Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2000 by Catano, James V

Those marketplace issues form part of Walton/Jones's own analysis of the changes wrought by the strong growth in demand for female private eyes, both in the publishing world and in the opportunities they offer to female authors. Discussing arguments by Klein "'that either feminism or the formula is at risk"'" (88) when the genre/gender clash enters that most masculine of worlds, the hard-boiled tradition, Walton/Jones argue (not surprisingly, given their title and its clear pun on both businesses and social behaviors) that female detective agencies can operate without doing damage to, or being co-opted by or excluded (by definition) from the meanest of streets in the detective genre. Combining the generic and political, they argue that "coopting" the hard-boiled genre "is an extremely important revisionary gesture that may work to alter the paradigms of both genre and gender" (89).

The core of Detective Agency sets out to prove their case, and evidence comes from a variety of sources. Chapter 1 addresses agency in light of both "real-world" publishing opportunities and restrictions for women writers and women protagonists as well as current academic concerns with both. Agency, in short, is not just a question of whether female PIs can be written, but whether they and their female authors are to be accepted within the marketplace and the academy. The answer in terms of sales is a resounding yes, as demonstrated by the explosion in materials featuring some combination of women writers and women detectives over the last fifteen years.

Popularity as a genre cuts both ways in academic circles, however, with detective novels, romances, gothic tales, and other widely read genres often being condemned in light of the very popularity that ostensibly proves their importance. Audience may underwrite an author's agency when it is defined in terms of market value. But the academy would like to know a bit more about the detective's agency and the reasons for its popularity before calculating a somewhat different value. Does the genre actually encourage and enable female agency among readers or somehow reaffirm and reinforce its limits? Walton/Jones provide their most direct answer in Chapters 2 and 3, where authors' intentions and readers' reactions are presented through interviews and a reader survey. Briefly stated, the books are described by their writers and readers as empowering.

The most compelling arguments come from the texts themselves, however, and these arguments form the basis for Walton/Jones's remaining chapters (3-7). Arguing female agency from a variety of angles-style and language, narrative stance, outlaw ideologies, the gaze, filmic interpretations of the genre-Walton/Jones bring forward myriad examples and scenes, drawing like Klein's essayists on a wealth of available materials to argue their specific case: "Hard-boiled detective fiction written by women can thus merit the label 'feminist' because it admits the possibility of altering the 'generic'-and gendered conventions of both literary and social behavior" (46).