Talking Back to Chandler and Spillane : Gender and Agency in Women's

ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Talking back to Chandler and Spillane : gender and agency in women’s hard-boiled detective ﬁction https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40242/ Version: Full Version Citation: Avery, Cathrine (2017) Talking back to Chandler and Spillane : gender and agency in women’s hard-boiled detective ﬁction. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Talking Back to Chandler and Spillane: Gender and Agency in Women’s Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction. Cathrine Avery PhD Birkbeck University of London ⁱ I, Cathrine Avery confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. ⁱⁱ Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Carol Watts for her continuous support, for her patience, motivation, and extraordinary knowledge. Her guidance has been immeasurable. I would also like to thank Roger, Carys and Isabel for their ongoing and uncritical support. ⁱⁱⁱ Abstract This thesis examines the perceived incompatibility of incorporating feminist values into the hard-boiled detective novel. Critical responses to this crime form have argued that it endorses a formulaic, misogynistic violence. My argument is that this is a literature that offers women writers the means to express female agency and empowerment, through a genre that changes to fulfil current social needs. Through the work of Raymond Chandler and Micky Spillane I establish the model of the ‘tough guy’ detective as a product of the moment of writing, reflecting contemporaneous gender anxieties. Fundamental to this analysis is the concept of a ‘surrogate public history’, through which society promulgates mythological constructs to salve or remedy social unease. My proposition is that early hard-boiled texts contributed to a surrogate public history in which the mythology of the male detective was embraced as both desirable and necessary. Subsequently women crime writers of the 1980s and 1990s have adopted this gendered space, offering a powerful commentary on the condition of women through a surrogate public history that allows us to see how women are bound by a social contract that divides public and private spheres in gendered terms. Through a careful deployment of the detective’s voice, authors such as Linda Barnes, Sue Grafton and Sarah Dunant, examine social inequalities and question how femininity is defined. These authors are defined as ‘gestic’ writers, who by giving precedence to the minutiae of the everyday open up to inquiry the practices by which women’s lives are regulated. Additionally I examine the work of Val McDermid and Jenny Siler to consider what this extraordinarily mobile form can stretch to incorporate. Siler in particular reveals the capacity of the hard-boiled form to reject normative gender assumptions through a central investigative figure whose outlaw status challenges social expectations of femininity. ⁱᵛ CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Introduction 1 1. Deconstructing masculinity: Raymond Chandler and the ‘symbolic’ Marlowe 28 2. Masculinity and violence: Mickey Spillane and the excesses of Hammer 68 3. Female agency and the ‘gestic’ hard-boiled detective novel 102 4. Violence and female subjectivity in the hard-boiled detective novel 142 5. Performance and parody in the work of Val McDermid 172 6. De-centring the form: the criminal-detective in Jenny Siler’s Easy Money 206 7. Conclusion – talking back to Chandler and Spillane 241 Bibliography 247 1 Introduction Women writers of detective fiction strategically talk back to a genre that has often demeaned, trivialised and even demonised women. The genre itself, however, offers an attractive position from which to investigate agency.1 Genres fill a need for which no adequate alternative method exists. And when they change, it is as part of a change both in the need they exist to fill and in the means that exist for its fulfilment.2 My introduction to women writers of the hard-boiled detective novel came through the works of authors such as Sue Grafton, Sarah Dunant, Linda Barnes, Sara Paretsky and Judith Van Gieson, published in the late 1980s and 1990s. I read them for the characterisation of the ‘sassy’ detective and her messy personal life. I took pleasure in the seriality of these texts, with the constant reappearance of the detective, producing at a basic narrative level a sense of familiarity, one that allowed me to develop an ongoing sense of reader identification with these specific women and their habits. Nikki Gerard, reviewing the work of Linda Barnes in The Observer, commented: The pleasure of Fatlands - as in so many of these thrillers - is not so much the competent plot but the excavation of an independent woman’s domestic life, which is both mundane and in crisis [...] we recognize and identify with her; not superhuman or stunning, but a bungling, touchy, anxious, ageing, not-so-modern modern woman.3 The narrative trajectory towards the solution of the crime was a secondary consideration, not because it was insignificant but because the nature of the texts, both formulaic and often predictable in outcome, meant that a resolution was a given. I read voraciously, working my way through Virago Crime, The Women’s Press, Arrow and Pan Crime. Without fully analysing the thought process I defined these texts as feminist because of their overt focus on the status and needs of women as distinct from men. The use of first person narrative allowed the female detective to comment directly on the inequalities that the crime highlighted and satisfyingly she always had the last word. Thus it was not until I began to consider the critical responses to the ‘female’ hard-boiled form in order to channel my reading pleasure 1 Pricilla L. Walton, and Marina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-boiled Tradition (California: University of California Press, 1999), p.94. 2 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600 to 1740 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), p.20. 3 Nikki Gerard, ‘Sleuth Sayings,’ The Observer, 27 June 1993, p.62. 2 into academic study that I began to realise the concerns that have been raised by this combination of feminism and a female detective. At the heart of these concerns is the adoption by women writers of what has been defined as a ‘masculinist’ literary form. Stephen Knight in his extensive analysis of the crime genre Crime Fiction 1800 - 2000: Detection, Death, Diversity, comments that there is ‘an inherent difficulty for writers speaking as women, usually as feminists, in a form which is deeply implicated with masculinism’.4 However, my reading of the hard-boiled detective novel by women writers, as my epigraphs suggest, is one of female agency, of empowerment, within a generic form that changes to fulfil a social need. The masculinist compulsion embedded in this literature is central to way these writers ‘talk back’ to the genre and challenge previously designated gender assumptions that ‘demean’ femininity. Questions of gender and the hard-boiled detective form So what are the attributes of this literary form that means that it has acquired this ‘masculinist’ designation? The following synopsis outlines the essential features of the hard-boiled novel and serves as a useful starting point in terms of understanding the basis of such critical concerns. Whilst abstracting a simple definition might appear to limit this literature to its formulaic components, understanding its structural framework is a vital first step in making sense of its complexity. My argument, as I will show, is that this is a dynamic, fluid form, one that has the capacity to change and change again, in response to social influences. In essence the hard-boiled detective novel is perceived as a formulaic sub-genre of the crime novel, founded by American author Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularised by Dashiell Hammett in the following decade, and then refined by Raymond Chandler during the 1930s.5 It is often defined in contrast to the then prevailing (largely) British crime form, that of the ‘clue-puzzle’ pioneered by Arthur Conan Doyle in the later decades of the nineteenth-century. The ‘clue-puzzle’ is categorised as ‘drawing- room’ crime with its emphasis on politeness and the maintenance of a class based social order.6 The hard-boiled format is broader in its social representation and relies 4 Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800 - 2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p.163. 5 Heather Worthington, Key Concept in Crime Fiction (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp.123- 4. 6 Charles Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp.179-180. 3 on strong realistic characterisation and urban settings. John Cawelti in his text Adventure Mystery and Romance observes that whereas the ‘clue-puzzle’ is dependent on eliciting answers through observation and intellectual prowess, the hard-boiled novel is about action and intuition.7 The hard-boiled detective is seen as ‘tough’, a man of physical practicalities. When Daly said of his detective ‘There is nothing soft-boiled about him’ he established an approach and attitude that denied any sentimentality and thus the detective was defined

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