From Periphery to Center: (Post-Feminist) Female Detectives in Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Introduction

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. . . . Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.

—Chandler (1939, 17)

This is the way Raymond Chandler’s star detective, Philip Marlowe, introduces the reader—and his own eyes—to Mrs. Regan, one of the females circling around his investigation in The Big Sleep from 1939. Like the other women, she is not making it any easier for him to find the culprit in the rather confusing environment of corruption, mob-methods, gambling, drinking, easy women, and easy money. And yet she has come to represent the epitome of the female role in the hard-boiled crime story for which Chandler set the standard. The book was turned into a movie in 1945–1946 (directed by Howard Hawks) and, as Kevin Hagopian comments on the Images website: “Shot during wartime, the film turns the draft-induced ‘man shortage’ into a satyr’s fantasy; sloe-eyed heiresses, hash-slingers with come-hither looks, and horny lady cab drivers brazenly proposition Marlowe, who regrettably stiff-arms most of them in the name of business” (Hagopian 2004). Two clear exceptions seen in the movie to the hands-off, all-work-and-no-play attitude of Philip Marlowe from the book are the romantic relationship with Vivian Regan and the afternoon tryst with a bookstore clerk. Primarily, Lauren Bacall, in the role of Mrs. Regan, illustrates the quintessence of the female temptress turned victim of seduction. At the time, critic James Agee wrote the following in a review in Time: “She has a javelin-like vitality, a born dancer’s eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness, and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while” (quoted in Thompson and Bordwell 2014).

Lauren Bacall may have been tough, but her physicality as a sex kitten with sharp and potentially dangerous claws is the focal point in her relationship with Marlowe. On a website created by Jørgen Grandt, it is possible to see the covers of the Danish translations of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Six of the eight cover pages depict women whose primary attributes are exotic sensuality and seductive glances (Grandt 2001). As established by Bo Tao Michaëlis, the influence of Chandler reaches far and wide (Michaëlis 2013), and the portraits chosen to represent his female characters confirm the above-quoted rather juicy and sensuous perception of women in crime stories that, obviously, were very popular in Scandinavia. However, simultaneously with Chandler, across the Atlantic, Scandinavian writers, such as Else Faber, Karen Blixen, and Kjerstin Göransson-Ljungman, created female detectives of a very different substance, far from the legendary portrayal quoted above (Hejlsted 2008, 235). Their primary weapons were not their bodies but their brains. This also holds true for the contemporary female detectives discussed in this article, yet their female bodies still generate gender-defined positions in both public and private spheres. These, in turn, create inequalities that then constitute the root problems of these women as representations of the attempt to “undo gender.” In a post-or neo-feminist framework, the detectives arguably use their feminine bodies “in a way that involves both active and passive...