Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon

Author(s): Johanna M. Smith

Source: Pacific Coast Philology , Jul., 1991, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Jul., 1991), pp. 78-84
Published by: Penn State University Press on behalf of the Pacific Ancient and Modern
Language Association (PAMLA)

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 Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon
Johanna M. Smith
University of Texas-Arlington

There are two possible ways to canonize and teach detective fiction.
One would be to insert representatives of this popular-fiction genre into
an already established "Literature" canon: teaching Poe and Doyle, say,
in a nineteenth-century novel course. Warrant for such insertions might
come from recent critical interest in detective fiction: Umberto Eco
writes it, Todorov has written about it, and the 1983 critical anthology
The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Critical Theory included such
eminences as Geoffrey Hartmann, Roland Barthes, and F. R. Jameson.
But allowing some popular fiction into a Literature canon would main-
tain the hierarchical division between these categories that assumes
Literature's relative autonomy from the realm of ideology and places
popular fiction in that grubby purlieu. Instead, we need to "dispute the
cartography of the field" (256), as Tony Bennett puts it; rather than
making Literature the center with popular fiction the margin and then
making select popular-fiction texts into honorary Literature, we need
to rethink center and margins. So I might teach detective fiction as a
canon in its own right: begin with Poe and Doyle, do the English
"genteel" canon and the American hard-boiled canon, and end with
contemporary women writers like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. Here,
however, I risk simply creating an alternative tradition; that is, valoriz-
ing a counter-canon of popular fiction would create another version of
the Literature/popular fiction dichotomy, a "respectable" detective-fic-
tion canon in which Poe and Doyle, say, make the cut while contem-
porary writers do not.

How can I avoid reproducing this dichotomy if the only alternative

to honorary-Literature inclusions is a separate-but-equal detective fic-
tion canon? In answer I want to sketch a potential syllabus, a
provisional mini-canon with which to "dispute the cartography" of
canonization itself. That is, I will construct an "alternative tradition"
canon, but I have use it to address "the diverse ways in which different
practices of writing are bound into the struggle for hegemony" (Bennett
263). In other words, Literary and popular "practices of writing" are
diverse, but both are nonetheless engaged in the same kind of ideologi-
cal struggle, a struggle replicated in canon formation. To approach
writing-and canons-in this way, reminds us that texts do not have
meaning but are sites for the production of meaning, and that texts do
not have value but are assigned value by a valuing subject. So I want a

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Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon 79

syllabus that will help students think about two issues: why readers--
including them-assign different values to different sorts of detective
fiction; and how texts figure, over the course of their reception, "not as
the source of an effect, but as the site on which plural and even contradic-
tory effects may be produced" (Bennett 253). Finally, such a syllabus
should suggest how canonization might silence or mystify some of
these "plural" effects so as to validate others.

The course might begin with the ideologies of the Sherlock Holmes
stories. Most of Doyle's women are either victims ("The Adventure of
the Speckled Band," "The Adventure of the Dancing Men") or perfectly
competent but apparently unable to stir without Holmes's aid ("The
Adventure of the Copper Beeches," "The Adventure of the Solitary
Cyclist"). We might speculate how this conventional ideology of
femininity could help silence the claims of the late-Victorian New
Woman. Analyzing the nitwit policemen of A Study in Scarlet and the
ineffectual aristocrats of such stories as "The Adventure of the Priory
School," we might see social criticism that is not finally subversive:
through the figure of Holmes, the omnicompetence of the exception-
al-male--individual somehow makes up for incompetent state ap-
paratuses.

We could then move on to hard-boiled versions of this gender-based

ideology of individualism. On one level Dashiell Hammett's novels
work against it; his detectives, Sam Spade and the Continental Op, do
not reassure the reader that all's well despite police and other forms of
corruption, because both are at least marginally corrupt themselves. Yet
for many readers of The Maltese Falcon, the fact that Spade turns Brigid
O'Shaughessy in to avoid taking the fall himself is effectively disguised
by his vaunted "[w]hen a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do
something about it" (568). Raymond Chandler unwittingly put his
finger on the ideology behind this reading of Spade's creed when he
called The Maltese Falcon, "the record of a man's devotion to a friend"
("Simple" 188); when represented as masculine friendship, that is,
saving one's own skin by disposing of the femme fatale reads as uncor-
rupted integrity.

It is no accident that this reading is Chandler's; in his The Long

Goodbye, which I would read as another "record of a man's devotion to
a friend," eliminating the femme fatale is the final measure of masculine
friendship.' Still, there are desirable women in Chandler's work: his
final novel does hint detective Philip Marlowe's romance with the
well-heeled Linda Loring, and "The Poodle Springs Story"-left un-
finished at his death--does find them married. For the ideology of such

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 80 Johanna M. Smith

romance, my syllabus might t

hard-boiled writer whose Po
Chandler's manuscript. Parke
Wife (signaled by her kinky
her trusting love); Marlowe r
so saves the Good Wife's marri
to Linda falls apart. The nov
Marlowe's apartment for G
marriage, but we cannot e
Woman is fully in line with
relations: his own detective
Galahad devoted to his signif
a career woman and a sexual dy
Doyle's victims and Hammett
she is as ideological a represe
psychologist is limited to an
"sounds like paranoid schiz
fantasy of absolute sexual av
To this point my syllabus wo
canon subscribing to a gende
women are male-defined. Th
tion of what happens to this
detective fiction. Often women writers use the form to show women
coping with masculine definitions of femininity. Dorothy Sayers's
Gaudy Night, Valerie Miner's Murder in the English Department, and
many of Amanda Cross's books dramatize the external and internalized
problems of women who choose the intellectual or academic life over
the domestic. Similarly, Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton rework the
traditionally masculine role of hard-boiled detective by putting women
in it. Both give their women detectives the kind of emotional baggage--
conflicted friendships, troubling memories of dead parents--unknown
to the hard-boiled, masculine, sturdy-individualist PI. In addition,
these women detectives seem free of the sexual difficulties male detec-
tives groan under: they are sexually active, without either the standard
masculine fear that sex will distract them from detection or the sup-
posedly feminine need for sexual monogamy.2
But are such alterations of the standard formulae necessarily
feminist?3 And do they gender the canon? Not always. In my view,
Paretsky's often do not. In Burn Marks, for instance, V. I. Warshawski
does face a problem unimaginable for a male detective (whether caring
for her aunt should override her work), but she is also capable of
simpering that "it just felt good to have ... some man ... think... that

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Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon 81

I should be working" (117). In other words, she remains male-defined,

sometimes to the point of unintentional parody: when she dumps a man
for questioning her professional judgment but later decides to "be
friendly" with him so as to "turn [his company] into a major account"
(260), she becomes the Woman Careerist from Hell. In contrast,
Grafton's novels do seem to me a feminist gendering of the canon,
because her detective Kinsey Millhone combines conventional "mas-
culinity" and "femininity" so as to blur the distinction between them.
While Millhone's obsessive independence might seem "masculine" or
her emotional vulnerability "feminine," in conjunction these conven-
tions lose their gender coding. Gender-blind in a positive way,
Grafton's novels de-masculinize hard-boiled detection by representing
it simply as a job with Millhone simply the (female) person doing it.

A far more radical challenge to the hard-boiled ideology, however,

would come from adding lesbian detective fiction to my syllabus.
Where other women's detective novels question masculine definitions
of femininity, these reject such definitions; in Sarah Dreher's Stoner
McTavish series, for instance, women don't agonize over what men
think about their work or their sexuality. In addition, lesbian writers
use the crime-story form to address specifically lesbian issues: in Bar-
bara Wilson's The Dog Collar Murders, the problem is whether lesbian
sado/masochism enacts a feminine sexuality or simply internalizes
men's hatred; Mary Wings's She Came Too Late addresses the question
of whether biogenetics is an opportunity for lesbian motherhood or yet
another instance of masculinist power over women's bodies. Most
importantly, such issues are not amenable to individual solutions; in
fact, the exceptional individual's Holmesian hubris is often a sign of
villainy. In such ways, lesbian detective fiction tends to subvert a
hard-boiled individualist ideology.
This fiction is not widely known. While discussing this paper with
many women who read and/or teach women's detective fiction, for
instance, I found myself the only hetero aware of these writers, and I
knew of them only through a lesbian friend. Although there are dozens
of lesbian detective novels, they form a counter-canon of their own;4 in
other words, they have not entered what we might call the traditional
counter-canon of detective fiction. Of the several possible explanations
for this canonical marginalization, one has to do with economics, and
here we need to look at publishers' role in the formation of the hard-
boiled canon.

As Barbara Herrnstein Smith reminds us, an entity's value is

produced in part by "the dynamics of an economic system" (16), which

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 82 Johanna M. Smith

includes not only the valuing

also the market economy se
signed a new detective n
economy (what kind of mys
economy (how much she or h
these factors in turn depend
is marketed for an existing c
Robert B. Parker's career is an instructive instance of such canon for-
mation. He himself constructed a canon in the subtitle of his 1971 PhD
thesis, "A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald" (quoted in Glover 83); the
Cincinnati Post blurb on his 1980 novel Looking for Rachel Wallace called
Spenser "the legitimate heir to the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald
tradition"; and the dust jacket for 1989's Poodle Springs pictures both
Parker and Chandler. What we have here is the Hammett-Chandler-
Macdonald-and-now-Parker canon emerging as a cottage industry for
Parker and his publishers.
Such an economic tradition or canon has been particularly important
for women writers of detective fiction, whose novels tend to have a
shorter shelf-life than men's.5 In the late 1970s author Linda Barnes was
told that readers accustomed to hard-boiled male detectives would not
buy a woman PI "who was not a Miss Marple type" (Behren El). In
1986, however, her first hard-boiled story featuring Carlotta Carlyle
"took off," in part because Paretsky's and Grafton's first novels--both
published in 1982--had prepared the way. Marcia Muller's Sharon
McCone series is currently receiving a comparable, if retroactive,
economic canonization. Begun in 1977, the series is being re-released
this year (1990) in a standard format. The reissue of the first novel touts
it as "the first Sharon McCone mystery"-information which, like the
standard design, lures the first-time consumer to the rest of the series.
On the cover, Sue Grafton calls Muller "the founding 'mother' of the
contemporary female hard-boiled private eye"; this blurb locates
Muller's series in a tradition and thus reassures the consumer that it is
worth buying.
In contrast, it is a safe bet that few publishers see the lesbian market
as a goldmine. Many of these novels are published by alternative
presses like Seal, and they are pricey (generally $8.95 per paperback).
B. Dalton or the Mystery Guild will sell you Grafton, Paretsky, and
Muller but not Dreher, Wilson, or Wings; the catalogue compiled by the
writers organization called Sisters in Crime includes Dreher, Wilson,
and Wings but few other lesbian writers.

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Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon 83

Part of the reason for this economic marginalization is the novels'

lesbian sexuality. While Wilson's fiction generally remains decorously
silent on this point, Dreher's and Wings's novels have a degree of
explicitness that would probably make many hetero readers uncom-
fortable. And this explicit sexuality also contributes, I think, to the
academic marginalization of these novels. In the first place, hetero
students would tend to feel the same kind of discomfort with lesbian
sexuality as other readers. For the hetero feminist professor, an addi-
tional problem is that many students already tend to equate feminism
with lesbianism and to reject both as equally deviant; to confront this
dual rejection-by discussing the ideology of compulsory hetero-
sexuality in hard-boiled detective fiction, for instance-is a dauntingly
difficult task.

But these problems seem to me all the more reason to include lesbian
detective novels in my syllabus. This fiction can help us interrogate the
construction of the standard hard-boiled canon and its ideologies. How
does that canon reflect and maintain suspicions of feminists and les-
bians as non-male-defined women? suspicions of feminist and lesbian
solidarity as challenges to an individualist ideology? To ask these
questions by teaching lesbian detective fiction would gender the canon
indeed.

Notes

1. For an analysis of such friendship as homosocial desire, see my "Raymond

Chandler and the Business of Literature," Texas Studies in Literature and Language
31.4 (Winter 1989): 592-610.

2. It is interesting to note that this need appears in Robert Parker's Spenser

where it is meant as a marker that he is sensitive to women.

3. See Kaplan for a discussion of this point in several writers I have not included
here.

4. Time constraints mean that I cannot here pursue an issue pertinent to this (or
any) counter-tradition, that is, whether a separatist canon which might be marginal-
ized is nonetheless preferable to an inclusive canon which might lead to co-optation.

5. Sara Paretsky make this comment as a respondent to a 1990 MLA convention

panel, "H is for Hero(ine): The New Women Detectives."

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84 Johanna M. Smith

Works Cited

Bennett, Tony. "Marxism and Popular Fiction." Popular Fictions: Essays in

Literature and History. Ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant, and Peter Widdow-
son. London: Methuen, 1986. 237-65

Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Art of Murder." The Simple Art of Murder,
3rd ed. New York: Pocket, 1964.

Glover, David. "The stuff that dreams are made of: masculinity, femininity
and the thriller." Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure. Ed. Derek Longhurst.
London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 67-83.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. The Four Great Novels. London: Picador
1982, 375-571.

Kaplan, Cora. "An unsuitable genre for a feminist?" Women's Review 8 (June
1986): 18-19.

Mehren, Elizabeth. "Their MO: Follow That Woman." The Los Angeles Times
13 Sept. 1990, Sec. E, p. 1 col. 2 and p. 5 col. 1.

Paretsky, Sara. Burn Marks. New York: Delacorte, 1990.

Parker, Robert B. Poodle Springs. New York: Putnam, 1989.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. "Contingencies of Value." Canons. Ed. Robert von

Hallberg. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984, 5-40.

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