I recently read two crime thrillers published by NYRB Classics: In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes and Fatale (1977) by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Both were remarkably fun reads, and quite thought-provoking, especially in terms of their gender politics.
In a Lonely Place situates itself within the hardboiled noir tradition of Hammett and Chandler but subverts the genre in certain crucial ways and is, in my estimation, superior to its predecessors. The prose is stronger, less forced, more lyrical; the characters are less “flat” in the Forester sense; and, importantly, the politics are far more interesting, and better.
The novel follows a close third-person perspective of Dix Steele, a WWII vet bumming around LA and ostensibly writing a detective novel. Meanwhile a serial killer, “the strangler,” is killing women in the LA area on a monthly basis. It’s clear to the reader early on that Dix and the killer are the same man—I almost expected some sort of twist in which some other man is revealed as the killer, but no such twist comes. My expectations had been colored by the fantastic, albeit very different, film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.
By coincidence Dix reconnects with his war buddy Brub, now an LAPD detective. Dix cautiously shmoozes with Brub and his wife Sylvia at various restaurants and clubs, careful to collect as much information about the investigation as possible without letting on anything that could implicate himself. Meanwhile Dix pursues a neighborhood woman, Laurel Gray, a redhead who excites feelings in Dix he hasn’t felt since his lover abroad, the Londoner Brucie.
What sets the novel apart from others: from the free indirect prose we get a glimpse into Dix’s psychology, deeply misogynistic yet not cartoonishly so—and this time the misogynistic main character is not one we’re meant to sympathize with like a Sam Spade or a Philip Marlowe. Dix is a rapist and a compulsive murderer, not a slick detective with a quip always up his sleeve. If anything Dix’s smooth dialogue feels forced on his part, like he’s trying to shore up confidence to cover up some lack.
This lack—whether we call it castration or not—seems to stem from his perpetual reliance on other men to provide for him financially (his friend Mel, or his rich uncle), and perhaps from the traumas of the war, or from losing his lover Brucie, whom we later learn he also killed. Dix is not a self-made man, he’s a mooch through-and-through; his lone wolf persona rings hollow, a pathetic attempt to convince others, but more importantly himself, that he’s more than who he really is.
Dix likes to contemplate the ocean. He likes to look out at the sea, taking in its rhythmic waves and the smell of salt; he specifically mentions to one woman that he wants to smell the sea. That yonic expanse, the vast opening into which perhaps Dix wants to dissolve his subjectivity, conjures the oceanic in Freud. This concept has been repurposed by feminist theorists like Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies, who discusses the recurring motif of the sea in Freikorps ephemera and other misogynistic male writing, in which men wish to be swallowed up whole by the infinite feminine.
Perhaps Dix’s fascination with the ocean, which inspire some of the more lyrical sentences in the novel, and his desire to kill women, are two desires in tension. Perhaps they’re one in the same, two sides of the same coin. Perhaps Dix murders women, just as he pretends to be an independent, enterprising novelist, in order to fill in the gaps, to make up for what he lacks—to reinstitute the phallus.
The other reversal comes in the ending, where the LAPD catch Dix but only with the help of both Sylvia and Laurel, women who could smell Dix from a mile away. They plot to lure him into a situation in which he’s tempted to strangle Sylvia, after which he’s immediately arrested for the string of murders. Sylvia and Laurel use their cunning, unlike the naive innocent young women of other noir, but not for malicious ends like the femme fatale.
In Fatale, the traveling grifter, who goes by the alias Aimée Joubert, shows up in the small coastal town of Bléville in order to infiltrate society’s upper echelons, identify a sucker she can exploit, and get to work, preferably as a hired assassin.
Aimée conjures what Theweleit termed the “rifle-woman,” the woman who possesses the phallus, the armed woman who penetrates, who attacks—who kills. This woman, usually some combination of communist, working-class, and sexually aggressive, haunts the fever dreams of Thetweleit’s fascist luminaries. Aimée isn’t necessarily a communist, but she is stunningly beautiful—in this sense she instantiates the femme fatale as the novella’s title suggests.
The novel opens with Aimée killing multiple men with a shotgun, and at first we’re not sure why. Then she arrives in Bléville and we start to realize what sort of business she’s up to. Aimée kills rich, powerful men for money, by pitting them against other rich, powerful men. She meets Baron Jules, whom she identifies as a mark. When she meets him he’s pissing against a wall, penis in hand, displaying his member in a way that feels crude, almost weak, no match for Aimée. (On the cover of the NYRB Classics edition, a dapper woman brandishes a pistol.)
Aimée realizes that the baron has dirt on everyone else in the town, and so she independently solicits about a dozen members of the élite to pay her to retrieve said dirt and do him in, thereby making a tenfold profit on just one assassination. She tells them that a male friend is the assassin, not her; she thinks they wouldn’t believe her to have the stuff of a hitman. Her true power is sheathed, at the ready but not brandished.
The eminent Manchette, credited with reinvigorating the crime novel, at least in the French language, plays with the femme fatale in interesting ways, molding her into Aimée, the coldblooded killer with whom the reader is tempted to sympathize, yet in a different way than Dix Steele. Her plan backfires but she retaliates by systematically killing each and every person implicated in the assassination of the baron, only to be stopped by the wife of one of the powerful men, who shoots Aimée—here it takes a woman to do a man’s job.
At one point, Aimée reveals that the first man she killed was her own abusive husband. This was a revelation for her: indeed, something can be done about powerful men. They can be killed.