Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (review)

In Detective Agency, Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones argue that women writers have found a site for resistance and revision in detective fiction of the hard-boiled tradition. Deeply versed in both the stories of women PIs and the now vast theoretical literature on detective fiction and popular culture in general, Walton and Jones rebut the naysayers who find this masculinist genre too conservative to admit feminist political views. They argue, to the contrary, that these women writers negotiate issues of gender and genre for feminist purposes, using “an established popular formula in order to investigate not just a particular crime but the more general offenses in which the patriarchal power structure of contemporary society itself is potentially incriminated” (4).

Walton and Jones pursue various avenues in their study of this recent subgenre, tracing its history from the late 1970s, figuring in the economics of mass-market publishing, considering the roles of communities of readers, and evaluating the shifting political responses to feminist gains and aspirations. They investigate all of these cultural frameworks thoroughly and convincingly, grounding the texts they study in the Real Politik of production and consumption.

But the richest parts of Detective Agency come in the later chapters where Walton and Jones analyze specific elements of the subgenre. In chapter 5, “Private I: Viewing (through) the (Female) Body,” they turn to the ways the autobiographical narrative of series fiction offers readers “a position of subjectivity embodied in the feminine autobiographical voice” (152). Not only does the female voice complicate the once-masculine power of the gaze (eye/I), but it permits new possibilities for reader identification. “Once readers occupy the character’s [narrator’s] shoes, they may be compelled to recognize their position of cultural or racial or gender conflict, . . . a recognition that enables the negotiation of differing subjectivities” (161). Additionally, the female PI necessarily narrates to some degree from a “traditional position of vulnerability in patriarchal society.” The “potential parallel between victim and detective,” moreover, “may evoke the larger social dynamic of subjection from which even the generic role of the tough guy detective does not make her immune” (170).

Chapter 6, “Plotting against the Law: Outlaw Agency,” evokes the long-standing loner-outlaw figure in American culture, retooled as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the 1930s. When a female PI assumes this role, Walton and Jones argue, she assumes as well attributes of the femme fatale, the “wild woman” representative of “degenerative forces at work in the social system . . . outside of and threatening to the social order itself” (192–93). The women who write the hard-boiled fictions “are, in a sense, generic outlaws,” who turn the “demonized” character of the femme fatale into a “heroic” role, making “a kind of feminist ‘outlaw agency’ possible” (195).