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Reviewed by:
  • The G-String Murders
  • Maria DiBattista
The G-String Murders. Gypsy Rose Lee. New York: Feminist Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 240. $13.95 (paper).

The G-String Murders may be one of those instances when it is quite fair to judge a book by its cover. This claim is more complicated and less snooty than it initially may sound. The art of the alluring cover might reasonably preoccupy a first time mystery writer best known for the faux refinement of her stripping act. In a letter to her editor on this very subject, Gypsy Rose Lee, with her headliner's eye for glint, wonders if the dust jacket for her debut fiction might feature "a picture full length of a stripper? Semi nude. The G-string actually silver flitter (very inexpensive, that flitter business). And a separate piece of paper pasted on a skirt, like birthday cards, you know? The customers can lift the skirt, and there's the G-String sparkling gaily. It is strictly gag business but it might cause talk" (241). The cover-gag is tawdry, and Gypsy knows it, but she also knows what attracts customers. Her idea never materialized, but the spirit behind it survives in the last word of the novel—publicity. The G-String Murders is, if nothing else, the work of someone who knows her business.

In this instance, the business is burlesque. When the novel was published in 1941, the back cover carried this endorsement by Janet Flanner: "Here is the living portrait of burlesque with assorted deaths thrown in." Flanner, an avid reader of detective fiction and one of the first Americans to read and appreciate Simenon, also knew her business. She doesn't oversell the book's mystery element, since she recognized, as did Gypsy, that the its primary appeal was its insider's account of the world and the people of burlesque. Gypsy sharpens the mystery à clé angle by making herself the first person narrator and principal character of her own mystery, playing fast and loose with the facts of her own biography much as a publicity director might have advised. Perhaps the modern novel, which so often made the first person narrator a semi-transparent alter ego for the author, gave her the idea. Gypsy had read the modernists. She even lived with them at a time, renting a room and bringing a measure of bourgeois order and domesticity to 7 Middagh Street, the famous brownstone in Brooklyn that, between 1940 and 1941, was the haven for a group of established and emerging modernists—W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson Macullers, and Gypsy's friend, George Davis. Gypsy apparently felt as much at home in American and continental modernism as she did on the burlesque stage and in fact imported her highbrow learning as comic embellishment for her lowbrow (to put it nicely) act. Rachel Shteir, in her informative and appreciate afterword, explores and comes to endorse this public image of Gypsy as a "strip tease intellectual." She points to the way Gypsy exploited "the titillating tension between books and stripping" (217) in her signature number, which eventually became the center of her Follies act. Among the lines she quotes are these:

Have you the faintest idea about The private thoughts of a stripper? ………………………………….. And though my thighs I have revealed And just a bit of me remains concealed I'm thinking of the life of Duse Or the third chapter of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

(217–18)

Despite such evidence of the high culture contents of her private thoughts, rumors circulated at the time of its publication that the thriller was ghosted by Craig Rice, a best selling crime novelist to whom Gypsy had turned for help and advice. Gypsy dismissed the rumors with her usual comic impertinence, insisting that she wrote the book three times with a thesaurus. It is [End Page 391] hard to detect, in reading the novel, what words she might have found there, since her narrator, keeping in character, speaks like a showgirl, not a schoolgirl. The high/low speech divide is spoofed, however, when one of the...

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