Thursday's Thugs: The Femme Fatale

What's not to love about the femme fatale? Therein lies the trap. These sexy, seductive, irresistible bad girls ensnare the lovers into invisible bondage. The hapless fools that fall for their charms will do anything for love. We readers can do nothing to help as good men are led into compromising, dangerous, even deadly situations by the beautiful face of evil.

The femme fatale is the anti-girl next door. There is nothing clean cut about this babe. She is beautiful, well endowed, seductive in every way. Often the femme fatale is foreign, and more exotic than that wholesome beauty down the street. She is a woman of mystery. A guy just can't help falling for her charms. When he does, she will pull him into a life of the most exquisite torture.

A lot of noir mystery novels use the femme fatale as a double-crossing seductress who leads the hero into trouble. Heroes take a lot of beatings and the occasional bullet wound on her behalf. It isn't surprising that Raymond Chandler loved to use these bad girls in his novels. I don't blame him. Done right a femme fatale makes the story. I must admit though, my personal favorite is the satire of the femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit. She wasn't a bad girl, just drawn that way.

Weekend Writer: Fighting the Hard Fight

I joined Sisters in Crime several years before my novel was written because their efforts to promote the work of women mystery writers are important. The tendency of the literary world to look down on genre fiction, and women writers in particular, is not new. Part of that is snobbery. There are many genre books that are better written and more literary than reviewers realize. Part of it is sexism. Blind studies have proven that when the gender of the writer isn't known, women rank much higher than when the readers know they are reading a woman's manuscript. Knowing the thinking behind ignoring excellent books by talented women writers doesn't change the fact that no reviews, and bad reviews, hurt.

It is a difficult, often thankless job, to write. Many of us are struggling to get reviews, to have our work noticed, and to carve out a place for ourselves in the writing world. Most of us are working a day job, and juggling our writing and promoting with hectic lives.

For all my hard working Sisters in Crime, I am posting the following review. I found it comforting to know  that long before Sisters in Crime, there were women working to make mystery fiction one of the best selling forms of fiction on the market. They suffered through the bad reviews and continued to work. Thirteen books into her writing career, mystery writing foremother Anna Katherine Green was still fighting the hard fight.
In February of 1895 the following blistering review of Anna Katherine Green's novel "The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock" appeared in Yale Literary Magazine.  I am including it in my writing blog as a reminder of the need for writers, particularly women writers, to develop a thick skin and keep turning out great books.

The works of Anna Katherine Green are always sought by a large number of readers who care little about how their literary dishes are served up as long as the dishes themselves are good. Anna Katherine Green is perhaps the best story teller in her line--a line which is almost unnecessary to say is neither literary nor intellectual. To make a long railroad journey seem shorter, or to while away a few stray half hours, her books do very well. If one does not get wildly excited over them, one does not at least throw them aside unfinished.

Her latest soar into the realms of literature is called "The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock." The title is decidedly the most interesting portion of the book, and it certainly stimulates curiosity. The story is vastly inferior to "The Leavenworth Case" and is not equal in continuity or interest to the thirteen other books which have come from her pen. Its redeeming quality is its brevity, for, while one can see into the mystery and beyond very early in the story one is tempted to finish it because it is not long.

Anna Katherine Green never draws characters; she merely introduces a host of people in order that her readers may guess who is the murderer. (Of course there is invariably a murder in her stories.) To anyone who has contracted the very bad habit of persistently perusing her works it must be a constant source of wonder that he himself is alive, for murders must seem an every day and perfectly natural occurrence to him. Of the people in "The Doctor, his Wife and the Clock," the clock has more to do with the story than any of the human beings, and is decidedly more entertaining than the majority of them. The doctor is tiresome, his wife is possible still more tiresome, and the detective was evidently born a fool and apparently never got over it.

The denouement of the story is clever and is well related: it is an oasis in a desert. It is not, strictly speaking a denouement, for the rest of the book was without doubt written around this incident. It goes without staying that the story is wildly absurdly improbable, and this is the reason why it fails of its object, which was presumably to be pathetic. The volume is one of the "Autonym Library Series," heretofore so excellent.

Thursday's Thugs: Bad by Circumstance

We often hear about "victim mentality," which is blamed for keeping people in bad situations/relationships/circumstances. As a writer, I have used this kind of thinking in characters. In my current work in progress, the wife of the murder victim has been abused for years. Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, it wasn't uncommon to see women like her. I have known several women who remained in abusive relationships because they either accepted the abuse as being their fault or because they couldn't see a way out. I have even known a few who reached the breaking point and struck back against the abuser. Under ordinary circumstances, these people would not kill: they truly believed they had to do something.

I am sure anyone reading this blog could give me examples of good people who turned to violence because they saw no other way out. My favorite fictional account is in Susan Glaspell's classic mystery story "A Jury of Her Peers." I love the way that all through the story the menfolk are stumbling over clues the women piece together while talking about quilts, preserves, and other womanly occupations. The solution to what happened and the decision of the women not to reveal the circumstances that led to murder shocked readers at the time.

Perhaps Glaspell's conclusion was so shocking to Victorian sensibilities because the story is loosely based on the real life murder of John Hossack. The sad saga played out in court, where interestingly enough the prosecution raised the issue of abuse in the home as motive rather than a mitigating factor in the crime. We may never know if Hossack's wife actually killed him. Sentiment at the time was that if she didn't commit the murder she knew who did. She was convicted of first degree murder, a year later the Iowa Supreme Court overturned her conviction, a second trial led to a hung jury.

Does the "bad by circumstance" story still work today?

I believe it does. A few years ago I used this type of plot from a male perspective. I had a construction worker lose his job because a busybody accused him of indecent exposure. His wife died because he could not afford her medical care without insurance. He murdered the woman who cost him his wife. These circumstances won't be repeated. I ended the story when his boss figured it out, but decided not to tell the police.