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

Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 315. $45.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

In Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Teresa de Lauretis states a defining paradox for feminist theorists, "[T]he only way to position oneself outside of [dominant] discourse has been to displace oneself within it--to refuse the question as formulated, or to answer deviously (though in its words), even to quote (against the grain)." Such "strategies of reading and of writing" that are themselves "forms of cultural resistance" ground Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones's engaging, interdisciplinary analysis of a new kind of crime fiction: post-1970s novels written by women that feature a professional female investigator-protagonist. ¹ Clearly influenced by feminist and cultural studies discourses on popular texts, Walton and Jones situate their textual analysis within the historical, economic, industrial, and reception contexts of these novels. What emerges is a compelling argument for reading the novels as a Foucauldian reverse discourse within the hard-boiled novelistic tradition. Indeed, the displacement of the male professional investigator in women's hard-boiled fiction not only produces a subgenre of crime fiction that includes women but also transforms the very conventions of the genre. Walton and Jones' analysis, by foregrounding the conventions, characters, and plots of the women's novels, challenge the prevailing assumption that hard-boiled novels constitute an exclusively male generic domain.

Obviously conversant with the hard-boiled novel and criticism of it, Walton and Jones successfully contest claims that the genre offers only limited, regressive, or antifeminist political and literary possibilities for women writers, characters, or readers. Their analysis identifies the multiple ways "agency" functions in the novels and their contexts of production and reception. The title refers to the "institutional agencies of publishing, marketing and consumerism" that shape the hard-boiled novels as well as to the ways women writers "exercise individual and collective forms of agency . . . within these institutional structures" (3). The detective, regardless of gender, functions as "a marginal figure who for readers explores in fantasy the border between law and lawfulness, between social norms and deviancy, between social security and individual risk" (191). Indeed, not only the detective, but the office of the detective agency itself functions at the nexus of the public and private worlds the professional detective must navigate. Within this literary genre, "agency" possesses semantic layers that go beyond the usual allusions to character alone.

Historically, the hard-boiled novel has problematized women's agency by representing predominantly male detectives and femmes fatales in narratives that punish women for their sexual, economic, and social transgressions. However, the specifically female subject as the professional detective complicates this gendered, generic terrain. Contemporary women's hard-boiled novels appropriate and recast the detective's liminal position in two intertwined ways: by capitalizing on the preexisting outsider status of women socially and by foregrounding women's arguably greater familiarity with the secrets and spaces of the private and domestic milieus. The result of this shift in narrating subject is neither unequivocally feminist nor reentrenched misogyny, as the authors' well-chosen examples and analyses illustrate. Instead, the professional female detective emerges as a character that offers women "room to maneuver" as subjects within a narrative form that historically has confined them to limited roles, spaces, and narrative trajectories. ² Indeed, as Walton and Jones state, the detective's ability to "speak and act outside of institutional structures" may be "a possibility even more tantalizing to and meaningful for women" (194).

Contemporary women's hard-boiled novels reconstitute generic conventions more radically by complicating the "scene" of the crime: the novels shift the gender of the subject, and in so doing, often reexamine what exactly constitutes crime. As Walton and Jones state, Sara Paretsky's novels, which have established guiding generic paradigms to other writers, reformulate answers to Raymond Chandler's imperative that hard-boiled novels investigate "what the...