crimeculture

The Queens of Noir: Crimeculture recommends the novels of Vicki Hendricks, Megan Abbott and Christa Faust

Lee Horsley, Lancaster University

The following is an extract from ‘She’s been around forever,’ part of a chapter on literary noir in the twenty-first century, written for the paperback reissue of The Noir Thriller (Palgrave 2009). The writers included here have produced some of the very best crime fiction of the first decade of the twenty-first century: we highly recommend all three (see below for brief bios and links).

The contemporary femme fatale is often to be observed engaged in perfecting the performance of her role, ever more confidently putting on display the power of her sexuality. Community has always been important in female-centred noir, and in some of the more sexually charged of recent texts this takes the form of intense, formative mentoring of the twenty-first-century temptress: “we’re the same, we’re the same. I made you…” (Queenpin, 89). Hapless male protagonists tend to flounder on, relying only on much-mediated images of macho, legendary role models whose prowess seems illusive; female protagonists, on the other hand, often have very direct contact with tarts and whores, porn stars and irresistible icons who can teach them the secrets of a fully sexual female competence. The results, of course, are unlikely to be harmonious and upbeat, but what temptress-in-the-making could resist learning the secrets of potency from a woman who, like Megan Abbott’s Queenpin, has “been around forever” (5)?

The availability of a range of somewhat mischievous variations on the transgressive woman is nicely illustrated in a 2002 collection of stories called Tart Noir, which explicitly broke away from the investigative female protagonist that had dominated feminist detective fiction for the last decades of the 20th century. The 'founding mothers' of the comically subversive subgenre of ‘tart noir’ were Lauren Henderson and Sparkle Hayter, and Henderson, in collaboration with Stella Duffy, edited the anthology which, like their ‘Tart City’ website (http://www.tartcity.com/), offers diverse expressions of “the Tart ethos - the naughtiness, the irreverence, and the constant attempts to reinvent how women write…” The anthology is amusingly subversive of gender ideologies, publishing several stories that explore the fluidity of the female self through the creation of characters who are alienated from culturally permissible (or at least culturally fashionable) forms of female identity and desire. These are stories that break down the binaries of transgressor-victim, sexual-domestic, consuming-nourishing, aggressive-passive, and one of their key strategies for accomplishing this is their amalgamation of the femme fatale and the nurturing domestic woman. This linking of two traditionally antithetic character types is often accomplished by the deployment of culinary motifs, which are central to some of the best stories in this collection (e.g., Sparkle Hayter's 'survival of the fittest' tale, "The Diary of Sue Peaner, Marooned! Contestant"; Karin Slaughter's macabre tale, "Necessary Women"; Jen Banbury's "Take, for Example, Meatpie" and Stella Duffy's "Martha Grace"). These and other stories vividly re-imagine exuberantly unrestrained female appetites - not just the voracious sexuality and the hunger for survival that characterize the femme fatale, but also a prodigious appetite for food and an outrageous, often grotesque corporeality.

Splendid corporeality is one of the hallmarks of the “Florida trash noir” of Vicki Hendricks, whose contribution to the Tart Noir collection is a tale of a torrid affair with a dolphin (“Stormy, Mon Amour”). In her recent novel, Cruel Poetry (2007), as in Miami Purity, Hendricks uses explicitly erotic scenes to intensify the themes of the noir tradition. The echo here is of the Out of the Past theme of the would-be rescuer of the femme fatale helplessly caught in her toils - suggested in Hendricks’ novel by the Burmese python that Renata wraps around herself. The deadliness is, of course, wholly traditional, but in contrast to earlier noir, one of the things that Hendricks has done is to create her femme fatale from the inside, demystifying her. She compels obsessive love in both men and women: Hendricks gives her a trio of lovers in thrall to her, each inadequate in his / her own way, vying with one another to connect with the essence of the femme fatale, trying to satisfy her (Francisco, the stud) or to draw renewed energy from her and to express her (Jules, the failed female novelist; Richard, the poet who can’t write any more). As the “supernatural” (166) femme fatale, she teaches, inspires – and tempts to destruction. The Poet romantically captures the duality of her role and the way she creates “the poetry of her extremes”: “The life inside her glows like neon, yet there’s a dark private corner of fragility and despair” (193). The drama she generates is acted out in a hotel that is a quintessential noir setting: indeed, Jules only gets properly underway as a novelist when she realises that she is living in “a perfect setting of gloom and despair, dirty dealings, more like a film set than reality” (311). There is a theatricality about this choreographing of the intertwined lives and poses of each, the constructed roles that everyone plays, that goes very much with the theme of instructive performance, with the femme fatale mentoring her own writer. Jules listens through the thin walls to Renata’s love-making, both pupil and storyteller, the intricate relationship (finally the most important in the novel) underscoring the self-referentiality of contemporary noir, the sense of inhabiting a tradition that is its own location, a fictional space in which the lessons taught are “cruel poetry”.

The role of the female protagonist is frequently acted out as though on a film set, inviting our voyeuristic enjoyment of the sheer spectacle of the strong, transgressive woman proudly committing herself to the appropriation of the moral low ground. In Christa Faust’s Money Shot (2008), for example, Angel Dare, with her porn star name and fame, is as tough as any female (or indeed male) private eye, but, from the perspective of conventional morality, is beyond redemption. What Faust does is to use the traditional noir theme of the wrong man (or in this case, wrong woman) to rehabilitate an identity that has been wrongfully represented in every sense, endangered by men who traffic in European sex slaves, who beat and rape women and persecute outsiders (“the whole 9/11 business” (122-3) hovers behind Money Shot).

A similar sense of staging the femme fatale characterises Megan Abbott’s retro-noir fables of mid-century America, which are amongst the most potent examples of contemporary female-authored noir. Die a Little (2005) and Queenpin (2007) both use Hollywood iconography as a touchstone of successful female self-projection. In Die a Little, Abbott creates a wonderfully over-the-top evocation of 50s home-making that centres on the manic Alice, perfecting all of the elements of suburban success at high speed – indeed, she turns out to have been on speed, as she whirls about to conjure a domestic ideal, efflorescing next door to the seedy haunts of the whole corrupt world that cohabits with suburbia in L.A. Both in this novel and in Queenpin, there is a doubling of the femme fatale and a struggle for power between two women, circling around the theme of “what you will do if you have to” (237). What lies behind these competing performances of female power is, of course, a reversal of the male version of reality exposed. Under the female performance, which signals compliance with centrally important male stereotypes (whether marital obedience, domestic virtue or sexual availability), lies precisely what the average male is lacking – ruthless, unrepentant hard-boiled agency.

The stereotypes manipulated here, as in the Tart Noir stories, draw on the classic film noir juxtaposition of the bad girl and the domestic woman. As in so many of the other novels of this period, there is self-reflexive play with the Hollywood conventions of plotting, here throwing into relief the serious themes underlying the classic tropes, in a way not distorted by the sexual ideology of the earlier reworkings of character types and plot elements. The plot is, as so often in neo-noir, a take on Farewell, My Lovely: a barely buried past investigated, driving the bad girl in respectable hiding to reveal how far she’s willing to go to protect herself. But here, via the carefully controlled first-person narration of the apparently good woman, Abbott gradually draws out the resemblance, and the fascination of prying virtue with hidden sin, which is horrifying but utterly compelling: “it’s like the world, once sealed so tight and exact, has fallen open – no, been cracked open, and inside, inside…” (130). Drawn inexorably into this dark world, Lora discovers in herself the same hidden depths of terrifying toughness, and learns at the last her likeness to the femme fatale: “‘It’s something we’ve both got in us’”, Alice tells her. “‘I don’t have it in me,’ I said louder…” (241). The end is Conradian in the truths that can’t be spoken: Lora is together again with the brother stolen away by marriage to Alice, but they are joined by “secrets so dark” that they can never speak of them to one another, living in a world in which “there are things you can never tell these people” (234-7).

Discovering “what you are capable of” (Die a Little, 238) is also the central theme of Abbott’s Queenpin, a more stripped-down anatomy of female power and formative influence. Like Sallis’s Driver, Abbott’s recent novel gives us a nameless existential loner, in this case, an isolated female figure who has first has to learn from and then prove herself in combat with an archetypal older woman. The namelessness of the narrator, suggesting the creation of a pure type, reanimates a whole tradition of fictional female agency that depends on looks and flawless performance and, underneath it all, the cold-hearted calculation required to become another ‘queenpin’. In the opening line – “I want the legs” – the most fetishised aspect of the femme fatale is brought into view, drawing our attention to the immense durability of the image (“But the legs, they lasted, I tell you”). The legendary Gloria Denton is wholly independent, no one’s wife or moll, and seems to hold the secrets of upward mobility in a world in which you have to be single-minded and ruthless to survive. In the opening temptation scene, she offers the young narrator some “brighter opportunities…She was giving me the keys to the kingdom. I knew that much, even then. I just didn’t know where the kingdom was” (11). The idea of a move upwards that requires iron discipline is in some ways not all that distant from the tough persona of the female PI, but here the accoutrements of the role are unequivocally female: “…Boy, did she school me. She talked to me, low and cool, for hours…So, I followed her example. I wore the clothes, I did the jobs…” When Gloria stands behind her looking into the mirror, it is “as if she was saying to herself, This was me once…I’ve seen it all. But look. We’re the same…I made you” (20; 30). What is required of this iconic figure are the traditional traits of the femme fatale – flawless performance, the “steel” (20), the class, inscrutability and lack of visible emotion. This is eroticised power, but its real strength lies in the fact that the sexuality is pure performance, not actual engagement. Female empowerment can only be assured by avoiding any entrapment in a close sexual relationship, and it is the narrator’s involvement with “a sharpie, a plunger” (55) with an easy grin that leads to an ending of savage violence, mutual guilt, betrayal and at last, the threat of the weak male eliminated, the question of whether the queenpin-in-waiting has learned her lessons well enough to take on her mentor and secure her place in the succession: “Save yourself, serve yourself. She taught me that. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying it was her” (165).

Copyright © 2009 by Lee Horsley

See the reissue of The Noir Thriller (Palgrave 2009) – available from Amazon

A little more about Vicki Hendricks, Megan Abbott and Christa Faust:

VICKI HENDRICKS

Serpent's Tail, Vicki Hendrick's UK publisher, writes: "Vicki Hendricks lives in Miami, Florida, where she teaches English and creative writing. A fan of dangerous sports, she took up sky-diving to research Sky Blues and has since completed 550 skydives. She also learned to dogsled in Finland and has been birding in the jungles of Costa Rica."  Hendricks' novels include: Miami Purity, 1995; Iguana Love, 1999; Voluntary Madness, 2000; Sky Blues, 2002; and Cruel Poetry, 2007. Her short story "ReBecca" appears in Best American Erotica (2000), and "Stormy, Mon Amour" appears in the collection Tart Noir in 2002. “No one writes better about white trash gone bad. If James M. Cain were a woman and alive today, the postman would only ring once on the doors of the sultry Miami condos inhabited by Hendricks's characters in heat.”  (Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian).  Visit Vicki Hendricks' website.

 

MEGAN ABBOTT

Megan Abbott is the author of the novels Die a Little, The Song Is You and the 2008 Edgar winner, Queenpin. July 2009 marked the release of Abbott's new novel, Bury Me Deep.  Dick Adler, The Barnes and Noble Review, writes: "Nobody combines historical fact with bravura fiction the way Megan Abbott does. . . . All three of Abbott's books have been nominated for an Edgar Award; she won one for the much-praised Queenpin. She deserves another for Bury Me Deep. And it's definitely a must-read for anyone who wants to see one of the best crime writers around perform her magic." A film, starring Jessica Biel, is being made of Die a Little. Born in the Detroit area, Megan graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English Literature and went on to receive her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. Her nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, was published in 2003.  Visit Megan Abbott's website.

CHRISTA FAUST

Christa Faust is the author of numerous crime and horror novels including Hoodtown, Triads, and Control Freak, as well as the Scribe Award-winning novelization of the movie Snakes on a Plane. She has also worked as a filmmaker, a model, and a Times Square peep show girl, and was the first female author ever to be published by Hard Case Crime.  Quentin Tarantino once said, "Christa Faust is a Veronica in a world of Betties."  Megan Abbott writes: "Money Shot is a stunner, careening along with a wild, propulsive energy and a deliciously incendiary spirit. Laced with bravado and loaded up with knockabout charm, Christa Faust’s Hard Case debut is the literary equivalent of a gasoline cocktail."  Visit Christa Faust's website.