Women’s History Month, Noir Edition

As we approach the end of Women’s History Month, it seems a fitting moment to honor the contributions women over the decades have made to noir fiction.

The debate over the status of female authors in contemporary noir rages anew every few months, as do discussions about the position of specific female authors (Patricia Highsmith, Leigh Brackett, Delores Hitchens, Helen Nielsen) within the noir, hard-boiled, and pulp traditions. In recent years, growing scholarship in the area and the launch of the CUNY Feminist Press’ Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp series has reinvigorated the discussion. So, too, have some exhilarating new books, such as Sara Gran’s Dope, and early excitement surrounding Hard Case Crime’s upcoming Money Shot, by Christa Faust, not to mention the long-overdue reprinting of Vicki Hendricks’ seminal Miami Purity (due from Busted Flush Press in May). Miami Purity celebrates and turns inside out James M. Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), recasting the original novel’s male drifter as a hardscrabble ex-stripper just out of jail and doomed by her own desires.

A side note, from a personal point of view: I set out last year to try to write a novel (Queenpin) in the pulp tradition--or at least my conception of it. Tugging on different fascinations I have with Cain, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Highsmith, Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich, and inspired by first exposures to Dorothy B. Hughes and Vera Caspary, I plugged away at a story built around a fundamental genre trope: the older tough guy who mentors a young protégée in the ways of crime. In my case, however, the mentor was an aging moll in the Virginia Hill mold, who takes a young bookkeeper under her wing, to no good end. The novel was a chance to explore the complexities (and dark corners) of female friendship in a genre that is generally far more revelatory about male friendships. All in all, though, the gender reversal mattered far less than I might have guessed. I wonder now if its because noir is so steeped in questions of power and powerlessness, fate and desperation--human issues, if dark ones. They frequently (almost obsessively) take gendered form (e.g., the classic sap falling victim to the emasculating femme fatale), but that’s just one form of many. The larger themes--ugly ambition, betrayal, and the terrible weight of desire--seem to loom up, regardless.

There’s a lot to reckon with here in terms of gender/genre. One thing, however, is certain. As this month encourages the recognition and celebration of the historic accomplishments of women, the women standard-bearers of noir merit commemoration. As a small token to their gifts to the genre, consider a poisonous little sliver from Dorothy B. Hughes.

Brimming over with post-World War II malignancy and sex panic, Hughes’ In a Lonely Place (1947) tells the story of Dix Steele, a Ripleyesque drifter and sociopath, who may have finally met his match in Laurel Gray, a hard-boiled beauty with a taste for the high life and a dark cynicism to match his own. Over drinks at the posh apartment Dix claims to be subletting from Mel, a wealthy Princeton friend, they discuss the most recent in a series of Los Angeles sex murders. Glancing at the newspaper headlines, Laurel says:

“I see where the strangler’s been at it again.” She wasn’t very interested; it was conversation, nothing more. “Someday maybe those dopes will learn not to pick up strange men.”

“You picked me up.”

She’d taken a long swallow of the highball. As he spoke, she lifted her eyebrows. "You picked me up, Princeton.” She purred, “Besides, you’re no stranger.” She knew it too, the instinct of one for the other. “Mel’s liquor is as good as ever.”

He said, “Yes, he left a good cellar for me.” He went on, “I ran into him in a bar.” “And you had an old-home week.”

“He was potted and trying to make my girl.” His eyes spoke meaning beyond the words he slurred. “A blonde.”

“That you’d picked up somewhere,” she retorted.

A simple passage, packed tight with nastiness. Here’s to the sublime Ms. Hughes and all the rest, the rough-and-tumble women who set such high standards for treachery and vice, mayhem and dissolution, a brutal eroticism and a desperate drive toward one’s own doom.