, pulps were considered ‘trash’ literature that “was read by white, working-class men” (Smith 10). In Hard- Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Fiction Magazines, Erin Smith also observes that the reason “the pulps commanded so little respect was that their readers were widely held to be socially and economically marginal” (23). Although many critics think of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler as “low-brow” writers who constantly put down women, their popular novels, now considered classics of the genre, contain strong female characters who, in many cases, steal the spotlight from the detectives. Patrick Anderson defends Spillane, stating: [Mickey Spillane] was denounced for corrupting America’s youth but he was, in fact, a revolutionary. Like Hugh Hefner, Elvis Presley, Alfred Kinsey, and Lenny Bruce, in their different ways, he challenged the pieties of the fifties and helped create the anything-goes society that followed (49). On the surface, the hard-boiled genre seems to be created simply for a group of “lower- middlebrow” readers (Fielder 498). Pulps were regarded as “lower-middlebrow” and working- class literature and never as an artifact of artistic expression. The lurid jacket covers of pulps in the hard-boiled genre almost always featured a seductive, scantily clad woman, often carrying a weapon.5 This figure represented the evils of an emasculated society, where a woman is strong, powerful, and defiantly aggressive, and a man

3 The image of a conservative 1950s continues to be promoted in films like “Blast From the Past” and “Pleasantville” 4 Gilbert, 1981, 54-75. 5 Server, Lee. Danger is My Business. Lesser, Robert. Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines. Robinson, Frank and Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines.

4 becomes weak, passive, and in need of proving his manhood. At the same time that the mainstream media was promoting the image of the domestic goddess, women were taking on new roles in pulp fiction. The hard-boiled of the 1950s often contained female who were highly sexual and coldly calculating. The femme fatale became the most popular figure to rise out of the hard-boiled genre. Elisabeth Bronfen explains that the femme fatale “enjoy[s] such because she is not only sexually uninhibited, but also unabashedly independent and ruthlessly ambitious, using her seductive charms and her intelligence to liberate herself from the imprisonment of an unfulfilling marriage” (106). She is beautiful, although often we are told that her beauty is almost mannish. Mike Hammer often describes Charlotte and Velda as “big,” referring to their height but also to their wide shoulders, large breasts and muscular thighs. The femme fatale’s body becomes a fixation for the detective and the predominately male-reading audience. What happens to a woman who was aggressive in 1950’s popular culture? The media often masculinized the aggressive and dominant woman, rather than simply objectify her sexually in order to draw attention to her displacement. The femme fatale is most recognizable according to her physical appearance, and her image is defined through her overemphasized feminine features and sexuality. In Spillane and Chandler, the apparel of the femme fatale, and other women, is described in explicit detail, expanding the idea that men in that time period were knowledgeable about women’s fashion. As Erin Smith confirms, “Hard-boiled fiction’s concern with class is most powerfully apparent in its obsessive interest in clothing and interiors, those apparently trivial matters that are deeply enmeshed with the (re)production of class hierarchies” (105). The femme fatales are almost always dressed in clothing that emphasizes their figure and the fact that they are indeed women. In Spillane’s first hard-boiled novel, I, The Jury, the femme fatale, Charlotte, allows Mike Hammer to see her in the park pushing a baby stroller for a friend. Her intention is to remind Hammer that she is not only the ideal woman but also is the ideal wife and mother. Her use of this image of femininity serves as a mask of her powerful underworld status. The femme fatale, who committed homicide, primarily for monetary gain, became the symbol of female criminality and evil. The representations of women in popular culture show criminals as antithetical to the image of female domesticity, and murderous crimes became an index for that departure. The act of committing a crime placed the perpetrator at odds with organized and lawful society. Not satisfied with simply living up to the expectations of her

5 gender as wife and mother, the femme fatale does not disrupt contemporary expectations: she destroys. She is not different; she is deviant. This act of transgression, while against social codes, becomes sensationalized through mass media, creating a sense of pleasure through the fetishization of crime. The media obsession with killers, especially serial killers, is heightened when a woman commits homicide. The femme fatales who graced the covers of the hard-boiled fiction acted as both fantasy and nightmare to the predominately male-reading population. The beautifully murderess Charlotte of Spillane’s, I, the Jury, declares herself at several points in the novel to be a perfect “little wife” for Mike. However, in the final scene where she stands naked before Mike, her evil is revealed as she reaches for the gun to destroy Mike. This erotic scene is featured on the cover of the novella, with a half-naked Charlotte removing the remaining clothing in front of Mike. Pulp novels published in the 1930s through the early 1960s sensationalized murder by depicting scenes of delinquent behavior on their covers. The fetishization of crime becomes a fantasy, both erotic and dangerous to the public, which can be seen ubiquitously in film, novels and popular artwork. The image of the femme fatale’s red lips, long, curled hair and hourglass curves aid the woman’s evil deeds in terms of and masking. Women across America sought to reproduce her image, wishing to promote their newly liberated sexuality and their position as an active participant in a sex act. However, in Hollywood films like Murder, My Sweet and , sultry fatal women commit crimes but do not seem to be active in their fate. Although film noir often featured ‘femme fatales’, the power they possessed as literary figures failed to translate into film because of the representation of women as sexual objects. Film noir’s femme fatales, while often deadly, did not commit their crimes as deliberately or as methodically as their literary counterparts. Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking book, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, describes how classic Hollywood films made women the object of the male gaze. Using Freud’s concept of scopophilia, where the viewer derives “pleasure in looking” and Lacan’s mirror stage where the audience identifies with the male protagonist, Mulvey declares that the female character’s role is that of a passive object, while the man’s role is “the active one of advancing the story, making things happen” (2187). The screen version of the femme fatale remains the object of scopophilia and not the active aggressor in crime. Thus, she does not have the same power that the literary figure does.

6 To simply claim that the femme fatale is a criminal would not be to give justice to her brutal and carefully planned murders. The femme fatale cautiously yet purposefully plans her crimes in advance. She chooses a victim, becomes acquainted with his surroundings, then murders himm viciously and effectively when she is ready. The sheer number of victims that each femme fatale accumulates is staggering; by the end of the novel, there are usually no less than three deaths attributed to the woman. I argue that the femme fatale’s techniques of planning, her selection of her victims and the numbers of deaths credited to her classifies her as a serial killer. While most criminology texts claim that serial killers are primarily men or hysteric women, this thesis will contend that the femme fatale is the ultimate serial killer who is decisive in her planning, unremorseful, with none of the sexual that usually accompanies the male serial killer. By declaring the femme fatale as a serial killer, I am arguing not only that the science of criminology needs revising in its assessment of female mass murderers, but that by occupying a role that is typically assumed to be male, the 1940s and 1950s pulp fiction femme fatale is a powerful new character in literature and popular culture. The femme fatale that can be found in pulp fiction novels of the 1950s obtains agency through her classification as a cold, calculating serial killer. Ever since Freud’s analysis of women and psychosis, women who commit crimes have been considered hysterical, menstruating, Medea-like figures who are suffering from neurosis. The femme fatale appeared as a manipulative murderer who is able to hide her calculating mind behind a ‘normal’ exterior. In Murder Most Rare, Michael and C.L. Kelleher, for instance, inform readers that a female killer will “remain undetected for a significantly longer period of time than the average male serial murderer” because she “is a quiet killer, who is often painstakingly methodical and eminently lethal in her actions” (intro xi). Otto Pollack, the eminent criminologists of the 1950s, contends that women who committed crime were simply good at lying: “The existing characterizations of the ways in which women commit their crimes center around the observation that women offenders are more deceitful than men” (Pollack 8). Women who have long been considered to simply be liars or hysterical are now being credited with brilliant, well-planned murders. The femme fatale seeks to destroy by using an amalgamation of female sexuality and masculine-like aggressiveness. This combination of contradictory attributes not only disrupts society’s conception of women, but also they problematize conceptions of masculinity. As John

7 Cawelti argues, “The function of the woman in the hard-boiled formula then is not simply that of appropriate sexual consort to the dashing ; she also poses certain basic challenges to the detective’s physical and psychological security” (154). The conflict that arises in the novels due to the reversal of gender roles will be discussed further in Chapter Three. Depictions of masculinity in the hard-boiled detective novels are often heightened next to the femme fatale’s exaggerated femininity, yet when her aggressiveness is revealed, the detective becomes inversely passive. The flat and quiet detectives of 1930s and 1940s pulp fiction became explosive and violent on the surface in the 1950s. Spillane’s detective Mike Hammer spends a great deal of time assuring readers that he is not a good-looking man, but rather the epitome of a rough and ready soldier. The detectives created by Dashiell Hammett, an original of the hard-boiled genre, were depicted in a mechanical, barely human way in the 1930s. The Continental Op of Hammett’s Red Harvest is described as short, fat, ugly and at some times, cowardly. He is neither sympathetic nor loyal and has very little inner monologue that did not pertain to the cases on which they were working. As Spillane and Chandler’s novels became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, the characterization of masculinity became distinctly emotional and thus allegedly “feminine.” Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe is obsessed with home décor and women’s clothing and describes it as one who has first-hand knowledge of fashion and mass consumerism. Spillane’s Mike Hammer’s violent escapades are emotionally stimulating and draining on him. While Hammett’s detectives never show emotion, even while committing heinous acts of violence, Hammer and Marlowe not only philosophize about it but make violence into a cathartically religious act. As men became more melancholic and thus, more feminized, women became increasingly more masculinized. The detectives in Mickey Spillane and Patricia Highsmith’s novels will be discussed in Chapter Three in terms of the social anxieties in the 1940s and 1950s around the concept of masculinity. Because the 1950s are often thought of in conjunction with the end of the war abroad, it is only fitting to speak of the conflict between men and women in the hard-boiled detective novel as being a kind gendered urban warfare. Sex is aggressive and often described in the language of a battle of the sexes in the texts. According to John Cawelti, Spillane writes the females in his novels as “aggressive-breasted, since the favorite metaphorical description has the woman’s large breasts thrusting against her clothing” (154). The physical battles that take place between

8 men and women in the hard-boiled pulps is often acted out in the bedroom. Both Spillane and Chandler’s novels contain scenes in which female characters seduce the detectives into having rough and kinky sex. This image of battle takes place throughout the genre, where femme fatales create an environment that forced the male detectives to assert their masculinity continually. In order to understand the femme fatale in terms of modern psychology, we must first determine her place inside the field of psychopathology, which was still a nascent science during the height of the pulp fiction era. Lee Horsley reveals that “by the fifties, the pop-psychology clichés of the psychopath were firmly entrenched and frequently deployed in both the fiction and the films of the period” (119). The interest in the female criminal had been popularized in 1897 when Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero published their (at the time) definitive text, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and The Normal Woman. Lombroso and Ferrero always equate female criminality with prostitution. In their study, the criminal female is a prostitute and only a prostitute. They examined prostitutes across Europe, looking specifically at their physical attributes in comparison with that of a ‘normal’ woman. They come to the conclusion that “Woman in general is inferior to man” (155). After Lombroso and Ferrero, the most important work to address women and crime came in 1950 with Otto Pollack’s influential work, The Criminality of Women. Pollack declares, “The criminality of women is often a masked criminality” (5). He claimed that because of their social roles, women committed crimes that allowed them to go undetected as suspects because “women offenders are more deceitful than men” (8). The concept of female deceitfulness and the idea of masking abnormalities will be addressed more fully in Chapters One and Two. Men are usually considered to be more violent offenders than women because of the sexual nature of a serial killer’s attacks. Serial killers find pleasure killing because it gives them a sense of domination and control. In history, and often in the media, women who kill are most likely to commit infanticide or to kill lovers or husbands.6 Indeed, it is this relationship to the victim that often marks a woman as hysterical. However, in the case of the femme fatale, she kills for monetary gain or to protect her image and usually her victims are strangers or accomplices. In their book, Murder Most Rare, Michael and C.L. Kelleher name a woman who kills for monetary gain “Profit or Crime Killer” and she is defined as “a woman who systemically murders individuals in the course of other criminal activities, or for profit” (93).

6 Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Mann, Coramae Richey. When Women Kill.

9 When one examines many of the femme fatales from popular fiction, such as Charlotte in I, the Jury, or Juno Reeves from Vengeance is Mine, she is usually the head or is part of some type of illegal criminal organization, and oftentimes she kills to keep her identity as a femme fatale from being detected. A study of contemporary works in criminology finds that criminal women are still primarily associated with the murder of family members or lovers.7 However, these contemporary criminology texts do not consider women to be inferior to men when it comes to committing crimes. Indeed, many theorists suggest that women are more competent criminals than men because the quest for sexual fulfillment that is often pursued by male serial killers is not part of the female serial killers modus operandi. Kelleher explains, “Whereas the male serial killer is most often driven to repetitive acts of sexual homicide, the typical female serial killer is a much more complex criminal, whose motivations are often wide-ranging and anything but simple” (Introduction xi). Men are often distracted by their sado-masochistic desires and thus, are often captured because of a formulaic modus operandi; murders that are committed by women are usually carefully thought out and expertly executed. In When Women Kill, Coramae Richey Mann, for instance, states that women are “significantly more likely to kill strangers for economic benefit in the classic fashion – with little victim provocation, outside of residences, with accomplices, and with guns” (168). Men who kills strangers often do so in a highly sexualized manner. Sex and homicide are often linked by perpetrators of crime and their victims. Criminality opens up new possibilities to discuss sexual desire. Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel, Strangers on a Train, for example, examines the way that desire can be negotiated through crime, but it does so through a relationship between two men. The men are obsessed with each other and the text suggests homoerotic desire. One of the men, Guy Haines, seeks to end the relationship with the violent Charles Bruno, but the struggle that ensues between the men becomes a fascination

7 Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. Journey Into Darkness. Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. The Anatomy of Motive. Flowers, R. Barri. Female Crime, Criminals and Cellmates: An Exploration of Female Criminality and Delinquency. Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Kelleher, Michael D and C.L. Kelleher. Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer. Mann, Coramae Richey. When Women Kill. Simon, Rita J. “American Women and Crime”. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 423 (Jan 1976): 31-46.

10 with the very relationship that they seek to end. This novel will later be considered in conjunction with a study of men and their place in hard-boiled pulp fiction. I will begin my investigation of the femme fatale as a serial killer by examining what 19th and 20th century science has claimed about women and criminality. In my first chapter, “The Science of Detection,” I will argue that the femme fatale defies scientific assumptions regarding women and crime through her role as a serial killer. I will expand on Cesare Lombroso’s 1897 study Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and The Normal Woman and its effect on how the female criminal has been understood in terms of physiognomy. Otto Pollack’s The Criminality of Women (1950) will provide a study of women and criminality that is contemporary to the novels that I will examine. This chapter will also use psychoanalytic understanding of aggression in women by considering Sigmund Freud’s works on women and hysteria. The presence of the femme fatale marks a crisis in science where the psychological moved beyond of gender and into an understanding of the brain. This chapter will also contain an analysis into the methodologies of criminal profiling that were developed in the 20th century. John Douglas, former Federal Bureau of Investigation profiler, explains in his text the development of a sociopath and the signs that serial killers exude during their sprees. These facts, in conjunction with close readings of the pulp fiction novels, will further solidify my claim that the femme fatale is a serial killer. This chapter will examine case studies of actual crimes that have been committed by women in the 1950s and the sensation that surrounded them has been featured in Kelleher’s Murder Most Rare. I will address these case studies in conjunction with novels from the hard-boiled genre that reveal a particularly crafty femme fatale. Chapter Two, “The Femme Fatale,” will examine the progression of the female criminal into the femme fatale. Women who did not adhere to the requirements of the 1950’s cult of domesticity were often criminalized in women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal. The femme fatale, as a woman who engages in crime, is the worst perpetrator against the conservative view of women as homemakers. Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1947) and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953) are discussed particularly for their characterization of the female serial killer in this chapter. Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940) features an intelligent and vengeful woman who discovers in the end that she was incorrect in the choice of whom to impart revenge. This chapter will further the discussion of the

11 female serial killer as a cold-blooded murderer as opposed to the concept of the hysterical, illogical female psychopath who simply kills her children in a fit of depression and melancholia. Chapter Three, “Complicated Masculinity,” will examine images of masculinity in the hard-boiled genre and how men react when faced with the devastating femme fatale. I will look specifically at how the role of women affects masculinity when situated within a plot in which a woman dominates because there is a direct correlation between aggressive femininity and passive masculinity in these novels. This chapter will explore Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train (1951), in which two men each commit a murder for the other in an effort to evade police detectives. I will examine male homoerotic desire and how homosociality is complicated in this novel as the two men become obsessed with each other. Mickey Spillane’s third Mike Hammer novel, Vengeance is Mine! (1952), reveals a different side of the detective as he battles the ensuing from his murder of Charlotte Manning. This chapter will also look at the ways in which men perpetrate crimes as opposed to how women commit crime. The primary focus will be to address the ways in which men becomes feminized in these novels that on the surface, appear to emphasize hypermasculinity, due to the powerful force of the femme fatale. The epilogue will seek to engage our discoveries from the texts of the 1950s with images of the femme fatale in contemporary popular culture. Although the femme fatale was an innovative and evocative figure in conservative 1950’s culture, in our more permissive society the figure of the femme fatale becomes objectified through a revision of an imagined popular noir fantasy. Frank Miller’s City (1991) is a modern take on the features of noir film and popular culture. The setting is dark and the characters are reminiscent, if not direct composites of Spillane’s detective and his female counterparts. The significant difference, however, is that Miller’s limits his portrayal of women to prostitutes or strippers. Spillane’s women exude sexuality, but it is a sexuality to which women exercise a measure of control. Miller’s women are allowed no role outside of the sex trade and are often violently raped, tortured or murdered. Arguing against David Lewis’ claim that Miller’s female characters are powerful because they elicit the male gaze, I will suggest that Miller takes the political and social revolutionary figure of the femme fatale of the 1950s and re-imagines her as a mere sexual object in a patriarchical society. This chapter will argue that in a conservative society such as the 1950s, demonizing sexuality often has the opposite effect, while promoting sexuality in our postmodern culture has led to greater sexual objectification of women.

12 Ultimately, the goal of this thesis is to redeem the femme fatale from her status as a sexual object who is simply a tool of patriarchy. The significance of the femme fatale is that she occupies the role of a serial killer while cunningly concealing her criminality through the mask of domesticity. The femme fatale manipulates, maneuvers and ultimately forces her way into America’s consciousness without giving up her image as a sexually independent woman. Many would say that because the femme fatale is a murderer, she cannot be a redeemable figure and offers a negative image for feminists. However, because the crimes of the femme fatale indicate her as a cold and calculating serial killer rather than as a hysteric subject that one would find in Freud, the murderous vixen actually creates a newly imagined space that had not been previous occupied by women because of outdated notions of science and criminology.

13 CHAPTER ONE: THE SCIENCE OF DETECTION

The primary aim of science is generally to explain natural phenomena.8 Science and technology are in a constant state of change and evolution, yet they can still be influenced by a history of patent generalizations and stereotypes. Historically, medical science and the modern discipline of psychology have categorized women as passive beings who were meant for the home. Even current medical data suggests that biologically men are more aggressive than women due to the “inherent differences in the ‘hardwiring’ of male and female brains” as well as the amount of testosterone in the male body (Douglas 1999, 29). As the late nineteenth century came to a close, the science of criminology became integrated into new biological and psychological studies. Cesare Lombroso’s work related the physicality of the body to the individual capacity to commit crime in both men and women. This emphasis on physiogamy attempted to explain how personality and behavioral disorders were caused by genetic predispositions that were visible on the body. Meanwhile, investigations into the psyche were being made by Sigmund Freud and his colleague, Josef Breuer, in their text, Studies on Hysteria (1893). The purpose of the study was to explore specific cases of women who suffered from hysteria and how they were treated by psychoanalysis. Freud’s psychoanalytic stance on women and behavioral neurosis are significant when discussing how, historically, women were thought of in terms of crime. This is especially true considering the preconceived notions of the types of crimes that women commit, i.e., the Medea-like slaying of children or the vengeful rages of the ‘wronged’ woman. These types of intimate crimes typify the belief that a woman who kills must be hysterical or mad. Otto Pollack asserts in his book, The Criminality of Women, that “menstruation becomes to women a symbol of injustice which arouses their desire for revenge” (127). This text, published in 1950, confirmed the prevailing findings of psychoanalysis which linked hysteria and criminality to the body. Pollak’s comprehensive work, The Criminality of Women, equates female criminality with the alleged natural propensity of women to lie. This contributes to Freud’s claim in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) that women have no sense of justice due to their

8 Miriam-Webster Dictionary

14 troubled position inside the Oedipal complex and “the predominance of envy in their mental lives” (Freud 1933, 166). Pollak’s insistence on the duplicity of women is based on his analysis of how women murder in a deceitful manner, i.e., killing people that they know with poison. Otto Pollak and Cesare Lombroso’s texts both attempt to regulate and define the female criminal scientifically in terms of her biological nature and the perpetration of her crime. While Lombroso believed that he could define criminality by the way it marks the body, Pollak acknowledged that women were better equipped at concealment and deceit. Pollak’s text will provide the prevailing view of women and crime during the time period that the hard-boiled detective novels were published. In order to understand the current theories behind behavior psychology and the ways in which law enforcement investigates crime, I will examine the standard criminology textbook, Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, written by criminology professors James Alan Fox and Levin. This book, in conjunction with texts by former F.B.I. profiler John Douglas, will provide insight into the process of how to detect crime as well as the methodologies of serial killers. Criminologists and law enforcement continue to relegate female killers to the realm of infanticide, angels of mercy (nurses who kill their patients) and jealous lovers. By examining the standard characterizations of serial killers, I will prove that the femme fatale in late 1940s and 1950s hard-boiled pulp novels can be considered a new type of serial killer. While literature and other forms of popular culture often supported the claims that science made about the physical and the psychological state of women, the hard-boiled detective novels of the late 1940s and 1950s destabilized these notions by offering a female character who acted outside of gendered scientific expectations. As the science and technology of criminal detection have advanced, the femme fatale has evaded detection due to a lingering hypothesis regarding women and crime. The femme fatale of the late 1940s and 1950s hard-boiled detective novels challenged assumptions that science made about women and criminality by acting aggressive and typically-masculine while at the same time, concealing her identity through her femininity. At the time that many of these novels were being published in the United States, the scientific community had continued to publish examinations of women and criminality that equates women’s crimes with their position as prostitutes or as degenerates. Cesare Lombroso

15 defines a criminal in The Female Offender (1895) as “a product of anomalous biological conditions as well as adverse social circumstances” (xiv-v). Lombroso examines the cadavers of numerous women in the United Kingdom in the late 19th century and compares the bodies of criminal women with ‘regular’ women. As a result of years of anthropological research, Lombroso finds that “the criminal population as a whole, but the habitual criminal in particular, is to be distinguished from the average member of the community by a much higher percentage of physical anomalies,” which consist primarily of “malformations in the skull and brain and face” (xv). Once one delves deeper into Lombroso’s study of women, the regularity with which he discusses prostitutes as opposed to normal women becomes more than apparent. In the first section, Lombroso measures the cranial circumferences of women and compared his findings. At he end of the chapter, he summarizes his statistics and explains, “In great cranial capacity the better class of women surpass, five or six times over, criminals, prostitutes and lunatics. Also in this respect prostitutes are slightly superior to criminals; and among the latter the highest are the poisoners” (21). Lombroso’s concern in his investigations was determining if physical traits would dictate a woman’s propensity towards criminality. It is significant that he determines the highest intelligence (cranial capacity) of criminals belongs to women who poison since poison has historically been considered a women’s primary and most deceptive weapon. Thus, it seems that Lombroso’s work points to female crime as being linked to increased levels of masculinity. Indeed, he addresses this idea when he examines the facial bones of regular women and criminal women in order to find that “female criminals resemble males” (24). Lombroso’s work on female criminality was based around the idea that criminality was written on the body. One could simply look at a woman and determine from her appearance whether or not that she was a criminal. Lombroso allows, however, that female prostitutes would not show their criminality as visibly as other female criminals since their crime depend on their ability to be attractive to men. As Lombroso explains, “Certainly, the art of making up, imposed by their trade on all these unfortunates, disguises or hides many characteristic features which criminals exhibit openly” (111). However, he continues by claiming that “even the handsomest female offenders have invariably strong jaws and cheek-bones, and a masculine aspect” (102). Lombroso’s text suggests that a researcher could view a woman and glean a definitive determination of their life of crime. While Lombroso finds that criminality is visible, in crime fiction, however, the fear lies behind the idea that a criminal is not a snarling , but a

16 person who is part of ordinary society. The hard-boiled detective novels by Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler contest the image of the visible killer by creating beautiful and deadly women whose crimes were not uncovered until the end of the novel. This characterization problematizes the idea that crime can be solved scientifically by examining physiognomy or by searching through the degenerate population for a killer who shows the tell-tale signs of being a criminal. At the same time that Cesare Lombroso was conducting his research on female malefactors, Sigmund Freud had published his developmental work on psychoanalysis and hysteria in his seminal text, Studies on Hysteria (1893). At the beginning, Freud offers the reasoning behind his theory of hysteria, claiming that “sexuality seems to play a principal part in the pathogenesis of hysteria as a source of psychical traumas and as a motive for ‘defense’ – that is, for repressing ideas from consciousness” (xxix). Freud himself acts as a detective, seeking out the causes of hysteria through hypnosis and transference. He claims, “Each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked” (6). The woman who is suffering from hysteria is diagnosed as a patient who is repressing her sexual desires from childhood that she has not been allowed to explore due to her subordinate position in society. Indeed, hysteria was considered a woman’s illness because the seat of hysteria was located in the womb; thus, its pseudonym became the ‘wondering womb.’ Hysteria, in Freud’s language as well, became synonymous with the feminine while neurosis, or obsession, was considered a masculine infirmity. Juliet Mitchell claimed in her book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) that the idea of masculine neurosis “is closely linked to excessive rationality, a quality that is valued – the description ‘hysterical’ is invariably derogatory” (112). The dichotomous relationship between female hysteria as a negative illness and masculine neurosis as simply a product of over-rationality sets up the distinction that men are rational and women are not. The woman who kills is often considered hysteric because she commits a crime against her feminine nature. If she destroys her child, the product of her womb, or her husband, it becomes a different type of sexually precipitated murder. These types of crime put her at odds with the normative gender expectations of caretaker and mother. While Lombroso’s text, The Female Offender (1895) concentrated on the physicality of criminality, Otto Pollak’s seminal text, The Criminality of Women (1950), focused on the

17 deceitfulness of women: “The existing characterizations of the ways in which women commit their crimes center around the observation that women offenders are more deceitful than men” (8). Pollak’s emphasis on female deceitfulness is assisted by his analysis of social constraints, which dictate that women must “conceal every four weeks the period of menstruation” (10). Thus, it is not necessarily inherent in women to be deceitful, but the requirements of contemporary society “make concealment and misrepresentation in the eyes of women socially required and commendable acts” (10). Pollak also makes the claim that female murderers are more likely to know their victim than their male counterparts. He attributes the relationship between victim and killer to the woman’s sphere, the home, which limits her to “the family circle” (13). The position of the woman in the home also dictates the type of weapon that she will use to commit her crimes. Pollak notes, “there seems to be almost unanimous agreement among criminologists that the woman who kills uses poison more often than any other means” (16). Indeed, in many detective novels of the 20th century, cases of poisoning are immediately attributed, correctly or incorrectly, to women.9 Pollak claims that while a gun might attract suspicion, “a woman who buys an insecticide” is not suspected because destroying is considered a domestic activity (17). Using poison as a weapon harks back to Pollak’s discussion of deceit since poison is often administrated through food, drink or medication. Therefore, the victim would have to trust their killer enough to imbibe the instrument of death against their knowledge. The primary aim of criminology is to make a determination about who is committing crimes and why these crimes are being committed. Cesare Lombroso and Otto Pollack’s texts exemplify the fact that criminology is ill-equipped to classify the femme fatale, yet criminology continues to look for methods and processes to define serial killers. In order to hunt a serial killer, investigators must be able to understand what is occurring in the mind of one. John Douglas is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who was once the head of the F.B.I.’s Investigation Support Unit. Douglas has chronicled many of his cases and his profiling techniques in books co-written with Mark Olshaker. The intention of these texts is to explain how the F.B.I. and other police investigative units create a profile for detectives to use based on the evidence at crime scenes and victimology. Douglas was instrumental in creating the profiling unit at the F.B.I.’s academy in Quantico. In the late 1970’s he and many other F.B.I.

9 Christie, Agatha. Cards on the Table. New York: Berkely Books, 1937.

18 agents went into prisons and interviewed violent offenders, particularly serial killers, in order to understand why they committed crimes. Through their extensive interviews and the work of correlating the information that they learned from the killers, Douglas and his team were able to create a system of parameters in which to discuss how to profile serial killers. Douglas is considered to be an expert in his field, having investigated some of the most brutal and famous serial cases, such as ones that he describes in Journey Into Darkness. Thus, we will examine his analysis of what makes a sociopath kill. Douglas’ analysis of serial killers starts with an exploration into the crimes and victims. His unit at the F.B.I. was the first to go into prisons to interview and study some of America’s most vicious murderers, including Gacy, David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), and Charles Manson in order to get a thorough understanding of how the mind of a serial killer works. According to Douglas, there are several common denominators that tie most serial killers and sociopaths together. Often they come from dysfunctional homes where abuse, whether or not sexual, physical or emotional, is a regular occurrence. There is also the presence of what his unit refers to as “the homicidal triad” which includes “enuresis – or bed-wetting – at an inappropriate age, starting fires, and cruelty to small animals or other children” (Douglas 1997, 36). By the time they reach their mid-twenties, they have probably already committed their first serious crime (36). The individual believes themselves to be a victim: They’ve been manipulated, they’ve been dominated, they’ve been controlled by others. But here, in this one situation, fueled by fantasy this inadequate, ineffectual nobody can manipulate and dominate a victim of his own; he can be in control. … He can decide whether this victim should live or die, how the victim should die (36). This classic analysis of the sociopath killer’s history places into context the beginning of male hysteria. The fact that investigators can locate the male serial killer’s instinct to kill back to his adolescence means that there is a visibility involved with male criminality. He can be found by looking for a specific type of a man, which Douglas and his team can often pinpoint down to size, race, attractiveness and age. The male serial killer, while daunting to hunt down, can still be categorized and profiled. Douglas’s analysis offers readers an insight into the history of the sociopathic killer, but noticeably absent is the pronoun ‘she’ or ‘her.’ Douglas himself is aware of this absence, but he

19 attributes the male-dominated analysis to statistics which indicate that “virtually all multiple killers are male” (40). Douglas contends that this statistic has to do first with the amount of testosterone found in men, which makes them naturally more aggressive (40). However, he justifies his findings on a more psychological level, suggesting, “While men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from similar backgrounds tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others” (40). Douglas admits that when a woman does commit multiple homicide, it is generally as an angel of death “where the killer believes he or she is relieving great suffering” or as a mother who is killing her children (40). These types of crimes, found close to the home or other gendered spaces (the nurse at the hospital) focus on the female murderer as hysteric rather than sociopathic. According to Douglas, an expert in contemporary criminology processes, women are not violent serial killers because they are not sexual sadists. A male sociopath derives pleasure from torturing and controlling his victims, but a female murderer does not. Douglas notes, “I can’t think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own” (40). But does a killer have to rape their victim in order for a crime to be sexual? I would argue that although Charlotte Manning and Eileen Wade do not sexually torment their victims, there is a sense of sexual satisfaction that is derived from their crimes. Indeed, the weapons that the femme fatale uses, like a gun, knife or a blunt instrument, are phallic in their appearance and sexual in the way they cause death: the bullet and the knife penetrate; the blunt instrument is dealt with savage blows. John Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s text, Journey Into Darkness (1997), analyzes specific case studies that the F.B.I.’s Investigative Support Unit profiles serial killers. Douglas writes that when they analyze a pattern of multiple murders, the “first crime in the series is so important” because it indicates the most about the killer themselves (51). When profiling a serial offender, Douglas explains, “you generally see a precipitating stressor in the hours, days or weeks before the crime” (104). This event in the life of the killer can be a “real or perceived crisis” that triggers “his acting out” (51). The first crime is often geared towards someone who is reminiscent of the person his stress is resulting from, like a failed relationship with a woman or an employer. The first victim reminds the killer of his own inadequacies. The first crime in a

20 series can indicate to the profiler the stressor that sets off the killer, which can lead to the discovery of the perpetrator. The femme fatale of the hard-boiled detective novels, like Charlotte Manning, was not prompted by a stressor that affects her psychologically, but was killed in order to protect her financial business. However, we may see how a femme fatale can be equated with a male serial killer when we consider the case of Julie Killeen and the death of her husband in Cornel Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black. The loss of her love set Julie on a murderous rampage that lasted several years. When she is confronted by detective Wanger, she explains, “It’s a long time ago now, as time goes, and yet all I have to do is shut my eyes and he’s beside me again, Nick, my husband. And the pain wells up around me again, the hate, the rage, the sick cold loss” (Woolrich 291). However, Julie’s crimes were not motivated by sexual inadequacies or a feeling of powerlessness but by a desire to enact revenge upon those who had harmed her. The male sociopath, according to Douglas, cannot control himself once he has been pushed beyond his limit in a stressful situation. The perceived crisis that occurs in his life will take over and cause him to murder. Yet the femme fatale in the books that I will analyze decides to kill rather than being pushed by hysteria. The hysteric reactions of the male sociopath to social or emotional stressors help investigators locate the killer. While the male serial killer can be situated in the discourse of criminology as a visible criminal due to his violent antecedents of animal torture and fire-starting and because of his hysteric reactions to stressful situations, the female serial killer remains hidden. In many of the theoretical criminology texts,10 the female serial killer is discussed as being often overlooked as a suspect due to “her maturity or position of trusted responsibility” (Keheller 16). In their book, Murder in America, Ronald Holmes and Stephen Holmes argue, for instance, “One reason for the reluctance to accept women as serial killers may be an aversion to the idea that women are capable of this kind of violence” (116). It is this feeling of aversion that gives the femme fatale the security that she needs when she commits crimes. In her book, Women Serial Killers and Mass Murderers, Kerry Seagrave explains the habits of the female serial killer:

10 Pollak, Otto. The Criminality of Women. Holmes, Ronald M. and Stephen T. Holmes. Murder in America. Kelleher, Michael D and C.L. Kelleher. Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer.

21 Often murderer and victim share a residence. Almost never is a victim killed in the street or in a public place. The most popular murder weapon is arsenic. Of the 17 victims that the average woman murderer claims, the majority are selected from her immediate or extended family (1). According to this study and many similar studies of female criminals, the typical female murderer kills people she knows, in the home, using some sort of poison. Thus, the typical female criminal commits murder on an intimate level. Often, she attacks her spouse, whether because of infidelity, abuse or neglect, or she attacks her children. Her crimes are committed in the home, in the space that is so often associated with the domestic and the maternal. Her crimes, then, are against the home, which is antithetical to her ‘role’ as caregiver and nurturer. Often, the woman who kills her spouse, her lover (or his lover), or her children is considered hysteric because she is in violation of the domestic space she is supposed to protect. In their comprehensive and standard criminology text, Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder (2005), professors James Alan Fox and Jack Levin question depictions in popular culture of the serial killer and ground their interrogation in a fact-based analysis of case studies and interviews. They dismiss the pretense of the exacting nature of profiling that is held by John Douglas and other F.B.I. profilers, stating, “a psychological profile cannot identify a subject for investigation, nor can it eliminate a suspect who doesn’t fit ‘the mold’” (148). As academics rather than as practicing criminal behavioral psychologists, Fox and Levin are perhaps more disposed to accept the reality of a female serial killer and attempt not to look past women as suspects because of historical aphorisms that equate women with passivity. In fact, they define female serial killers by their connection with the victim, which is often a relationship in which “the victim is dependent on them” (39). This definition, however, still conforms to the pre-existing notion of female killers who destroy their own family members or infirmed victims. According to the systems of classification that Fox and Levin discuss in their book, the femme fatale would be a sociopath because of her “cool and calculating manner” and the “fearlessness that typifies this personality type” (143-4). She is also a profit-motivated offender who kills out of necessity, usually with a gun. The profit-motivated serial killer usually has a “lack of empathy” that enables them to kill with impunity (63). Fox and Levin claim that a sociopath is able to conceal their identity from family and friends by “playing a role” (67). While the sociopath “lack[s] the capacity for human kindness and compassion,” they are well

22 aware of the ramifications of behaving this way in a social setting. As Fox and Levin note, “[Sociopaths] are often skillful at maintaining a caring and sympathetic façade, especially when it is in their self-interest to do so” (67). As a practicing psychiatrist, Charlotte Manning spends her time listening to her patient’s maladies in a kindly manner. Yet, she manages at the same time to get them hooked on heroin, creating an unending supply of consumers for her business. Unlike most recorded female serial killers who murdered family members or acquaintances, Aileen Wuornos, the thirty-five year old prostitute and hitchhiker, killed seven men between the years of 1989 to 1990 with a gun, while robbing them in their cars. Wuornos behaved like the typical for-profit killer that we see in the hard-boiled detective novels, except, of course, for her low social standing and her occupation. The frightening aspect of the femme fatale of literature is her ability to remain under the radar of police detection and suspicion. The concealment of her crimes and the deliberate manner in which she committed them would define the femme fatale as an “organized killer,” according to the F.B.I. (Fox and Levin 146). As Fox and Levin explain, The organized killer typically is intelligent, is socially and sexually competent, is of high birth order (one of the oldest children in the family), is a skilled worker, lives with a partner, is mobile, drives a late model car and follows his crime in the media (146). The femme fatales that I will investigate in Chapter Two exemplify this category, although the pronoun in the definition would have to be changed. Once the femme fatale enters into her killing spree, she remains hidden, never giving any indication of her violent actions. In John Douglas’ profiling process, he explains that once the male sociopath begins his killing spree, there would be a change in his habits and behaviors “which would be noticeable to those around him,” including “a heavier reliance on alcohol or dugs, change in sleeping or eating habits, weight loss, anxiety, more eagerness to associate with others” (51). In fact, Douglas verifies that once the police release the profile of a killer with warnings of the above mentioned behavior changes, the public is often “extremely instrumental in identifying the killer” (51). The outer sign of inner turmoil reveals the criminality of the male serial killer because the body often reflects what is occurring in the mind. However, in Spillane’s I, the Jury Charlotte Manning does not go through psychological changes that are reflected in her social interactions. Charlotte is able to compartmentalize her life into her

23 criminal actions and her everyday interactions. The stress of running a criminal organization is separate from her social life, which is what kept her from displaying criminal behavior. In fact, had it not been for a simple mistake on her part (Myna and the coat), she would not have been discovered. Charlotte’s ability to disguise her criminality through her position in the community and her image of feminine domesticity is a deadly and effective combination. The femme fatale uses dress and accessories to enhance her sexuality and beauty in order to emphasize her femininity. The concept of masking applies to the terms artistry and artfulness both. Artistry in women refers to the way the body is dressed and painted in order to achieve a particular appearance. In the 1950s, fashion was focused on the silhouette of the female body and make-up centered on creating a flawless front. Artfulness contends with idea of covering deceit and creating an appearance that is congruent with the expectations of what a ‘good’ woman should look like. Artfulness and artifice, however, both have to do with the masking of the original product in order to conceal or protect the image underneath. As Elisabeth Bronfen claims, “Duplicity thus emerges as her most seminal value, insofar as she is not simply willing to delude anyone in order to the money and the freedom she is after, but because she will never show her true intentions” (106). Because both Charlotte Manning and Eileen Wade use their artistry to promote their beauty, which in turn conceals their artfulness, the two terms become mutually inclusive. What separates the femme fatale from the ‘typical’ female killer is her presence outside of the home. The home has historically been considered a woman’s sphere and this is where, traditionally, female murderers have committed their crimes. Men commit murder outside of the home, while female murderers primarily enact their crimes in a more intimate setting. The femme fatale, though, usually kills strangers outside of her home, which disengages her from the domestic sphere. In I, the Jury, Charlotte Manning kills six people in an effort to conceal her heroin scheme. She commits all of the murders in a public space or in the victims’ home. The fact that the femme fatale can move between the public and the private sphere in order to commit her crimes makes her a more able killer than her male counterpart. As we have noted previously, the weapon of choice used by women when committing murder is often poison. This would account for the fact that female murderers are considered sly, since poison is administered under the nose of the victim. According to John Douglas in Journey Into Darkness (1997), “A woman is unlikely to kill repeatedly with a gun or knife” (40).

24 Guns and knives have become masculinized weapons; not only are they phallic objects, but they are aggressive weapons that require skill and strength to make them deadly. In the hard-boiled texts, the femme fatale does not use poison to commit her crimes, but instead uses the male instruments of killing. Indeed, when Charlotte kills her first victim, Jack Williams, she proves a working knowledge of weaponry and a knowledge of the human body. She shoots Jack in the stomach, knowing that it will be an agonizingly slow death. Eileen Wade bashes in the skull of her husband’s mistress and ex-husband’s new wife, and then shoots her husband in a way that makes it appear as a suicide. Both women show a capability of using weapons and a mastery of the manipulation of a crime scene. Thus, the way in which Charlotte and Eileen perpetrate murder defies the general assumptions made by criminologists about how women commit crime. There is a fascination with the femme fatale in popular culture that concentrates not just upon the crimes that she commits, but also on her objectified body. In the contemporary lexicon, the femme fatale is defined as a woman who is dangerously seductive, a woman who leads men to their doom, a woman who captivates men with her sex appeal and then destroys them. The beauty of the femme fatale translates directly into the dangerous part of her position. She is so beautiful; she can ensnare even the most astute men into believing her act. Thus, the fear and fascination with the femme fatale stems from her ability to mask her criminality and the inability of men to resist her. In the late 1930s there was the actual case of Anna Hahn, who, like the femme fatale, disguised her murderous crimes beneath a traditional feminine exterior. Hahn, a “blond and comely” German immigrant, killed between five and fifteen elderly German men for their money. She is described as being cold-blooded, yet she was able to trick astute men into giving her their wealth. In her interviews with reporters, Hahn maintained her innocence, declaring that she wished for money only “to take care of the poor unfortunates, the old people and the children” (“11 Deaths”). Although she was not a hyper-aggressive vixen like the fictional Charlotte Manning, Hahn was an expert at manipulating men using her beauty and sensuality. During her trial, the prosecuting attorney had stated, “I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say she is the most heartless, cruel, cold, greedy person any of us will find in the scope of our lifetime” (Seagrave 165). When facing death by electrocution, Hahn attempted to elicit sympathy by repeating over and over to spare her for her child’s sake. However, on December 7, 1938, Anna Hahn was executed.

25 Because the femme fatale’s power is derived from her sexuality and beauty, the public’s fear of criminal women is specifically concerned with her appearance. In one of the most famous cases of the middle 20th century, “The Lonely Hearts Murders,” the criminal mastermind becomes the target of media ridicule and disgust, and not for her vicious crimes, but for her unsightly appearance. In 1947, Martha Beck, an obese woman with a history of being the victim of rape, fell in love with Ray Fernandez, whom she met through “Mother Dinene’s Friendly Club for Lonely Hearts.” Although Beck was not the usual fare for Fernandez, who is described as good-looking and suave, the two became a couple and, according to Segrave, “the pair formed an odd alliance and their deeds soon escalated to include murder as Beck came to dominate Fernandez” (26). The two carried on a scheme of fraud as a team; Fernandez seduced women into marrying him and then took their money, while Beck posed as his sister. Beck would usually begin the attack on Fernandez’s new brides by hitting them with a hammer; Fernandez would finish the deed by strangling them. The couple is estimated to have murdered twenty women during their short crime spree; however, the police only ever charged them with three. Although femme fatale’s primarily work alone, there are instances where they use easily controllable men to help them with their deeds. Beck used Fernandez to gratify her sexual desires, which included rape and murder. Martha Beck’s appearance is emphasized in every account of the Lonely Hearts murders. She is described as “grossly obese” by Emanuel Perlmutter in his essay “The Springs of Evil,” which appeared in the New York Times in April of 1952. Every article regarding Martha Beck contains her weight, said to be “200 pounds.” In Women Serial and Mass Murderers, Kerry Segrave recalls that Beck was “fat, ugly” and that she “had no clothes sense” (27). Why is it necessary for the American public to be constantly reminded of Beck’s weight and her failing looks? While the femme fatale is dangerous because her criminality is hidden by a lovely façade, there is something comforting to the American public about the idea of Beck’s murderous intentions equating with an ‘ugly’ body. Indeed, the degeneration of the body is the physical reflection of the deterioration of morality. On March 8, 1951, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez were put to death by the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. As Kerry Segrave comments, “Martha was slated last because it was felt that she was the most likely to break down as the end neared and perhaps hold everybody else up. They needn’t have worried. Martha showed no evidence of remorse or any

26 sign of mental or physical breakdown” (30). Up until the end of her life by electrocution, Martha remained unremorseful and in complete control of her emotions. Although she was not a femme fatale because she lacked the appealing exterior, Martha Beck is an example of the American public’s fascination with female criminals and serial killers in general. The technology and methodology involved in the detection of crime continues to evolve and make way for contemporary sociological views. Although women have become more equal with men, the preconceived notions of female passivity continue to influence how criminals are being categorized and defined. The femme fatale of the late 1940s and 1950s hard-boiled fiction provided a new role for women to occupy as aggressive serial killers. I am not claiming that violence and murder are positive tools for feminism, but that the femme fatale had defied scientific theories regarding women and aggression by becoming a serial killer who evaded detection by using her femininity and by contradicting the conclusions of modern science about women and their behavior. By creating this new definition of what it means to be female and by evoking fear in the minds of the male detectives, the figure of the femme fatale in popular culture became a new type of female character both to fear and admire.

27 CHAPTER TWO: THE FEMME FATALE

Women in the hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s exude feminine glamour and psychological mystique. These vicious vixens embody tropes of domesticity and exaggerated femininity, which disguise their criminal lifestyles. The detectives in these types of novels had the seemingly impossible task of discovering the criminality of the femme fatale at the same time that they were seduced by her. Generalizations regarding women and crime placed the femme fatale above suspicion due to her place in society and her portrayal of domesticity. Meanwhile, science and modern psychology were limited in their ability to classify and delineate women in part because of historical clichés regarding the impossibility of understanding women and biological assumption about women and passivity. The character of the femme fatale took advantage of the hypothesis about women and crime that were concrete in the minds of scientists and criminologists and used them to conceal her criminal actions. In the American hard-boiled pulps of the late 1940s and 1950s, the femme fatale was at her strongest; she had evolved into a calculating murderer who could execute her crimes flawlessly while continuing to elude police detection through her performance of stereotypical femininity. The femme fatale posed the strongest threat in the literature of this time period by inciting men to fear that they would not be able to detect criminality through the guise of the good wife. The hard-boiled detective novels glorified violence and, through her role as a serial killer, the femme fatale was able to participate in the glory. This chapter will argue that the hard-boiled detective novels of the late 1940s and 1950s challenged both cultural and scientific norms about women and crime by portraying a female serial killer who is calculating, deliberate and aggressive in her actions, terms that have been historically regulated to men, while retaining their own sense of femininity. I will closely examine standard novels from this genre, including Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929), Cornel Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940), Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1947) and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953), in order to mark how the femme fatale progressed into a serial killer whose feminine beauty and apparently masculine planning make a deadly combination. The chapter will contain an examination of post-World War II America to put into historical context the transformation of the femme fatale and the crisis which occurred in

28 20th-century science of criminology. As gender roles had changed during the late 1940s, there was an upheaval of social norms and in the general understanding of women. In response to the male anxiety that arose surrounding changing gender roles in the home and workplace, the femme fatale became more equipped at concealing her true identity. She exploited the male fantasy of the image of the ‘good’ wife and mother by embodying that role and using it to conceal her murderous deeds. I will then focus on the science of criminology and the processes used by investigators to uncover the perpetrator of vicious serial killings, as were discussed in the previous chapter. Using the definitive texts on profiling by former F.B.I. investigator John Douglas and Fox and Levin’s Extreme Killing, I will compare the common features of male serial killers to the femme fatales in the hard-boiled detective novels of the 1940s and 1950s. The femme fatale does not just challenge gender roles; she destabilizes literary and cultural expectations through her remarkable place as a serial killer. The hard-boiled detective novels published in the late 1940s and 1950s differ historically from previous works in their characterization of the femme fatale. While Dashiell Hammett and other writers of the 1930s wrote novels that contained dangerous women, it was not until after the war ended that the femme fatale emerged as a deadly killer who committed her murderous deeds under the guise of domesticity and beauty. In the early prototype of the femme fatale featured in Hammett was foiled relatively quickly and efficiently by the detective. Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the female murder in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929), could not hide her criminality from the detective . By the time Mickey Spillane published his novel in the late 1940s, the femme fatale is not only adroit at concealing her true identity but also she is the nemesis of the hard-boiled detective. Because my argument is based on the hard-boiled detective novels of the late 1940s and 1950s and the femme fatale as a serial killer, Hammett, Woolrich and Chandler’s novels will act as secondary texts to compare with my primary focus on Mickey Spillane. This chapter will examine the progression of the femme fatale as she becomes more aggressive in her crimes and a more frightening adversary to the hard-boiled detective. What links these particular novels that are featured in this chapter is the development of the relationship between the femme fatale and the hard-boiled detective from the dominant male presence in Hammett to the rise of the female aggressor in Spillane. I will first examine Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929), a classic of the hard-boiled genre. In this novel,

29 detective Sam Spade and his partner are hired to find the missing sister of a beautiful woman. After an attempted recovery, Spade’s partner is dead and the story is found to be false. The beautiful woman, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, admits she is attempting to locate an expensive and historic statue. More murders ensue and in the end, Spade reveals that Brigid is a killer and he turns her in to the police. While Brigid does manage to Spade for a time, she needs his help to find the statue and enter into a tawdrier, criminal world. What marks Brigid as different from the fatal women who will follow in her footsteps is her reliance on Sam Spade and other men to achieve her goals. This novel will be the starting point in examining the characterization of the femme fatale in hard-boiled American detective fiction. Following Hammett’s writings from the 1930s, I will examine Cornel Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940). In the novel, Julie Killeen, the femme fatale, goes on a murdering rampage to kill the five men who caused the death of her fiancé on their wedding day. For each murder, she embodies a specific character to appeal to the man that she is about to kill. She uses her natural beauty, aided by hair coloring, clothing and make-up to create her victim’s ideal woman, which enables her to have more intimate access to the man. After four perfectly crafted murderers, her identity is uncovered by detective Lew Wanger, and she is stopped before she can murder the last man. Wanger discovered that Killeen had killed the wrong men; that her dead fiancé was the one responsible for his own death, and these men were just innocent bystanders. Although the Bride thought she had found vindication, her victory was taken away from her and she became the evil one. This early femme fatale had the knowledge of artistry and the intelligence to pull off a murder and masquerade, yet because she was not deliberate or careful in her investigation of her husband’s murder, she was incorrect in her assumptions. This novel marks the beginning of the type of femme fatale who would become a in later novels, yet she lacks the intense deliberation that sets the femme fatale apart from a fatal woman. Mickey Spillane’s 1947 novella, I, the Jury, is perhaps the most representative of the hard-boiled genre and certainly contains one of the most powerful femme fatales in American popular fiction. The novel features the hyper-masculine private eye Mike Hammer who is searching for the murderer of his friend, Jack Williams. He vows that he will revenge his friend by shooting the killer in the stomach - a painful death. His search leads him to the beautiful psychiatrist Charlotte Manning, with whom Hammer falls deeply in love. Charlotte agrees to help Hammer find the killer and the two eventually become engaged. As the bodies pile up,

30 Hammer discovers that a heroin ring being run in the city that Williams was attempting to uncover by none other than his gorgeous fiancé. When Mike confronts Charlotte, she slowly removes her clothing in an attempt to save her life. Although Mike is tempted by her beautiful body, he fulfills the promise he made at the beginning of the case and shoots her in the stomach. The novel ends with Charlotte asking Mike, “How c-could you?” to which he replies, “It was easy” (Spillane 147). I will use I, the Jury as my primary text in analyzing the femme fatale’s role as a serial killer because the novel is, I believe, the epitome of the American hard-boiled detective novel. Six years after Spillane’s initial iconic hard-boiled novella, Raymond Chandler published his 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye. This novel contains the beautiful housewife, Eileen Wade, who is really a murderous vixen and femme fatale. Her husband, Roger Wade, was a known alcoholic and philanderer who reportedly threw his wife down the stairs in a fit of rage. The novel begins when Roger’s lover, Sylvia Lennox, is murdered outside her home. Her husband and murder suspect, Terry Lennox, after an attempt to flee to Mexico, is reportedly killed in a shootout. Eileen Wade convinces the family attorney to hire Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s hard- boiled protagonist, to come protect her husband, although that really implies that he is coming to protect her. Although Eileen wants Marlowe to help in order to gain information about the death of Sylvia Lennox, which Marlowe investigates, she becomes afraid of his ‘detection’ and attempts to elicit Marlowe’s love. After her husband’s death, apparently a suicide, Marlowe manages to link Eileen to the death of Sylvia Lennox and her husband, Roger. Eileen kills herself in order to prevent her public trial. However, even after the police and the press receive a copy of her suicide letter detailing how she murdered her husband and his lover, they were still unable to believe her capable of the crimes. Perhaps this was because Eileen was not only beautiful, but she appeared to be the epitome of a good wife. Chandler’s novel, more reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and less aggressively hard-boiled than Spillane’s I, the Jury, standardizes the fatal woman in literature while allowing the male detective to regain his position as an almost omniscient investigator. In fact, what separates the femme fatale of the hard-boiled genre from murderous is her evolution into a serial killer. This title of serial killer is significant since even the most current of contemporary criminology texts find only a small place for women in their

31 definition of a serial killer as an angel of death or a hysterical practitioner of infanticide.11 Historically, the title of serial killer has been relegated to men, while women have only been considered hysterical if they kill. The significance of the femme fatale is that she defies all stereotyping of a hysteric woman and the idea that one could view criminality by simply examining the body. While it may seem pertinent here to argue whether or not it was the intention of the author to create this powerful female figure, I contend that would lead this thesis into the intentional fallacy, where the author is given an omniscient role and their intention is considered the only correct one.12 Regardless of the author’s original objective, the femme fatale is far too strong a presence to be relegated to the mind of the author alone. Spillane, Chandler and other hard-boiled detective novelists were, however, writing at a time when America entered World War II. It is significant to note that the effects of the war on America’s economy and workforce played an important role on the depiction of women in popular culture. During World War II, many American women took over the jobs that had once been held by men in order to perpetuate America’s industry and economy. This transition of women into the workplace marked one of the first times in American history when women were not confined to the home but were encouraged to join the workforce. While individual men may have scorned the idea of dealing with women in the workplace, the government’s support of the female laborers trounced whatever hostilities existed amongst men. Rosie the Riveter had become the new household symbol of femininity in war-time America, while sexy and curvaceous pin-ups donned the sides of American bomber jets. Maria Elena Buszek claims that the government campaign that released the Rosie the Riveter poster “promoted the notion that it was not only necessary but also fashionable, even sexy for women to enter the workforce” (213). Women were fully integrated into the war effort and, because of their new position outside of the home, gained an unprecedented amount of freedom. However, when the war ended, women were expected to give up their factory and industry jobs in order to allow the returning soldiers a place to work. In this decade after the Second World War, there is an insistence in popular culture to remind women of their roles as

11 Birch, Helen. Moving Targets. Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. The Anatomy of Motive. Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. Journey Into Darknes.s Flowers, R. Barri. Female Crime, Criminals and Cellmates: An Exploration of Female Criminality and Delinquency. Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Kelleher, Michael D and C.L. Kelleher. Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer. Mann, Coramae Richey. When Women Kill. Pollak, Otto. The Criminality of Women.

12 Wimsatt, William K. and Beardsley, Monroe C. “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946).

32 homemakers and wives. Buszek notes, “Images of women in popular culture reflected the postwar American interest in idealizing a less aggressive, thoroughly nostalgic construction of the contemporary woman, fit to cultural demands for a return to more conventional gender roles” (235). Television promoted these images with programs like The Honeymooners (1955) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952). Meanwhile, Spillane’s femme fatale who appeared in Mickey I, the Jury in 1947 took advantage of this public fantasy of the domestic goddess and embodied it in order to dupe even the most discerning of men. The separation between male spaces and female spaces limited most women to the home. The femme fatale opposed this segregation by operating as a murderer in the public sphere while retaining the image of a woman who knows her place in the private sphere. What is significant about the female mass murderer is her place within the history of violence. When a woman is associated with violent acts, usually one considers her to be the passive victim. The woman serial killer is an anomaly; she dissociates herself from her expected social role. Traditionally, men are trained from birth to be aggressive while women are brought up to be passive caregivers. Kerry Seagrave writes that men are “socialized to be violent” in order to prepare them for their future as soldiers (2). This insistence on the need for men to be aggressive became an obsession in 1950s popular culture where movies like Champion (1949), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), for example, featured muscular and sometimes violent male protagonists. In his book, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950’s, James Gilbert argues that during the 1950s, masculinity became “increasingly defined in terms of mass culture and celebrity icons” even though in popular culture, the “presentations of manliness that are unattainable for most individuals even if they are considered to be aspirational heroes” (16). But just as there was a focus on men to be aggressive, there is similar pressure for women to be passive. Because the female serial killer received training to be passive, she uses her passivity allegedly to manipulate situations where a male serial killer would simply use their aggression. While the 1940s saw a historical shift in women’s roles outside the home, the 1950s bore the brunt of the reaction to those shifts. Prior to World War II, the home remained the “women’s sphere,” while during the war, the factory became the woman’s new home. After the war was over and women were encouraged, if not forced, to return back to their homes, the following decade in America’s popular culture sought to perpetuate the domestic fantasy of the good, stay-

33 at-home wife who was passive and feminine. The 1950s saw an emphasis on hyper-masculinity and passive femininity, but in the literature of the time period, a radical transformation had occurred. The femme fatale served as a link between the two extremes of heightened masculinity and over-emphasized domestic femininity. Dashiell Hammett explores the struggle for power between female and male in his classic detective story The Maltese Falcon (1929). The beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy hires Hammett’s private-eye Sam Spade to help her locate a lost statuette, the bejeweled Maltese falcon. O’Shaughnessy has several pseudonyms, which she changes to as the occasion suits her. Although she is young and beautiful, Spade is fully aware of her duplicitous nature and exposes her almost immediately. Edward Margolies, in his book, Which Way Did He Go?, asserts that Brigid O’Shaughnessy is “the prime liar of all Hammett’s women,” yet she does not deceive Sam Spade because “liars depend on believers and Sam believes only in his job” (29). Spade prepares for women to lie to him and after a well-rehearsed and seemingly innocent plead for help, Spade laughs and explains, “You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good” (35). Brigid is not the accomplished actress that Julie Killeen, Charlotte Manning or Eileen Wade is, but she relies on her innocent features in order to attain help. Spade, however, is too intelligent and far too good a detective to be fooled by her feminine wiles. The presupposed advantage of the detective over the innocuous and somewhat ineffective fatal woman is narrowed in later hard-boiled detective novels. A group of men employed to find the falcon of Malta hired Brigit to seduce its current owner in order to steal the statue. Thus her function in the novel is not as an individual, but as a sexual object in a larger scheme. When the group disperses due to betrayal and murder, Brigid attempts a lone hand, but, according to Spade, she does not know what she is doing: “It’s just what I told you: you’re fumbling along by guess and by God” (83). She falls in with assorted men to aid her in her quest of the falcon but leaves them, usually dead, in her wake. Brigid’s inability to commit murder without the help of men does not make her a serial killer like Charlotte Manning or Eileen Wade. Instead, she is effective only as far as her body will take her. Brigid uses Floyd Thursby, a known felon and “sucker for women” to steal for her and aids in his murder in order to protect her interests (207). When she became afraid that Thursby would double-cross her, Brigid set him up for murder by killing Sam’s partner Miles Archer. Thurbsy’s subsequent murder allows her to murder Archer, the only crime she commits by her own hand.

34 Brigid seduces strong and naïve men into helping her by feigning helplessness, yet she requires a male body to keep her safe. Spade accuses Brigid of her reliance on men, telling her, “you knew you needed another protector, so you came back to me, right?” (210). Spade is angry that he was almost used like Thursby, Archer, and the other men more than he is shocked by Brigid’s criminality, telling her heartlessly, “I won’t play the sap for you” (212). When the police arrive to take Brigid away, there is no more dialogue from her character. The last scene that features her speaking ends with her in Sam’s arms, kissing him even as he prepares to turn her in. The Maltese Falcon is prime example of how the detective retained the upper hand in his interactions with a dangerous woman. Although Brigid is beautiful and a well-practiced manipulator of many men, she is no match for the intelligent and ruthless Spade, even after they appear to have fallen in love. Her inability to commit murder herself, with the exception of Miles Archer, denies her the classification of serial killer, even though many men die around her. Margolies argues that Sam “is as unmoved by the threats of killers as he is by the importunities of women” (30). The Maltese Falcon provides an excellent example of how the antagonism between the fatal woman and the hard-boiled detective began with the power on his side. Hammett’s novel provides an appropriate segway into the next generation of vicious vixens in hard-boiled novels, where we see the femme fatale become an independent and dangerous entity. Cornel Woolrich’s 1940 novel, The Bride Wore Black, became a transition between the early characterization of the passive yet conniving femme fatale to the purposeful and aggressive new image brought about by Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. In the early detective pulps, the women who were criminals committed their crimes under the guise of protecting themselves. Although their early counterparts played the victim, the femme fatales of the late 1940s and 1950s owned their aggression and their murderous intentions. The Bride Wore Black is a perfect example of how early female murderers in pulp texts were victims as well as murderers. According to Thomas Renzi in his expose on Woolrich, the intention of The Bride Wore Black was to “explor[e] the inscrutable workings of fate, the desperation of obstructed love, and the tenuous, illogical connection between crime and punishment” (78). Julie Killeen, the vicious killer of Woolrich’s novel, does not kill for the thrill or for any political or economic gain. Her crimes are committed in order to exact revenge upon the five men she believed caused the death of her husband. Woolrich does not reveal to his readers the motive behind Julie’s

35 attacks until after the third victim, thus, according to Renzi, “Julie appears all the more monstrous and villainous because we initially learn more about her victims than we do about her; consequently, they are made the more sympathetic characters” (80). Her victims are given in- depth backgrounds and profound inner monologues, yet Julie remains illusive. Her finest asset comes from her ability to change her identity according to the man whom she is trying to kill. I am using the term identity on purpose because she does not simply change her hair, clothing, eye-color and general appearance; she completed reinvents herself in order to insert herself into some relationship with her particular victim. In the first three chapters of the novel, arranged in order of her victims, little is revealed about the murderous vixen or the motive behind her crimes. Julie’s first victim, Ken Bliss, is celebrating his engagement to Marjorie at a large party downtown when a beautiful stranger appears. The stranger is blonde, tall and thin, with a long black dress on. As the couple joined hands, admiring Marjorie’s engagement ring, they notice the beautiful woman standing nearby who was “regarding them steadfastly” (28). At first glance the couple saw, “a dimple of sympathy – or possibly derision – at the corner of her mouth had disappeared before they could confirm it.” The woman, Julie Killeen, moved past them, but Ken and Marjorie were unable to retain the happy feelings that had felt prior to her passing: “The room didn’t feel quite as warm as it had. As though that look from the doorway had chilled it” (29). As she pushes Ken to his death just a few moments later, she hisses with “a sound that was explanation, malediction and expiation all in one: ‘Mrs. Nick Killeen!’” (37). Immediately readers are sympathetic to Bliss and his fiancé since Woolrich provides insight into their characters. As Renzi comments, “Unable to understand her behavior, we see her as objectified, alientated from our empathy and sympathy” (80). Yet before the reader is given anymore information about the murderer or the investigation into her crime, the next chapter begins with Julie’s new victim. Her guise for her next crime was created by studying pictures of semi-famous women hung on the wall of her victim, Mitchell. After an examination of the type of women that Mitchell idealized, Julie appears next to him at a show with red hair and dramatic face. As Renzi explains, “She wiggles her way into men’s lives by presenting herself as a sensual object of desire or an ideal helpmate before she teaches them the dangerous, fatal consequences of trusting her” (80). Her sheer beauty was enough to get him alone at his house while she slipped him poison in his wine. Her third victim, Frank Moran, is stuck at home with his young son when his

36 wife is mysteriously called away to her mother’s sick bed. Moran tries to handle his young son (since back in the early 1940’s he would have had little interaction with child-rearing) when his son’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Baker, fortuitously arrives to help. Miss Baker, aka Julie Killeen, is young, pretty in a plain way with reddish hair severely kept up with pins who wears no make-up. She offers to help him take care of the child and Moran thinks to himself, “she was one of the nicest, most competent, most considerate young women to have around that he’d yet had the pleasure of encountering” (113-4). Feeling relieved and relaxed, Moran little knows that this woman is about to impart her revenge on him. Because of her position as a kindergarten teacher and her ability to make him feel comfortable by cooking and cleaning up the house, she manages to get closer to him than she could if she had simply approached him on the street.13 Killeen used this method in the opposite manner by relying on Moran’s non-instinctive parenting skills and offering him help. By the next morning, he was dead, suffocated to death by being locked in the hall closet. At this point in the novel, detective Lew Wanger is beginning to see the connection between the three murdered men. Renzi thus argues, As a seminal literary work in this area, [The Bride Wore Black] most importantly prefigures the mysterious and predatory femme fatale, a character critical to so many central conflicts in noir. In addition, as often occurs in a Woolrich story, it established the male characters as weak competitors with the female, susceptible to her wiles and, if not careful, potential victims for her schemes (85). While Renzi is accurate in his characterization of Julie Killeen as “mysterious and predatory”, he does not recognize that Killeen does not manage to outsmart all of the men in her path. In fact, the male characters that she kills in the first three sections appear to be weak when faced with her because she is preying on them during the weak moments in their lives. Bliss is ‘blissfully’ unaware at his engagement party, Mitchell is depressed and Moran is desperate for help. As Julie continues on her murderous spree, her victims become harder for her to manipulate while the police close in on her. The fourth murder victim was a young artist named Ferguson who was enchanted by a young woman named Christine Bell who came in to model for a painting he was doing. This

13 The infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, for example, lured young women to him “appearing to be disabled” and relying on the apparently inherent care-taker instincts in women (Fox and Levin 63).

37 time, Julie had studied Ferguson’s paintings of women at a show to determine what hair color on young women he liked to paint the most. After noting his preference for brunettes, she arrives at his studio with “raven-haired, creamy-skinned, and her eyes seemed violent behind the imperceptible shadow line she had drawn round them” (192). Her beauty enticed Ferguson to paint her as Diane the Huntress even after he discovered that she had not really been sent over by a modeling agency but had arrived on her own. Her pose required her to standing with a bow and arrow drawn and this was how eventually Ferguson met his death. Her one mistake came when a young man named Corey, who was also at the engagement party for her first victim, Ken Bliss, arrived at Ferguson’s loft for a late-night party. Corey knew he recognized Julie although her hair looked different and by the end of the evening, although it was too late for Ferguson, he remembered her and reported it to the police. Thus, by the time that the fifth and final murder would need to take place at the home of the novelist Holmes, the detective Lew Wanger knew where she would strike and was ready for her. Wanger caught Julie Killeen and informed her that although she believed she was getting retribution on those who had wronged her, she was actually mistaken in her findings. Indeed, the police found that the death of Nick Killeen was not caused by a car hit and run, but by a bullet fired from his old partner in crime, Corey. Detective Wanger, wanting to punish Julie for the four innocent men she had killed, tells her cruelly, If you had come to us at the time, asked us how we were progressing, we could have proved it to your satisfaction once and for all. But no, you hugged your vengeance to yourself, nursed your bitterness, wouldn’t interview the police. You deliberately withheld the information – inaccurate though it was – and used it for murder (301). Had it not been for her fiancé’s death, Julie Killeen would never have turned to crime. And if she had been more rational in her death-dealing, she would have done more research into her husband’s death and have been assured of her victim’s guilt. Although her crimes were perfectly planned and executed, Julie was found to be wrong in her reasoning for exacting revenge. Julie Killeen is assured of a place in literature as a fatal woman, but she is denied the classification of a femme fatale because she lacks the careful investigation that she needs to make her crimes purposeful.

38 As the 1940s came to a close, the characterization of the female serial killer shifted from being a victim who kills to protect herself to a powerful figure who initiates crime for her own personal gain. Charlotte Manning, the infamous femme fatale in Mickey Spillane 1947 novella, I, the Jury, is the epitome of the scientifically deliberate serial killer just as Mike Hammer embodies the of the hard-boiled detective as an aggressively vengeful, anti-social personality. As explains, “The Hammer novels are fantasies about a character who does not control his rage in a socially acceptable manner” (38). Hammer’s personal vengeance against the murderer of his best friend Jack Williams is the plot behind Spillane’s best seller I, the Jury. It is a surprise to readers that the person behind six brutal deaths and a well-run drug ring is the beautiful Charlotte, especially when one considers that the person who was investigating these crimes, Mike Hammer, was engaged to her. Charlotte Manning’s ability to conceal her criminal acts while seducing the supposedly street-wise Hammer makes her the epitome of the careful and deliberate femme fatale. The novella featured the hardened, hyper-masculine private eye Mike Hammer who is searching for the killer of his best friend and war-buddy, Jack Williams. Williams was killed after uncovering the individual behind the heroin ring who had gotten his girlfriend Myrna addicted to the drug. Police chief Pat Chambers informed Hammer that they never discovered who the head of the operation was, but that he was “a smooth operator” (23). Hammer rushes around the city, beating up as many people as he can in order to find information. On the way he meets Charlotte Manning, a lovely psychiatrist whom Mike falls in love with. At the end of the novel, we are informed that Charlotte was the head of the heroin scam and Jack Williams’ killer. How did Hammer fail to recognize the criminality of the woman to whom he was so close? Alexander Howe explains that the prerogative of the hard-boiled detective lies in his quest for “knowledge” and, thus, “the master of this knowledge” (4). In this case Charlotte Manning is the ‘master of knowledge’ because of her position inside the drug ring and as the perpetrator of the murders Hammer investigates. Yet Charlotte also contains knowledge beyond Hammer’s understanding or recognition, which is shown throughout the novella in her ability to mask her crimes using techniques that appeal to Mike’s masculine desire for female domesticity. Charlotte embodies these domestic stereotypes not simply to disguise her crimes, but to manipulate Mike into an intimate relationship with her.

39 Writer Max Allan Collins claims in his introduction to a collection of Spillane’s works that I, the Jury “sold in the millions,” yet was “roundly despised” by most critics (x). As we noted earlier, the prominent literary critic, Leslie Fielder, claims that detective fiction, especially the work of Mickey Spillane, “insists, however, on undressing its bitches, surveying them with a surly and concupiscent eye before punching, shooting, or consigning them to the gas-chamber” (477). While Hammer certainly harps on the ‘loveliness’ of Charlotte’s body, I contend that Fielder is overtly preoccupied with the dénouement of the novella, which hinders his understanding of the process of masking crime in the novella as a whole. And while it is obvious that Hammer “hates” Charlotte and is happy to be the one to kill her, one cannot help but admire the way in which she manages to deceive him and match wits for the bulk of the narrative. In fact, Collins claims that Hammer is “enraged not only at the murder but also by Charlotte’s attempts to blind him to her deed with the offer of sex” (48). Like Sam Spade’s reaction to the manipulative Brigid, Hammer is more distressed that Charlotte ‘almost’ had him fooled. Upon viewing the bloody murder scene where his friend Jack Williams lay dead, Mike Hammer informs police chief Pat Chambers, “This was no ordinary murder, Pat. It’s as cold- blooded and as deliberate as I ever saw one” (6). The assertion Hammer makes about the killer is a correct one: she is cold-blooded, deliberate and precise. Charlotte Manning, the beautiful femme fatale who commits this gruesome murder and watches her victim, a war veteran and symbol of the great American soldier, crawl helpless on the floor with a bullet in his “belly” (5). The shot to Jack Williams’ stomach did not kill him instantly, but left him to die in excruciating pain with a hole in his belly “big enough to cram a fist into” (5). Spillane constantly reminds readers that this murder and the subsequent ones committed later in the novella are calculated, cruel and executed perfectly. Thus, it comes as a complete surprise at the end of the novella when Hammer informs readers that the evil murderer is the beautiful and professional Charlotte, the woman to which Hammer himself was engaged. How did Hammer, a man of the world fail to recognize evil in his lovely fiancé? As Mike reminisces in his head, Charlotte the beautiful. Charlotte the lovely. Charlotte who loved dogs and walked people’s babies in the park. Charlotte whom you wanted to crush in your arms and feel the wetness in her lips. Charlotte of the body that was fire and life and soft velvet and responsiveness. Charlotte the killer (140).

40 The female serial killer, like Charlotte, will remain undetected because murder is a masculine venture. Kelleher claims that a female murderer “is a quiet killer, who is often painstakingly methodical and eminently lethal in her actions” (xi). Unlike Hammett’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who is visibly guilty to Sam Spade, Charlotte Manning is the perfect killer, evading detection through her femininity. In one of Mike’s first intimate meetings with Charlotte, he intends to surprise her by appearing unexpectedly at her house. However, when he arrives, it becomes clear that Charlotte expects him to come see her; she dresses perfectly, appearing magnificently coifed and made up. Charlotte is aware of her attractive beauty and sexuality. She expects Mike to come to her house because that is what any man would do after encountering her. She takes Mike into the kitchen so he can see the mound of fried chicken that she prepared for him. Hammer is surprised when he sees his favorite meal has been prepared: “I was dumbfounded. Either she kept a complete file of my likes and dislikes or she was clairvoyant” (51). Could it be that Charlotte had indeed researched him extensively? Whether or not she knew of his love for chicken or she just guessed at his preference, Charlotte emanates feelings of domestic comfort and reminds Mike of what a home should feel like. After finishing his meal, he leans back in his chair, “contended as a cow,” not knowing that what he is seeing is an expert performance where Charlotte plays the part of the perfect wife in order to create the illusion of a ‘typical’ domestic woman (52). She uses the stereotypes of the perfect mother, the “angel in the house,” in order to hide her criminal background. As a serial killer, Charlotte is as proficient in maintaining appearances as she efficient in the act of killing. John Douglas explains that most offenders “display changes of behavior after the first killings which would be noticeable to those around him” (1997, 51). Yet this vicious murderer shows no visible signs of guilt nor does she leave any clues to her crimes. In spite of the aggressive nature of Charlotte’s crimes and her suggestive last name, “Manning,” she remains very feminine, a “goddess” to the end of the novella (146). Charlotte hides her sadistic intentions with her feminine beauty and domesticity. In a seemingly normative scene from I, the Jury, Mike Hammer encounters Charlotte Manning in the local park pushing a baby carriage. Charlotte was not simply on a stroll in the park, she “wav[ed] her hand frantically to catch [Mike’s] attention” so that he could see her playing the part of a mother (83). Charlotte actually borrows motherhood from a friend by taking her baby and displaying her potential as a mother in

41 order to entrance Mike. The sight of Charlotte with the child sets their conversation on marriage and the possibility of having children together in the future. Charlotte uses conventions of marriage and children to continue to cement in Mike’s head the vision of her domesticity. Mike remarks that Charlotte expertly manipulated him and everyone else into believing her a ‘good’ person based on her perceived domesticity: “The play was perfect, and she wrote, directed and acted all the parts. The timing was exact, the strength and character she put into every moment, every expression, every word was a crazy impossibility of perfection” (Spillane 14). Charlotte’s studied depiction of the domestic mother and housewife is not simply an attempt to conceal her criminality but a method of seducing Mike Hammer, the man sworn to uncover the truth. By manipulating Mike, Charlotte inserts herself into his investigation so that she is aware of his findings and, if need be, able to destroy anyone who might reveal her true identity. John Douglas explains that a serial killer would “closely follow the news of the investigation,” not only to remained informed of the police investigation, but to relive the powerful moment when they killed (51). Whether or not Charlotte gained pleasure from her killing spree, she invaded Mike’s personal life in order to protect her agenda and influence his investigation. As a criminal, Charlotte manages to conceal her identity and cover her crimes with professional expertise. According to John Douglas’s analyses of serial killers, most murders are precipitated by an event in the killer’s life which inspires them to begin his or her killing spree. In this way, the first crime, as we noted previously, becomes the most important because it can help elucidate the modus operandi of the killer. Charlotte and her psychiatric practice are not linked to Jack Williams’ murder throughout Mike’s long and tedious investigation. Charlotte, however, maintains her position and her personality without displaying her criminal actions. As was discussed in Chapter One, Charlotte’s ability to compartmentalize her life made her a successful serial killer. No one is cognizant of her true identity because the murders do not consume Charlotte. Because most serial killers are motivated by sexual sadism and inferiority complexes, their behavior changes as they become more elated or become disrupted by guilt. A seemingly endless trail of pointless leads obscure the motives behind Charlotte’s crimes. Another method that criminal profilers use to locate offenders is victimology, which is the practice of asking who the victims are, how they are chosen and how the crimes are carried out. The bodies that accumulate in I, the Jury seem to be linked through Mike’s interrogation

42 tactics rather than to Charlotte. After Mike interrogates (with his fist) George Kalecki and Hal Kines, they are killed by Charlotte. All of her victims are killed to cover her leadership in a lucrative heroin ring, which Jack Williams was on the verge of uncovering. Charlotte’s victims, then, are killed because of their knowledge, usually with a gun. Jack is a police officer, his fiancé Myrna is a recovering heroin addict who is killed after she accidently puts on Charlotte’s coat and discovers heroin in the pocket and Hal Kines is a low-life drug peddler. The victims, when arranged by their jobs and/or their involvement in the heroin ring, point to a killer who is attempting to protect themselves from exposure. James Fox and Jack Levin claim in Extreme Killing that “Many serial killers have slaughtered scores of innocent people by viewing them as worthless and expendable,” a process known as “dehumanization” (68). Other than police officer Jack Williams, Charlotte’s victims are drug pushers, prostitutes and addicts, people that she believed to be disposable. Charlotte’s position in society keeps Mike from making the connection between her and the ‘dregs’ whom she murders. Indeed, Charlotte’s professional position as a psychiatrist seems forward in such a conservative society. Mike Charlotte’s profession for turning her into a killer. When confronting her about her crimes, he declares, “Your profession started it. Oh, you made money enough, but not enough. You are a woman who wanted wealth and power. Not to use it extravagantly, but just to have it” (141). According to Spillane enthusiast, Alexander Howe, “increasingly throughout the 1940s and beyond, psychoanalysis (or psychiatry more generally) becomes a stock figure of sinister forces that limit the independence of the detective, that threaten his very being-an anxiety that is entirely warranted” (Howe 5). Even the murder of Mike’s friend Jack became a psychological study. As opposed to most serial killers who destroy for the thrill, which is usually sexually oriented, Charlotte watches Jack die in order to conduct a study of “a man facing death” (Spillane 1947, 143). Charlotte emasculates Jack by slowly pulling her chair away from the dying man as he crawls across the floor towards her in his last agonizing moments. This type of sadistic satisfaction is not comparable to the sexualized killings of most male mass murderers, yet it is indicative of a sociopathic nature. In fact, Charlotte’s profession as a psychiatrist put her at an advantage over most serial killers and over Mike because of her knowledge of what men want, how to please them and how to hide her own sociopathic tendencies.

43 Charlotte manages to captivate the attention of Mike far after he realizes she is the murderer. Even as he holds a gun to her, he is entranced by her exquisite beauty. She slowly removes her clothing, hoping he will be distracted long enough for her to reach her gun. The words in which he describes her are not simply ; he is making a final homage to the most beautiful woman that he has every known: “If it were anyone but me they’d never have known she was acting. Christ, she was good! There was no one like her” (Spillane 140). Her feminine beauty is the tool that she uses to hide her criminality and she attempts to take advantage of her superb good looks one last time. Hammer, a killer himself, sentences her to death and pulls the trigger. The famous last lines of the novel are an attempt to regain the masculinity that Mike had lost to Charlotte. “How c-could you?” she gasped. “It was easy,” Mike answered (147). Charlotte’s death, unlike the presumed imprisonment of Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and Julie Killeen in The Bride Wore Black, is evident of the increasing need for the destruction of the femme fatale in order to reconstitute the detective’s power. The vixens of noir were similar not only in their appearance, but also in their fates. Many critics argue that the death of the femme fatale shows the punishment that society inflicts on women who step out of line. Thus, pulps with femme fatales are often deemed ineffective as a feminist tool because the death of the woman destroys her power and reinforces patriarchy. Charlotte’s death at the end of I, The Jury, is a judgment against a woman who dared to outsmart a man. However, the death of the femme fatale marks not her futility, but shows the paranoia of a male society. Although her life is destroyed, the femme fatale created enough of a disruption in male society that she had to be stopped. The novels of Mickey Spillane show Mike Hammer consumed by his preoccupation with Charlotte long after he kills her. According to Howe, Mike Hammer was attracted “to strong, powerful women, and Charlotte is such a woman, as her manly strength, libido, and, of course, name attest” (9). In subsequent novels, the memory of what he did to Charlotte haunts Mike. We will thus examine more fully Mike’s neurosis as an instance of male anxiety in Chapter Three, “Complicated Masculinity.” Charlotte Manning is the definitive example of a powerful femme fatale. Unlike her predecessors Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Julie Killeen, Charlotte commits her vicious crimes with her own hands and with a precision that rivals the most deliberate of male serial killers. This is what makes the character of Charlotte Manning so significant: she is a more ideal serial killer than the group to whom mass murdering is attributed to. John Douglas, in all of his books,

44 contends that “virtually all multiple killers are male” because women would rather hurt themselves than hurt others (40). This assumption that women are passive and emotion beings who do not wish to inflict pain on others is based on historical notions of women’s inherently ‘motherly instincts’. During a time when emphasis on domesticity was so ubiquitous, Charlotte Manning, as the femme fatale, created a new space for women that was dangerous to the authority and ideals of masculinity. However, just as Charlotte enters and creates this space, the femme fatale’s power becomes watered down in an hegemonic leveling that returns the detective to power and the femme fatale to her domestic role. Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye (1953) features the intelligent tough-guy, Phillip Marlowe, who investigates the death of his acquaintance, Terry Lennox’s wife Sylvia. The crime is brutal, “the dame is as naked as a mermaid on the bed and let me tell you [the butler] don’t recognize her by her face. She practically ain’t got one” (40). Lenox had just escaped to Mexico, aided by Marlowe, where he is apparently killed in a shoot-out with the police. Terry Lennox is blamed for the murder of his wife and the police consider the case closed. Marlowe, however, cannot stop thinking about the case until he is hired by a beautiful woman, Eileen Wade, to come protect her alcoholic husband, the sub-par novelist Roger Wade. Eileen epitomizes the domestic housewife. She is beautiful, passive and apparently devoted to her husband. When Roger goes missing, she begs Marlowe to find him, even though he is, when drunk, sometimes violent towards her. She tells Marlowe, “I love my husband, Mr. Marlowe. I’d so anything in the world to help him” (108). Eileen’s ability to embody the idealized domestic housewife helps her remain free of culpability as Marlowe begins his investigations into their household. After her husband apparently commits suicide later in the novel, Marlowe accuses Eileen and she confesses to his death and the death of Sylvia in a letter. It seems that Eileen’s death is a welcome one, which led Geoffrey Hartmann to claim that Chandler participated “In conventional woman hating” (220). This comment seems significant when considering Gene Phillips’ statistic: “The female murderers outnumber the male killers in Chandler’s stories and novels by a wide margin” (17). The lovely and lady-like Eileen is also seen as deceptive and manipulative. When Eileen first meets Marlowe she asks him about his involvement with Terry Lennox. Although Marlowe, knows that Roger Wade had an ongoing affair with the murdered Sylvia Lennox, he thinks that Eileen was simply trying to elicit information from him to protect her husband. Eileen, like Charlotte Manning, wished to keep

45 Marlowe close to her so she would know the details of his investigation. Her careful planning and perfect image helped her evade detection, but she wanted to make sure that she would not be suspected of killing Sylvia. After her husband is put to bed in a drunken rage, Eileen calls Marlowe to her bedroom, where she removes her clothing and leaps into his arms. Marlowe responds, as many men would, to this fierce and enticing beauty: “I was as erotic as a stallion,” but is interrupted by the houseboy before he can consummate the relationship (213). Eileen claims later that she was in a state of shock and mistook Marlowe for her first love, who dies in the war. This indicates that Eileen initiated the rendezvous with Marlowe in order incite his sympathy and create an attachment. However, the story of her first love is true and the man that she loves just happened to be Terry Lennox. When Eileen discovers that Terry was married to Sylvia, she becomes enraged yet disdainful because of Sylvia’s known promiscuity. This becomes her motive for committing homicide. The novel takes a sudden twist with the apparent suicide of Roger Wade. Marlowe is angry and assumes that Eileen will not care that Wade is dead, however, when he informs her, she rushes to his room: “She was kneeling beside the couch with his head pulled against her breast, smearing herself with his blood” (257). Eileen expertly acts the part of the desperate, shocked wife: “She was rocking back and forth on her knees as far as she could, holding him tight” (257). When the police come to investigate, Eileen accuses Marlowe of killing her husband, declaring, “I think this man murdered him” (258). Marlowe confronts Eileen in front of her attorney, Mr. Spencer, and informs her that she is a suspicious figure to the police. Eileen explains that her husband killed Sylvia Lennox when he was drunk and that she had to clean up after him. Eileen tried to justify her fear of her husband to Spencer and Marlowe, claiming, “I was terribly afraid…I was living in the house with a murderer who might be a maniac” (310). As she continued to try to elicit sympathy as the wronged wife who simply tried to protect her husband, Marlowe manages to catch her in a lie. In an effort to apparently conceal her husband’s crime, Eileen threw a suitcase filled with bloody clothes into the Chatsworth Reservoir. Marlowe asks her how she managed to throw the suitcase over the high fence and Eileen answered, “somehow or other I did it,” to which Marlowe answered, “there isn’t any fence” (313). Caught her in her lie, Eileen left the room angrily and Marlowe explains, “She killed them both” (313). Hours later, Eileen is found dead in her bedroom from an overdose of

46 sleeping pills. Rather than give a jury the satisfaction of charging her with her crimes, she leaves the world on her own terms. After Eileen’s death, Marlowe and police detective Bernie Ohls try to piece together what has happened. The District Attorney arrives and informs them both, “I’ve read that purported confession and I don’t believe a word of it” (322). Even after proof is shown of her guilt, including her own confession letter, the D.A. refuses to believe that Eileen is guilty. Marlowe accuses the D.A. of being afraid to admit that Terry Lennox was innocent. Ohls informs Marlowe that Wade never threw Eileen down the stairs and Marlowe questions why he was ever hired. Ohls explains, “You were the loose end. She wanted to milk you and she had the charm to use, and a situation ready-made for an excuse to get next to you. And if she needed a fall guy, you were it. You might say she was collecting fall guys” (324). Marlowe refutes this idea, claiming, “You’re imputing too much knowledge to her” (324). The novel ends with Marlowe having outsmarted Eileen and her memory regulated to a woman who does not have enough “knowledge” to commit such well-planned crimes. By exposing Eileen’s criminality, Marlowe places him and the hard-boiled detective in general, back into a position of power. Eileen and Marlowe’s relationship echoes the antagonism between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Gene Phillips argues in his book Creatures of Darkness that “Eileen’s tragic relationships with both Terry and Roger make The Long Goodbye domestic tragedy, a melancholy meditation of life and loss among the idle rich” (146). This characterization of the novel as a “domestic tragedy” reminds readers that Eileen did not go out of her prescribed domestic sphere to commit these crimes. In fact, Chandler does not allow Eileen Wade the ability to outsmart his detective for as long or as effectively as Charlotte Manning outsmarted Mike Hammer. This return to the emphasis on the private-eye’s ability to outwit the femme fatale marks the return to pre-Spillane hard-boiled detective novels. From the perfect crimes of Mickey Spillane’s Charlotte Manning to the domestic murders of Raymond Chandler’s Eileen Wade, the femme fatale enters into a hegemonic leveling in which men return to power. Although Eileen’s first murder of Sylvia Lennox was well executed, she did not contain the cold rational methodology of Charlotte that kept her from committing more crimes unnecessarily. Indeed, it was Eileen’s vanity and pride that reveals her criminality. By hiring Marlowe, whom she thought she could manipulate and seduce, Eileen brings about her own downfall. Marlowe is far too intelligent and perceptive to be completely taken in by her

47 charms. This is where the significance of the detective becomes so apparent; the detective’s anxiety, produced by the femme fatale, often causes him to overlook her criminality to the detriment of his own hard-boiled masculinity. The female serial killer’s sophisticated concealment of her crimes in the hard-boiled detective novels of the 1940s and 1950s sets her apart from the more vicious and sexually motivated killings seen in the murders of male serial killer. Her value lies in her ability to be duplicitous, yet this skill is what elicits fear from the American public. A femme fatale evokes fear and desire and it is these conflating passions that make her dangerous. It is not that the crimes are necessary always perfect; it is that her crimes do not seem to affect her psyche. In my analysis of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, I claim that while Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a good actress and an accomplished liar, she does not have the aggressivity required to commit multiple cold-blooded and deliberate murders on her own. Her destruction of Sam Spade’s partner Miles Archer is the only crime that she commits without the aide of a strong masculine figure. Brigid’s power comes from her ability to manipulate men, yet it is only feeble-minded men who are weak when confronted with beauty who are able to fall under her influence. Spade, however, easily discerns Brigid’s duplicitous nature and, in the end, he “sends her over” to prison without qualm or question. The novel ends with Spade being little changed; his power and influence remaining constant throughout the story. This novel sets the hard-boiled detective up as being almost omniscient and the fatal woman as ineffective. While The Maltese Falcon continues to be a classic of the hard-boiled genre and Brigid O’Shaughnessy the fatal woman in the text, I contend that she does not fit the parameters necessary to qualify her as a femme fatale. The femme fatale is not simply a murderous woman; she incites fear in the hearts and minds of men. Sam Spade is not afraid of her because he contains the knowledge of her guilt. Because Brigid can not effectively disguise her criminality, she does not frighten the male readership because they, like Spade, can see through her meager methods of masquerade. Brigid O’Shaughnessy is dangerous to the weak- minded and the easily manipulated, but she remains visible to the discerning detective and reader. This 1929 version of the American fatal woman existed prior to the mass entrance of women into the workforce that occurred during World War II. Thus, the “crisis of masculinity” of the 1950s that James Gilbert references has not yet occurred, and the ascribed gender

48 definitions of women as passive remain intact. The link between women and passivity is challenged in 1940 when Cornell Woolrich had published his novel, The Bride Wore Black. Julie Killeen, the vicious female murderer of The Bride Wore Black, is aggressive and efficient at her crimes, yet because she makes an error in judgment, she lacks the deliberation that the femme fatale embodies. Julie conceals her crimes by presenting herself as a new character to every victim. Because we are not given details about what her life is like between the crimes she commits, we do not know how these murders affect her psychologically, but she is devastated by the realization of her victim’s innocence at the end of the text. As a fatal woman, she evokes fear in male readers who see her victims as normal men, unable to see through her perfect guise. However, the fear does not come from visualizing her stalking a male victim, but the idea that she could mistakenly murder them. Thus, Julie Killeen fits the description of femme fatale because of her violent, efficient perpetration of murder, but she is denied satisfaction or peace due to her incorrect assertions. Although Julie Killeen had committed her crimes successfully, all of them took place in a domestic space where she could perform a specific role. It is not until Mickey Spillane’s femme fatale Charlotte Manning that we see the femme fatale become part of spaces of power generally attributed to men. The prolific murders of Charlotte Manning in Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, marks the entrance of the femme fatale into the masculinized criminal world in a position of leadership and not simply as a man’s assistant or tool. Charlotte Manning’s murders occur outside of the domestic space and in conjunction with a crime ring that had stymied police investigations. When in the act of committing her violent crimes, Charlotte occupies a significantly male space by firing bullets out of a moving car or by crouching in yard as a sniper. It is her knowledge of guns and military technology that evokes genuine fear in readers and confounds the hard-boiled detective. Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, while a classic hard-boiled novel, does not contain the emphatically dangerous femme fatale of Spillane’s work. Eileen Wade, while a proficient actress and intelligent murderess, does not mark a departure from earlier, pre-Spillane characterizations of the fatal woman except in her evident connection to an aristocratic lifestyle. Eileen is not dangerous in the gun moll tradition of Charlotte Manning, yet there is something frightening about her hatred for her first husband Lennox’s new wife. Again, we have a return to the domestic murders.

49 I have argued that the femme fatale in the late 1940s and 1950s hard-boiled novels, epitomized in Charlotte Manning, creates a new role for women through her substantial participation in crime. It is not just that the femme fatale is a criminal or that she commits murder that makes her powerful; it is that she evokes fear and causes a crisis in the mind of the hard-boiled detective. It is through the act of murder that the femme fatale also proves that science is incorrect in its assumptions about women and crime in general. Thus, the femme fatale defies gender expectations and disrupts the alleged facts of science. This is what makes the femme fatale powerful, transgressive, progressive and dangerous. She does not simply evade detection; she proves that the science of detection itself is not equipped to explain her criminality.

50 CHAPTER THREE: COMPLICATED MASCULINITY

The late 1940’s and 1950’s in America marked a great social change in gender relations. During World War II women had performed the jobs usually ascribed to men with equal fortitude and ability. As the war came to a close and the soldiers returned home, they found that their jobs had been easily filled by women, a fact that put into question the prevailing ideas about how men and women do work. Women were encouraged to leave their jobs or, according to James Gilbert, “forced out of the factory and into the home” (1981, 57). Meanwhile, the returning soldiers recognized a hesitance on the part of some women to submit themselves to their husband’s rule, while the government dealt with the reality that “most female workers hoped to stay on the job” (Gilbert 1981, 15). According to a 1946 survey by the Federal Women’s Bureau, “About 75 percent of the interviewees intended to continue working, and of these, about 86 percent wanted to retain their current positions” (Gilbert 1981, 15). Many of the men returned from the war physically maimed or psychologically disturbed which severely affected the sense of masculinity in America. The fact that many women were able to perform the jobs of men while they were gone marked the shift of gender roles; women were performing historically masculine tasks with ease, while men were suffering from hysteria from their physical and emotional wounds. In the end, the government had to step in to enact the G.I. Bill, which ensured returning war veterans the rights to jobs and securities (Gilbert, 1981, 23). The bill eventually forced women back into the home, yet did nothing to assuage the antagonism between the sexes. In the hard-boiled detective novels of the late 1940s and 1950s, male and female characters aggressively struggle for power, while attempting to remain in their socially- constructed gender roles. As we have seen in Chapter Two, the femme fatale played the perfect wife/mother who concealed her true identity as a killer. Her masculine alter-ego, the detective, also existed in a state of masquerade as the former soldier who attempted to regain his masculinity after the harshness of war by becoming a private citizen/private eye. Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury was once a soldier who fought in Japan during World War II (Spillane 5). Persistent struggle occurs when both the man and the woman are in character as the ‘good,’ passive woman and the hard, aggressive private eye, yet the true

51 battle is raging under the surface. The bloody and beaten ex-soldier tries to regain the power that he had prior to the war, while the vicious female has force that defies gender expectations. The emasculation of men and the masculinization of women becomes the focus of these novels in which gender roles become complicated and interdependent if not entirely confused. While the tendency in hard-boiled detective fiction appears to idealize masculine aggression, the detective’s masculinity is troubled when faced with the femme fatale who is acting contrary to normative gender roles. The hard-boiled detective fiction from the late 1940s and 1950s was an indicator of male anxiety stemming from the threat of the femme fatale. Historically, hysteria has been an affliction linked to the female sex because of the literal connection to the womb. In her article “Male Hysteria,” Ursula Link-Heer claims that “as long as the affliction of hysteria has been acknowledged, it has been defined as feminine” (196). As psychoanalysis developed as a science, the seat of hysteria moved from the female genitalia to the nervous system. However, women remained the center of discourses on hysteria, as French psychoanalyst Gerard Wajcman claims in his text, Le maitre et l’hysterique, “Woman is destined to feel, and feeling is almost identical to hysteria: man, on the other hand, is destined to act. He must suffer the drawbacks of having to act” (201). The association of passivity and feeling with woman and action with men is destabilized in the literature of the hard-boiled detective novels of the late 1940s and 1950s. While the previous chapter focused on the development of the femme fatale into a serial killer who redefined notions of femininity and psychosis, this chapter on the hard-boiled detective will examine the correlation between the remorseless female serial killer and the penitent male murderer who becomes subsumed with the reality of his crime. I will analyze Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), to make a contrast between the femme fatale and the psychopathology of the male murderer. Highsmith’s novel begins on a train where architect Guy Haines meets a young and wealthy drunk named Charles Bruno. Haines is traveling to get a divorce from his estranged wife Miriam , which he reveals to Bruno after a discussion regarding Bruno’s hatred for his father. Bruno drunkenly exclaims, “What an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis!” (28). Although Guy refuses to be a part of the caper, Bruno murders Miriam while Guy is vacationing in Mexico. After a brief period Bruno begins to hound Guy to return the favor. The pressure from Bruno culminates in

52 blackmail, and Guy finally commits the murder. After the murders go unsolved by the police, Bruno cannot resist trying to pursue a relationship with Guy although contact was against his initial plan. Meanwhile, Guy suffers from remorse and depression stemming from Bruno’s psychotic obsession with him and his life. The relationship that develops between these two men is both “homoerotic” and neurotic, according to Noel Mawer in her critical assessment of Highsmith’s novels. There is an “obvious homosexual attachment” between Bruno and Guy, just as there is in many of Highsmith’s novels (280). Both become obsessed with each other and are tied due to the blood on their hands. Neither men are able to live with their crimes and both succumb to destructive behavior. Although Highsmith’s work does not place her within the hard-boiled detective genre, her novels were immensely popular during the 1950s as works of mystery and psychological thrillers. Strangers on a Train highlights the typical process the male killer experiences in response to his crimes. Mickey Spillane’s hyper-masculine detective, Mike Hammer, appears to be the epitome of the hard-boiled private eye. However, after he kills his fiancé and femme fatale Charlotte Manning in I, the Jury (1947), he is subsumed with guilt. In Spillane’s 1950 novella, Vengeance is Mine!, Hammer is haunted by the memory of Charlotte and the relentless feeling that he might have made a mistake. The story takes place two years after Hammer murders Charlotte in an act of revenge for killing his best friend, Jack Williams. Hammer is framed for a murder, and although his license to carry a gun is taken away, he begins a frenzied and clumsy search for the real killer. Through his investigations he becomes involved with a beautiful and powerful modeling agent, Juno Reeves, a woman who looks strikingly like Charlotte. Hammer never feels comfortable around Juno, especially when the light causes her tawny hair to look like Charlotte’s golden locks: “In that brief second I looked at her the light filtered through her hair again and reflected the sheen of gold. My whole head rocked with the fire and pain in my chest and I felt Charlotte’s name trying to force itself past my lips” (409). By the end of the novel Mike reveals why his feelings toward Juno are founded: “Juno was a man!” (513). Vengeance is Mine will provide a backdrop to discuss the male detective’s anxiety of the femme fatale in the hard-boiled genre and the effect that his violent lifestyle has on his psyche. Both of these novels detract from Wajcman’s idea that women are often overcome with feelings while men are more active. Highsmith’s male characters, Guy Haines and Charles Bruno, are unable to sustain normative

53 patterns of behavior after they engage in murder. Spillane’s Mike Hammer is subsumed by guilt and grief over the death of his love Charlotte Manning after he kills her. These novels call into question the primordial assumptions about masculinity and aggression while examining methods of crime and concealment. In his book, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950’s, James Gilbert argues that during the 1950s, masculinity became “increasingly defined in terms of mass culture and celebrity icons” even though in popular culture, the “presentations of manliness that are unattainable for most individuals even if they are considered to be aspirational heroes” (16). Heroes emerged in popular culture, like James Dean, Marlon Brando and John Wayne, who were supposed to be the full embodiment of masculinity. The hard-boiled detective became an everyday example of masculinity in the United States. Gilbert claims that in this decade an obsession with hyper-masculinity developed in reaction to the apparent “feminization” of the American workplace and social consciousness (3). While the 1950s is often remembered as a time that promoted “family culture”, a crisis of masculinity occurred in the American home (Gilbert 1981, 55). According to Gilbert, the crisis of masculinity was the “moment when observers [began] to notice that assumptions about masculinity and expected male behavior [were] being undercut by circumstance and social and psychological changes” (16). Men became concerned with reconnecting their masculinity “outside of, or in defiance of, threatening changes in work or family relationships” (Gilbert 3). The hard-boiled detective novel became a source of inspiration for men who aspired to be like the heroes of film, but did not have the looks or, perhaps, the social status. According to Erin Smith’s Hard-Boiled: Working-class Readers and Pulp Magazines, “Pulp fiction was read by white, working-class men who were preoccupied with manliness, finding skilled and remunerative work, and the “” increasingly necessary for social advancement (10). As the percentage of women in the workplace , a large majority of men became concerned about their role as breadwinner and patriarch. Gilbert claims, “What made this period so animated was, in fact, a real conflict between an assumed norm of masculinity and new forms of masculinity based upon notions of companionship and cooperation within the family and workplace” (3). The realization of a partnership in marriage rather than patriarchy occurred as women became part of the labor force. To some, the heroine suddenly replaced the hero. Thus,

54 men turned to heroes in mythology, literature, sports, and so on, to find examples of ‘the cult of true masculinity.’ As Gilbert contends, In the 1950s, there was an enormous popular and professional literature on gender, either openly directed to concepts of masculinity or sometimes imbedded in discussions only thinly disguised by the invocation of the generic “man” when the subject was quite clearly just men (2). Although the tenants of masculinity were threatened on the home front, American men could still find solace in the novels that promoted male dominance. How does the hyper-masculinity of the hard-boiled detective novels affect the construction of the aggressive nature of the femme fatale? The exaggerated physicality of Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer creates a supposedly dichotomous relationship with the soft, sweet and supple female criminals Charlotte and Eileen.14 Because the men are so hyper-masculinized, it makes the femininity of Charlotte and Eileen seem exaggerated as well. So why would a genre so dedicated to creating hard- boiled, ultra-masculine male protagonist have the hero of the novel outwitted by a woman? The hyper-masculine texts of the 1950s were a reaction to the growing number of women in the workforce.15 The defining traits of masculinity are often reduced to physical attributes, aggressive behavior and deliberate decision making. When faced with the femme fatale, however, men become threatened because she embodies the traits, like aggressiveness and deliberation, which are usually attributed to men. The nervous condition exhibited by Guy Haines and Charles Bruno in Strangers on a Train and Mike Hammer in Vengeance is Mine suggests a lack of deliberation that delineates the idealized image of masculinity. The following close readings of Highsmith and Spillane’s texts will focus on the manner which these men follow the set patterns of behavior indicative of a serial killer. In the introduction I examined the ways in which women committed crimes as opposed to the expectations made throughout history as to how women behave. Profilers of serial killers often cite the most common connective tissue between perpetrators to be presence of the

14 Spillane, Mickey. I, the Jury. Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. 15 Breu, Christopher. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Gilbert, James. Another Chance: Postwar American, 1945- 1968.

55 “homicidal triad” in the killer’s childhood or adolescence, which includes “enuresis – or bed wetting,” “starting fires,” and “cruelty to animals” (Douglas 36). John Douglas has enumerated numerous times that “virtually all multiple killers are male” (40).16 In all of Douglas’s works, he profiles crimes that are sexually based, which would certainly indicate a male slayer. The female killer commits mass murder for financial gain or security; she does not resort to the type of sexually frenzied attack indicative of the male serial killer. However, she does, in most cases, use the weapons that are considered masculine, the phallic gun and knife. Indeed, after examining most contemporary texts of serial killers, be that in books, film, television, etc., one would come to the conclusion that all multiple killers kill for sexual satisfaction or are so-called lust killers. Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), marks a different type of detective novel. The killers in this case are both men, and their crimes are committed in order to keep the other from coming under suspicion. Atypical of textbook male serial killers, Highsmith’s characters commit murder passively and in response to fear. Guy Haines, a twenty eight year old up-and-coming architect, is traveling on a train to his home town of Metcalf to see his separated wife about getting a divorce. While on the train, he meets Charles Anthony Bruno, a twenty five year old wealthy young man whose father has kept him from gaining access to his inheritance; an intrusion that enrages Bruno. As the men talk and drink, Bruno interrogates Guy about his estranged wife, Miriam, who is pregnant with another man’s child. Miriam emasculates Guy and makes him a cuckold, which incites Bruno’s sympathy. It becomes evident that Bruno has a distinct hatred for women, even though he worships his mother. Although the men have just met, there is a strange chemistry between the two of them, marked by Bruno’s idealization of Guy, who is self-sufficient and self-made, traits that do not apply to Bruno. As Noel Mawer notes, “Bruno has a weak sense of identity, leading him to fix on another man with whom he will become one” (68). Guy, flattered yet disgusted by Bruno’s advances, sees in Bruno a young man who is in search of someone to look up to, hungry for approval and in need of a friend. Bruno, perhaps emboldened from the copious amounts of Scotch he has drunk, analyzes Guy immediately. Indeed, Guy felt a connection with Bruno and told him many intimate details about his life, although he could not understand why: “He grew happy as he talked, and tears of excitement came to his eyes, though he kept his voice low. How could he

16 Co-authored with Mark Olshaker, these books include Anatomy of Motive, Journey Into Darkness

56 talk to intimately to Bruno, he wondered, reveal the very best of himself? Who was less likely to understand than Bruno?” (26). The tension between Guy’s attachment to Bruno and his subsequent hatred of him continues throughout the novel, adding to the hysteria that arises from the relationship. When Bruno sets upon his murderous path to kill Guy’s wife Miriam, he does so with no concrete plan and no attempt to hide his identity. Finding Miriam at a local fair, Bruno watches her interact with her friends, singing along with them and drinking from his flask. When she and another man alighted into a rowboat to journey to a small nearby island, Bruno followed and tried to decide how to kill her. There was a knife in his pocket and as he watched her, he felt disgusted at the idea of having to touch “her soft sticky-warm flesh” (77). Finally, he grabbed her when she walked a short distance from her friends and strangled her. Carelessly wiping away her spit from his hand, he flung down his handkerchief, but remembered that it might get linked to him and picked it up: “He was thinking! He felt great! It was done!” (81). After committing the crime and making his escape, Bruno felt emboldened and powerful, which initiated a desire for sexual satisfaction: “He wanted a woman more than ever before in his life, and that he did pleased him prodigiously” (83). Bruno’s hatred for women fulfilled by his murder allowed him the ability to copulate with one. Male serial killers are often marked by contempt for women because of their own ineffectiveness. As John Douglas remarks, “virtually all serial murderers are sexually based,” which is perhaps the reason that so many of these types of attacks are disorganized (39). Because the sexual desires of the male serial killer call for violent gratification, the perpetrator often becomes irreducibly focused on the sexual act rather than concealing their deed. Although Bruno’s plan for the perfect crime called for no interaction between the men, he could not stop himself from fantasizing about their relationship. Bruno called Guy and sent him letters on numerous occasions, trying to keep open the line of communication: “The one thing Bruno needed to make his happiness complete was to hear Guy’s voice, to have a word from him saying he was happy. The bond between Guy and him was now closer than brotherhood” (108). Mawer notes, “Bruno has a weak sense of identity, leading him to fix on another man with whom he will become one” (68). The satisfaction that Bruno had received came from imaging how happy Guy was now that he had released him from his bonds with Miriam. Bruno fixates on Guy’s approval of his deed and envisions their friendship as proof of their superiority.

57 The relationship between Bruno and Guy, although, in reality, slight from their brief meeting aboard the trail, became strained after Bruno admitted to Guy that he had killed Miriam. As Mawer claims, “In murdering Miriam, Bruno was simply fulfilling Guy’s unstated wish, acting as an extension of Guy. It was the Bruno part of him that strangled Miriam” (72). Mawer’s assertion would explain why Guy feels guilt for Bruno’s deed and disgust for the man himself. Upon receiving a letter from Guy, which stated that he did not wish to pursue a friendship with him, Bruno “began to cry” (111). Bruno continued to deteriorate as his attempts to see and talk with Guy became more frantic. His need for reassurance from Guy was eating away at him. After more fevered attempts at a meeting, Bruno became enraged: …He hated Guy! He had killed for him, dodged police for him, kept quiet when he asked him to, fallen in the stinking water for him, and Guy didn’t even want to see him! Guy spent his time with a girl! Guy wasn’t scared or unhappy, just didn’t have time for him! (121). As Bruno discovered that Guy was in a serious relationship with a woman named Anne when he killed Miriam, Bruno felt more than betrayed: he felt that he was used. Though Bruno remained upset about Guy’s reaction to him, he continued, usually in a drunken stupor, to fantasize about their friendship. After killing Miriam, Bruno could not keep himself from going back over the experience of taking a life. He also could not control his desires to talk to and about Guy. He kept newspaper clippings, something that John Douglas claimed serial killers often do: “he would also closely follow the news of the investigation” (Douglas 51). Bruno’s clippings of the newspapers reports on Miriam’s death brought him satisfaction. He kept them strewn about on his bed, waiting for someone to ask about them. His mother noticed the clips and asked in an offhand manner about Guy; Bruno was pleased to talk about him, “he liked to say Guy’s name” (104). As his mother dressed and her interest in the murder case dissipated, Bruno became upset and exclaimed, “Ma, you’re not interested in my friend” (105). Later when his elderly grandmother came into his room, she asked him playfully if he planned to put his clippings in a scrapbook, but she did not ask what they were of: “She was looking at him, and Bruno wanted her to look at the clippings” (110). These visible reminders of the moment of power which Bruno felt when he took Miriam’s life. The problem for Bruno lies in the secrecy of such a deed.

58 After dealing with Bruno’s constant calls and attempts at meetings, Guy finally agreed to meet with him at a bar. Their conversation was more like a lover’s quarrel than an argument between two acquaintances. Guy threatens to take Bruno to the police, but Bruno asks him why he did not do so in Metcalf: “Oddly, Guy felt his inner voice had asked him the question in the same way” (123). Mawer claims that this “Mak[es] Bruno that very inner voice, intimating the identity of Bruno and Guy” (71). Although he does not know why, Guy cannot bring himself to give up Bruno. As Bruno attempts a reconciliation, “he pushed his hand flat across the table towards Guy, then closed it in a fist” (123). The image of Bruno’s hand sliding across the table is reminiscent of a lover trying to entice his lover to reach out for his hand. Mawer agrees, “The most pervasive of the feelings Bruno has for Guy is that of a lover” (74). The conversation between the two ends when Bruno informs Guy that he must kill his father or he will turn Guy in to the police. When Guy sees Bruno next, he runs and hops into a taxi before they can talk. As the cab pulls away, Guy feels shameful for having run from Bruno, noting that there had been a “certain dignity that had up to then been intact” (125). Although Guy hated the sight of Bruno, “he wished he had said something” to him and had “faced him for an instant” (125). The relationship between the men is based on fear and hatred, but also an uncontrollable curiosity to see what the other would do next. Both Guy and Bruno exhibit behaviors typical of serial killers after they commit their assorted crimes. According to John Douglas, offenders display changes of behavior that are visible to people around them. These include: “heavier reliance of alcohol or drugs, change in sleeping or eating habits, weight loss, anxiety, more eagerness to associate with others” (Journey into Darkness 51). Although Bruno had always been an alcoholic, his abuse rose after the murders, to the point that he was pronounced near death by a physician. Guy also suffered from the stress and guilt of his crimes. He found himself unable to work or interact with others. Guy however, feels extreme guilt. Mawer explains, “Guy is not a failure; and Guy doesn’t find his since of worthlessness diminish when he kills someone” (77). Bruno, however, is a drunk and a failure, thus, like a typical sociopath; killing Miriam enables him to feel power. Mawer continues, “The empty sociopath needs someone or something – even the act of committing a murder – to give him substance, to give him an identity” (77). Guy’s new wife Anne was aware of his depression, something which he feels acutely. He imagined that everyone he met would know he had killed a man and judge him accordingly: “They must know something is the

59 matter, he felt. Everyone in the world must know. He was only somehow being reprieved, being saved for some weight to fall on him and annihilate him” (192). This fear of final retribution permeates his outer demeanor and when the private investigator, Gerard, is asked about Guy, he answers, “The man is tortured with guilt” while making a “disdainful sound in his throat” (261). The visibility of Guy’s feelings of guilt makes him an obvious suspect and by the end of the novel, Guy confesses to Gerard. Strangers on a Train, Highsmith’s first novel, culminates with the death of Bruno and the knowledge that Guy will go to jail, probably to be hung. These two men, whose fate is inextricably linked, do not survive without the other. The connection between Guy and Bruno is cemented through the act of murder. Mawer claims that “[Guy] finds the evil he fears of himself personified in Bruno, but is unable to see Bruno as separate from himself” (90). While I agree with Mawer that Bruno does embody part of Guy that he tries so desperately to suppress, I will argue instead that their bond stems from their acts of murder. Jack Levin and James Alan Fox claim that, for partners in crime, “the chemistry of their association together provid[es] the necessary catalyst for turning them into serial killers” (74). While both men might have continued to live crime-free lives on their own, their association created the milieu in committing murder was acceptable. Fox and Levin state, “In a sense, the insanity is located in their relationship rather than in their individual minds or personalities” (74). This bond sets these men apart from the individualized crimes of the femme fatale. However, even the man in the hard-boiled detective novel who commits murder on his own does not sustain the deliberation or violent methodology enacted by the femme fatale. Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled detective, Mike Hammer, is a prime example of the troubled image of masculinity following World War II. Max Allan Collins claims that Mike Hammer “is a war veteran, suffering problems of readjustment to a peace-time society, as would any real veteran; his problems are admittedly an , and at times a metaphorical extension, of real postwar problems and concerns” (39). As was examined in my second chapter, Mike Hammer’s murder of Charlotte Manning preys heavy on his mind in later Spillane novels. However, John Cawelti argues, “that Mike has so little trouble with such decisions suggests some of the more disturbing psychological undercurrents of the hard-boiled story” (146). While he does not mind committing the deed at the time, telling Charlotte coldly after he shoots a .45 caliber bullet into her stomach, “it was easy,” he is plagued by his hard-boiled vigilantism in later novels (147). When he meets Juno Reeves, the woman who runs the Anton Lipsek

60 modeling agency, Hammer is struck by her beauty “her face had a supernatural loveliness as if some master artist had improved on nature itself” (375). Although Mike is fascinated by her beauty he is also confounded by a feeling of uneasiness when he looked into her eyes, which said “something I should know and couldn’t remember” (377). He tells Connie, a model for the Lipsek agency, “I don’t like her and I don’t know why” (393). While this might be an effort on the part of Spillane to inform his readers that his detective, Mike Hammer, could not fall in love with a transvestite because he “knew” something was wrong it appears that his obsession with Charlotte is continuing to have an effect on him. When Juno asks him to visit her the next day, he finds himself unable to say no. “I couldn’t have said no. I didn’t want to. I nodded and my lip worked into a snarl I couldn’t control. Even my hands tightened into fists until the broken skin over my knuckles began to sting” (395). Hammer’s passionate anger is beyond his control when he looks at Juno, a feeling that Charlotte, on the other hand, would have been able to resist. Mike recognizes the link to Charlotte during his second meeting with Juno when the sunlight hitting Juno’s hair makes it appear to be golden. She reminded me of another girl…a girl I thought I had put out of my mind and forgotten completely in a wild hatred that could never be equaled. She was a blonde, a very yellow, golden blonde. She was dead and I made her that way. I killed her because I wanted to and she wouldn’t stay dead (408). Mike’s continued hatred of Charlotte marks his investment into her murder. “Is this what it is like to think back? Is this what happened when you remember a woman you loved then blasted into hell?” (409). Juno saw the anger and fear in Mike’s eyes when he broke a glass in his hand, seeing Charlotte again. He told her about his past, “I shot her right in the gut and when she died I died too” (416). This declaration differs significantly from his earlier insistence to Charlotte’s corpse that ‘it was easy.’ However, faced with the image of Charlotte again, Hammer recognizes that by murdering Charlotte, he destroyed a part of himself. Mike’s acknowledgement of guilt is confirmed and he prepares to kill ‘Charlotte’ again. When Mike discovered that Juno was the one who set him up for murder and led a lethal blackmail ring in the city, he points a gun at her stomach and informs her “I am going to shoot you Juno” (510). However, as he levels the gun at her head, the light changes again and he sees Charlotte standing before him. Then, Mike Hammer, the hardest of the hard-boiled detectives, falls into manic hysteria: “My head was a throbbing thing that laughed and screamed for me to

61 go on, bringing the sounds out of my mouth before I could stop it” (510). Lowering the gun, he screams at Juno I thought I could do it. I thought I could kill you, Juno. I can’t. Once there was a woman. You remind me of her…I loved her and I killed her. I shot her in the stomach. Yeah, Juno…I didn’t think it would be this much trouble to kill another woman, but it is” (510). After a physical battle between the two, Mike accidently rips off Juno’s dress, revealing her masculine body. Hammer informs her, “I knew it all along and it was too incredible to believe. Me, a guy what likes women, a guy who knows every one of their stunts…and I fall for this” (512). Max Allan Collins claims that “readers in the post-war era welcomed a man who could handle problems in such a direct manner” (17). However, in Vengeance is Mine!, readers are presented with a Mike Hammer who does not know what to do; his natural desire to kill is conflated with his love for Charlotte. Spillane’s insistence of Mike’s masculinity at the end of the novel exposes both the anxiety revolved around homosexuality as well as the fear in of being fooled by women. However, while Mike claims that he knows women and “their stunts,” he was unable to recognize Charlotte’s true nature until many people had died. What this scene reveals is the male anxiety of the femme fatale stems from her domestic masquerade. Juno commits the ultimate form of artifice in disguising her masculine body and fooling the many men in her path. Mike’s revelation about the similarity between the two women invokes his fear of being deceived…again. Although it is revealed at the very end of the novel that Juno Reeves was really a man, she manages to evade detection as a female criminal and serial killer for some time. Seven people are dead at her hand, yet she was never questioned because she fulfilled the domestic image of the perfect lady. It is significant that as a woman, the man behind Juno Reeves does not reveal his crimes, while other male violators in the hard-boiled genre suffer mental breakdowns that expose their criminality. The power of the femme fatale lies in her ability to commit crimes without culpability or fear while remaining outside of police investigations. Mike Hammer, Guy Haines and Charles Bruno all suffer from emotional affect from the memory of their crimes, and it is this emotional affect that makes their crimes visible to those around them.

62 Chapter Two argued that the femme fatale is powerful because of the fear that she evokes and the devastation that she causes science and technology. The men that we have examined in this chapter, Charles Bruno, Guy Haines and Mike Hammer, however, do not evoke fear but suffer from it. Bruno’s hatred and subsequent fear of women cause him to murder the cuckolding wife of Guy. Guy, who would never had murdered had it not been for the pressure of Bruno, kills his father in order to appease a persuasive Bruno. Mawer suggests that Guy “finds the evil he fears of himself personified in Bruno, but is unable to see Bruno as separate from himself” (90). Guy is not only afraid of Bruno, he is afraid of himself. Mike Hammer lives with the fear and guilt everyday of having murdered his fiancé Charlotte Manning. Yet Mike’s hatred for Juno, Charlotte’s apparent , seems to stem from his fear of being ‘duped’ again by a woman. For all of these men, what is at stake is their masculinity which has been appropriated from them by the aggressive women in their lives. The quiet control exemplified in Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade is replaced with the brutal Mike Hammer, who wears ‘his heart on his sleeve.’ The male killers in the late 1940s and early 1950s hard-boiled detective novels became more visceral as their position of dominance in society changed. The male anxiety that is featured in these particular novels typifies a transition of gender roles that was occurring in society. Gilbert’s suggestion of the “crisis of masculinity” that occurred in the 1950s references to that period in American history where men were supplied conflicting views from popular culture of how they should act. Pulp novels capitalized on the image of the hyper-masculine male while family-oriented television glorified the family man. Both images promoted the ideal of the strong independent man, yet that classification was slowly being reconstructed through women’s place in the workforce. Thus, the anxiety that occurs in the hard-boiled detective novel is indicative of the crisis of masculinity in 1950s American popular culture. In Sin City, Frank Miller’s graphic novel that attempts to reinterpret the hard- boiled detective genre, this masculine anxiety is replaced with heavily stylized violence and overtly misogynistic representations of women. The prevalence of reproductions of 1950s popular culture often fails to incorporate the level of apprehension that was historically present. The final part of my thesis argues that Frank Miller’s graphic novel Sin City, written in the early 1990s, misrepresents the noir genre and the characterization of the femme fatale.

63 EPILOGUE: FRANK MILLER’S SIN CITY AS NOIR FANTASY

As elements from the past become reproduced and re-imagined in our contemporary culture, interpretation is instrumental in how we remember history. The 1950s is a decade that is often recreated in popular culture, primarily because of the Hollywood fantasies and the nostalgic idealization of family life. This time period often becomes parodied in films in which people look back at the 1950s and envision a time in which the was still achievable and all life existed in an idealized suburbia. Nostalgia for this ‘simpler time’ has caused many popular culture representations of the 1950s to be fantastical revisions rather than authentic memorializations. American film noir has become sensationalized as a mystical place where women were highly sexual beings, criminal yet passive, while men were fast-talking, hard-hitting and in complete control. I have argued in this thesis that the femme fatale is a powerful image of femininity who redefines gender roles through her occupation as a criminal and mass-murderer. However, what was liberating in the 1950s became consumed by capitalism as the image of the femme fatale became conflated with the image of the sexual siren. In fact, the term “femme fatale” has become so ubiquitous that anytime a woman with heavy lids and red lipstick is seen, she is referred to as a ‘femme fatale.’ Numerous films, television programs and books have misappropriated features of the hard-boiled detective novels and created the misnomer that the femme fatale is a symbol of promiscuity and violence rather than a symbol of power and aggression. Frank Miller’s highly stylized noir-inspired graphic novel, Sin City (1991), owes its terse language style and simplified plotline to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. Sin City appropriates noir characteristics but fails to recreate the spirit of the 1940s and 50s pulp novels. Instead, Miller creates a seamy Manichean world where all women are prostitutes or strippers and all men are hard-drinking and overly hyper-masculine. While the femme fatale of the hard- boiled detective novels of the late 1940s and 1950s is powerful because of her creation of new gender roles, Miller’s graphic novels return women to the Madonna/whore complex that existed prior to the femme fatale. All women in Sin City are prostitutes or strippers, making their bodies the mere force behind their supposed power. What made the original femme fatale so powerful was her ability to plan methodically and to act deliberately, while creating the image of the

64 domestic ideal. The women in Sin City, however, can rely only on their bodies because their characters are so one-dimensional. In Miller’s novels, only the male characters have inner monologues and antecedents that are revealed to the reader, while the female characters are often drawn with featureless faces and detailed bodies and very little dialogue. Miller thus misreads Spillane by creating a world that regulates women to sexual servitude. Indeed, women are worth only what their bodies will get them. The power of the femme fatale of the late 1940s and 1950s hard-boiled detective novel was in her ability to conceal her crimes through the fantasy of the domestic wife and mother. The femme fatale of this genre had the mental fortitude to plan violent murders carefully and to carry them out flawlessly. By contrast, in Miller’s world, the fantasy revolves around the objectification of women’s bodies and the image of violence in domesticity. The novel is known for graphic scenes of domestic violence and brutal depictions of sadomasochism where women being dominated cruelly. The second book in the Sin City collection, A Dame to Kill For, features a woman characterized as a femme fatale, yet lacking in the traits that made the classic femme fatale so threatening. Ava Lord manipulates men through sexual encounters, but does not commit murder herself. In the one instance where she attempts to kill a man, she cannot shoot him because of her inability to fire a gun. Unlike Charlotte Manning, the femme fatale of Spillane’s I, the Jury, who was technically savvy with a firearm, Ava is an inept murderer, denying her the classification as a serial killer. In Frank Miller’s popular graphic novel, Sin City (1993), the storyline of Mickey Spillane’s 1947 hit, I, the Jury, is recreated with a comic book flair. The ending of both of the texts are similar, but the femme fatales are portrayed in entirely different manners. Charlotte Manning is a methodical, deliberate killer who hides her true intentions from both Mike Hammer and the reader until the end of the novel. She is deadly, but decidedly feminine, upper-class and lady-like. She is the perfect image of domesticity and Spillane treats her with respect as a worthy adversary of Hammer. Ava Lord, on the other hand, does not murder her victims herself but relies on men she manipulates to do her ‘dirty work.’ Unlike Charlotte, who uses the image of domesticity to manipulate, Ava literally uses her body to ensnare the men who help her by sleeping with nearly every male character. Although she is beautiful, Miller harps on her sensual body more than her face, with most of the graphics featuring her completely naked and usually wet. There are numerous pages dedicated to illustrations of Ava and other naked women,

65 usually with little to no dialogue or commentary, the majority of which have no face.17 Because it is a graphic novel, the reader is given the images of her sexual exploits with numerous characters. While it is obvious that Dwight and the police lieutenant are quickly taken in by her stories, the reader and other characters in Sin City recognize that she is a liar, a murderer and, in true Sin City fashion, a whore. Like all the female characters in Miller’s graphic novel, Ava is portrayed as a sexual object rather than as a fully developed character. In his article for Pop Matters, David Lewis argues that Sin City is far from being misogynistic and actually portrays “empowered” and “strong” female characters. Lewis contends that the female bodies in Sin City are drawn to appear “powerful and sensual,” which he equates with agency: “The women of Sin City are strong and, paradoxically, gain even more strength from each seductive pose Miller draws. They are not victims of the male gaze; they ensorcel their viewers” (“Sin City”). Lewis’ reading, however, does not go beyond the visceral surface of the novel to examine what is actually occurring within the story. Claiming that the sensual drawings entice the viewer is obvious; what is more interesting is the way in which Miller misreads the genre. The town of Sin City contains many male characters, such as Marv and Dwight, who have interesting pasts and clear psychotic neuroses. The female characters, however, are regulated to lives in the adult entertainment industry. There is Nancy, the stripper with a heart of gold, the vicious, murdering prostitutes of Old Town and Ava, a woman who has risen up the ranks by selling her body and manipulating men. The only women who are not prostitutes and strippers or who are other than simply promiscuous are the wives of certain Sin City officials. One businessman, who is obsessed with prostitutes, threatens to kill a ‘whore’ in order to keep his wife from discovering their affair. These women never make a physical appearance, except for the police lieutenants’ wife whom we see sleeping next to him while he fantasizes about Ava. The fantasy of Sin City is that reality never sets in; women are available sexually at any time, and men, regardless of their looks or economic status, are able to obtain them. Although the prostitutes of Sin City are supposed to act as powerful female figures, the reality of their positions as sex laborers prevents them from having agency. As Dwight escapes from the police on suspicion of killing Damien Lord, he instructs his friend and driver, Marv, to go to Old Town, the dangerous neighborhood run by a band of violent prostitutes. Although the

17 8, 47-9, 52, 60-7, 83-5, 92-5, 131-4, 140, 159-61, 165-6, 190-2.

66 prostitutes, all in various states of undress, kill the police officer as he drives into Old Town, Dwight is spared and receives medical attention. It is a running theme in the Sin City graphic novels that the violent prostitutes seem to have a soft for certain men like Dwight. In fact, one of the women, Gail, claims that she would die for Dwight, even though he does not love her. The second installment of Sin City, A Dame to Kill For, features Dwight, a rehabilitated violent drunk who spends most of his time trying to keep himself under control. He is haunted by the memory of his love, Eva, who left him for a wealthy businessman, Damien Lord. Four years after her marriage to Lord, Eva contacts Dwight in an apparent effort to illicit help from him. In their meeting in a shadowy bar, Eva apologizes for leaving him, “I’m nothing but a selfish slut who threw away the only man she ever loved” (36). She repeats these sentiments moments later, again referring to herself as a “slut.” A femme fatale from the 1940s or 1950s would never use this type of misogynistic language because she was not objectified in this manner. Later, when Ava appears at Dwight’s apartment, fully naked, she begs him to have sex with her. She apologizes again, saying, “I’m nothing. I’m dirt. I’m a lying, treacherous whore” (61). Dwight answers her with a hard punch to her face before he acquiesces to sleep with her. Sin City’s insistence on the femme fatale as a slut marks the failure of noir’s origins to be translated into a new postmodern context. In the 1940s and 1950s, American society was much more conservative in terms of sexuality. The hard-boiled detective novels contained explicitly erotic scenes, even some sadomasochistic encounters between Mike Hammer and a female model in Vengeance is Mine; yet, the novels were not sadistic in their treatment of women. In our contemporary society, which is routinely saturated with sex and violence, the reinterpretation of noir does not rely on subtle sexuality, but the over-the-top brutal and violent treatment of women. The original hard-boiled novels were shocking because the women seemed to be more in control and aware of their sexuality than had been previously explored in literature. In Miller’s interpretation, the women have again lost control and agency through the blatant objectification and violation of the female body. Before she is dragged away by her husband’s bodyguard, Ava tells Dwight mysteriously, “Just remember me, my love, remember me” (39). Ava informs Dwight that her husband Damien has been sexually torturing her for years with the help of his manservant Manute. As Ava relates the various tortures that are inflicted upon her, the literally illustrated graphic is a close up of her naked body, where these devices are apparently used. Although this scene is supposed to cement

67 Dwight’s belief in her turmoil, it is eroticizing sexual torture through Ava’s narrative and the images of her body. Dwight is sufficiently convinced through their sexual rendezvous of Ava’s genuine fear, although the reader, at this point, has not been given one positive image of Ava. In contrast to the characterization of Charlotte Manning, who seems to be a positive female role model and a kind, thoughtful woman who is deeply in love with Mike Hammer, Ava Lord is presented as a “slut” who does not deserve Dwight’s love. Thus, there is suspicion that has been placed upon her from the beginning. After being thoroughly throttled by Manute, Dwight goes after Ava in order to save her from her husband. When he encounters Damien Lord, Dwight beats him so violently that he dies. Ava enters the room at the moment that Dwight is standing over Lord’s dead body and sarcastic thanks him: “You’ve murdered an innocent man, darling. And you’ve made me a very rich woman” (110). She raises the gun in her hand and fires point-blank at Dwight’s head, yet does not kill him. Although Ava does attempt to commit murder by her own hand, she does not have the skills required to kill a man. This is utterly different from Charlotte Manning, who kills all of her victims herself with a marksman’s knowledge. As Dwight lays on the floor, suffering from numerous, though not-deadly, bullet wounds, Ava elaborates on her violent scheme, claiming, “I almost never get the change to stop acting – to stop lying. To let somebody see the real me” (114). However, from the beginning of the novel, Ava is seen only in the throws of her obvious attempts at manipulation which is yielded through the use of her body. Ava informs Dwight that she is not insane, but evil, a term that could not be applied to the careful, for-profit crimes of the femme fatale. As she waits for her manservant to come and kill Dwight for her, he is whisked away by Marv, a friend and accomplice, before he can be destroyed. Unlike Charlotte, who would have destroyed someone who knew her identity, Ava is unable to finish the crime that she began. When Ava meets with the police investigators, she throws herself at the lieutenant in an obvious attempt to gain his confidence. Miller relies on the inherent sexual nature of men to keep his femme fatale successful. Grasping the front of his coat, Ava gets down on her knees and begs the lieutenant, “Oh, please, lieutenant. Hold me. Hold me tight. Just for a moment…” (129). Within the day the lieutenant has left his wife and is sleeping with the ‘distressed’ widow. Ava’s manservant, Manute, informs Dwight that Ava is a goddess who “makes slaves of men” (172). He continues, “She can see to the heart of you – and transform herself into your deepest

68 desire” (173). The problem that Miller encounters in his interpretation of the femme fatale is the he considers it dangerous for a woman like Ava to be able to embody a man’s ‘deepest desire.’ What causes male fear and anxiety of the femme fatale, however, does not come from her ability to be sexual, but from her masquerade of domesticity. The image of the wife is supposed to be safe because it is equated with the home. The femme fatale creates paranoia because she has integrated violence into the home. Miller fails to recognize what makes the femme fatale so frightening and effective and instead falls back on sexual exploitation. The ending of A Dame to Kill For is more than reminiscent of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury; it is almost a replica. Dwight enters Ava’s home to find her completely naked in the swimming pool. Like Mike Hammer when confronting the gorgeous Charlotte, Dwight is struck by Ava’s beauty: “Everything she’s done. Over the years. All the lies and tears and blood and death and still I can’t take my eyes off her” (194). The captivating nature of the femme fatale calls for men to be unable to resist her, except, of course, for the hard-boiled detective. As Ava rises out of the pool, her body naked, as usually, and her face drawn without detail, bodyguards and her large man-servant surround her. Unlike Charlotte Manning, who operates on her own, Ava is aided by the numerous men that she ensnares into her service. Dwight pulls a gun on Ava’s obsequious man-servant Manute and unloads six rounds into him, although none kill the large man. Ava grabs one of the guns that has dropped and yells, “Dwight! Get down!,” then fires more rounds into Manute’s body. Dwight notes derisively, “I guess she figured I was the winning horse…It’s a little late in the race to change your bet, Ava” (202). As Manute lays dying, Ava screams, “Kill him…it’s the only way. It was him. All along…It was him! He’s not human! He controlled by mind!” (204). In Spillane’s last scene, the femme fatale says nothing but tries to placate Hammer with her eyes. In Miller’s more visceral world, Ava must and beg in addition to revealing her body in her attempts to sway Dwight not to kill her. The effect is not pretty; even the reader, by this point, is ready for her to die. As she tries to explain to Dwight how Manute has controlled her mind with “ancient techniques,” she moves her body close to his and follows with a kiss. Dwight shoots Ava while her arms are around him and “life leaves Ava with a sigh” (206). The final image in the book is of Dwight standing over Ava’s dead, naked body. A Dame to Kill For, Frank Miller’s stylized recreation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, fails to project the anxiety and fear that is integral to the hard-boiled detective fiction of the late

69 1940s and 1950s. Miller assumes that the femme fatale’s most important asset is her body, rather than her careful planning and deliberate action by which sexuality in turn can be wielded. Thus, his fatal female character, Ava Lord, does not achieve the power that Charlotte Manning does because Ava cannot commit murder effectively, nor can she mask her deceitfulness. Miller has created a world of sadomasochistic fantasy that relies on violence towards women to be ‘hard-boiled.’ However, there is no anxiety or fear in his novels because it is obvious who the reader should condemn. While Charlotte Manning was a significant figure in the creation of new gender roles for women, the characterization of Ava Lord returns to the stereotype that a bad woman is also a whore. Frank Miller’s blatant appropriation of Mickey Spillane does not hold up to the original, but instead, is a much more crude, misogynistic misrepresentation of the genre. An exaggeration of gender roles became predominant in American popular culture during the late 1940s and 1950s. Male characters were suddenly hyper-masculinized while female characters became overtly sexual and feminine. Although the female characters were still examined in terms of their relationship to men, the characterization of their sexuality was expressed in two forms: mother and sex-kitten. But, as the emphasis on aggressive masculinity in popular culture grew, strong female characters began to emerge in film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction that competed with the hero, or , for power. In Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel, The Maltese Falcon, the female murderer, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, is passive and kills out of fear, then manipulates Sam Spade and other men into being her protector. Cornel Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940) allows for a violent and aggressive female who commits murder independently, yet her error in judgment disallows her vindication and intentionality. The femme fatale’s transformation in literature began when she went from a helpless woman who killed out of fear to a purposeful murderer who killed for financial gain. In Spillane’s I, the Jury, (1947) one can witness the epitomized transformation of the femme fatale into a cold-blooded and aggressive murderess. Raymond Chandler’s, The Long Goodbye (1953) saw the femme fatale begin to return to her domestic arena, where she continued, however to perpetrate aggressive and violent crimes. These novels are all indicative of the vast changes in gender relationships that were occurring in American society during their publication in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Prior to the United States’ involvement in World War II, the country existed in an implicitly patriarchal

70 state. However, with the country’s entrance into the war and the necessitation for women to fill the void in factory jobs, the protocol of what is gendered feminine and masculine became troubled. As we have seen in Chapters Two and Three, with the return of the soldiers in the mid 1940s came an urbanized warfare between men and women. This conflict that occurred in the American workplace and the home is investigated, metaphorically, in the hard-boiled detective novels published at the time. As I have previously argued, the femme fatale’s engagement with murder is not what made her so influential, it was her perpetration of crimes in the masculine public sphere. The removal of gendered spacial boundaries created a crisis in American culture. At the same time that the definition of gender roles were evolving, so was science’s understanding of biologically and psychopathology. The legacy of Cesare Lombroso’s findings on criminality and physiognomy reassured society that criminality was indeed a visible condition. However, as Otto Pollack recognized, in women, criminality was becoming difficult to see because of the inherent duplicitous nature of the female sex. Pulp fiction capitalized on this notion of performativity by featuring female murderers who were not only efficient at killing, but experts at concealing their crimes through exaggerated feminine domesticity. These vicious vixens, while sensationalized in popular culture, evoked fear and desire in male readers and the hard-boiled detective. And, as I have previously claimed, the actions of this character evaded scientific and criminology methodological approaches and revealed that science was ill- equipped to categorize the femme fatale. The contrast between the femme fatale and the hard-boiled detective requires an examination into the stereotypical assumptions of what is masculine as opposed to what is feminine. Charlotte Manning and the other femmes fatales conflate notions of inherent femininity by displaying behaviors that are considered naturally masculine. Aggression, violence, emotional detachment and deliberation are all historically masculine traits, yet Charlotte displays these behaviors underneath her guise of femininity. Charlotte is a visceral embodiment of domestic ideals, which aids her in crime. Her position as not simply a vicious killer but a criminal overlord, who sells drugs, promotes prostitution and participates in blackmail, creating a new definition of what it meant to be an independent professional woman. By returning to the femme fatale in the hard-boiled detective fiction of the late 1940s and 1950s, we have seen a figure which is not simply revolutionary but evolutionary because of her classification as a serial killer. While it is probably not the first time someone has referred to the

71 femme fatale as a serial killer, it is important to understand the radical implications of classifying a woman as a serial killer. Criminal science limits serial killer status to men and only acknowledges female mass killers who destroy children out of hysteria. Science and psychology have delineated women as biologically and psychologically unable to be mass murderers. However, in the fantasy of fiction, the notion of a female serial killer becomes a reality. Although there are not many case studies of female serial killers who do not murder their children or lovers, could it not be, perhaps, because they were exacting enough, efficient enough and disguised well enough, to avoid detection?

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76 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Leslie Anne Tharpe was born May 1st, 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida, to William and Priscilla Tharpe. After graduating from Leon High School, Leslie Anne attended Florida State University and in 2006, received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature. In fall of 2006, Leslie Anne began her graduate career at Florida State to pursue her Masters in English Literature, specializing in literary theory and criticism and 20th century American literature. During the time of her studies, Leslie Anne taught Reading Comprehension at Tallahassee Community College and in the spring of 2007, she married Michael W. Jennings. In the fall of 2007, Leslie Anne was awarded a teaching assistantship and she taught Freshman Comp for the remainder of her graduate work. Working closely with her mentor, Dr. Christopher Shinn, Leslie Anne defended her thesis and graduated in August of 2008 with her Masters and a certificate in Critical Theory from the English Department.

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