Re-reading Noir: American Women’s Cold-War Crime Fiction and The Resisting Reader

This article considers Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader in relation to the author’s current research on Cold-War American women’s crime fiction. The dominant critical framework about this fiction from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is noir, a masculinist genre about male loners / outsiders that often embraces a cynical or nihilistic worldview. Many of these books objectify women and feature a spider woman or femme fatale, who is punished for her pursuit of self-interest and use of her sexuality to attain power. The lesser-known female crime writers of the period were–in many ways–resisting readers of this tradition. Their re-readings and rewritings often privileged community and connection over isolation and offered more complicated female characters. The author uses the case of Charlotte Armstrong’s A Dram of Poison (1956) to make this case.