The Noir thriller----Page 7

Fatal Women

On the pulp fiction covers of the 1950s the most familiar figure is the
femme fatale. She is repeated with countless minor variations, the
immodest icon for a period during which sex became one of the major
ingredients in the paperback boom. This is the decade that saw the
beginning, both in film and pulp literature, of a great outpouring of
femme fatale plots.¹ The changes taking place in the representation of
women in crime fiction could also be observed in the pulp magazines
of the era. Black Mask covers which in the 1930s had depicted women
as helpless victims were by the 1940s picturing aggressive dames shoot-
ing .45s or even sub-machine guns, or stamping with spiked heels on
a man’s hand.²  In the fifties, this iconography was made still more
provocative in the cover art of the host of new paperback originals being
published by Gold Medal, Lion and others.

A handful of the paperback covers is reproduced here (Figures 4-7):
Miss Otis, reclining in a flimsy gown and red bracelet, with extravagant
blonde curls and lips parted seductively on the cover of a British gang-
ster paperback of the early 1950s; with the same Veronica Lake hair,
wearing a tight sweater and thrusting her hip out in a provocative pose,
David Goodis’ ‘blonde on the street corner’ (1954); the sultry, scantily
clad redhead who lies back holding a motel key in one hand and a cig-
arette in the other on the 1961 cover of Charles Williams’ Stain of Sus-
picion (1957); and Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (1957), represented on the cover
as a Lolita-like street urchin, posed in much the same way as any street-
corner blonde, leaning back, tight-sweatered, cigarette in hand, wearing
an expression that is unmistakably sexual in its appeal. The grown-up
version of the look had been amply established in the films noirs of the
mid-1940s: Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Veronica Lake
in The Blue Dahlia, Ava Gardner in The Killers, Rita Hayworth in Gilda,

Jane Greer in Out of the Past (all 1946-7).³ One of the defining charac-
teristics of the noir cycle has been seen as the increased centrality of
the female figure, with the woman becoming crucial to the hero’s strug-
gles and perhaps constituting his central problem, contributing to his
sense of an unstable world and of the failure of masculine desire.⁴

The power of such roles and the reproduction of such images have
ensured that the femme fatale is (with the exception of Bogart’s Philip
Marlowe or Sam Spade) the most immediately recognisable of noir’s
iconic figures. The elements of the image constitute a kind of visual
shorthand for dangerous attraction and steamy corruption. It is an
explicitly sexual iconography, and the threat represented by the dan-
gerous woman is sometimes simply that of the sexual predator drawing
in a male protagonist who suffers loss of control and destabilisation of
identity. Such anxieties are also, however, generated by the much more
direct imitation of male aggression and appropriation of male power. In
addition to holding a cocktail glass or a smouldering cigarette, the
femme fatale often holds a gun on the cover and has by the end of the
narrative pulled the trigger.

But if you look beyond the boldly clichéd cover art you see that many
of the noir thrillers of the 1950s not only reproduce but rewrite and
challenge the stereotype of the sexual, aggressive, independent woman.
Even within film noir the audience can be brought to look critically at
the male compulsion to control women sexually and at the way in
which male society itself is culpable. It can be distanced from the male
perspective, or can be brought to witness something of the inner strug-
gles of the femme fatale.⁵ The underlying ‘message’ of dangerous

woman films is often that ‘the male ideal of self-sufficiency is not only
impossible to achieve but in many ways self-destructive’: women are
‘merely catalysts, and in the end it is often the men who are destruc-
tive to themselves’.⁶ Hollywood, however, constrained not only by the
Hays Code but by conventional expectations about the ultimate repres-
sion of the sexual, aggressive woman, tended to package the femme
fatale narrative in ways that limited the ‘progressiveness’ of the cycle
and confirmed popular prejudices by figuring the defeat of the inde-
pendent female and the reassertion of male control.⁷ Novelists were free
to play much more extensively against stereotype, often setting up plots
that initially lead us to judge according to stereotype and then revers-
ing our expectations, or complicating our judgements and in the process
establishing strong female figures who, though sexual, are admirable
and/or indomitable. The literary as opposed to the Hollywood femme

fatale is less likely to be repressed, killed or otherwise punished for her strength and transgression.

All four of the covers illustrated here helped to sell novels that subvert
the expectations that they would have aroused in their readers. Ben
Sarto’s Miss Otis is true to type in her qualities. She is brashly sexual,
‘daintily  cruel’ (75-6)  and  manipulative,  but  unlike  the  standard

Hollywood femme fatale she is not doomed to destruction by these
qualities. She is in fact a series character, both tough and sympathetic,
a hard-headed business woman who is as much a survivor as, say,
Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The blonde in the David Goodis novel is seen by
the protagonist in conventional terms, but brings death and destruc-
tion to no one and has by the end of the novel been allowed to speak
quite fully of her own sense of Depression-induced frustration and
deprivation. Her primary role on the cover, in fact, is to abet Goodis in
establishing  formulaic  expectations  which  he  will  undercut,  thus
drawing his readers into a sense of how completely immobilising the
Depression years were. The cover of Charles Williams’ Stain of Suspicion
deliberately fosters confusion about the identity of the femme fatale and
so contributes to the novel’s assault on small-town prejudice. The motel
and the cover blurb refer to the woman who seems, to the narrow-
minded local community, to be the very image of a tramp and a mur-
deress, but her red hair (we eventually realise) identifies her as another
woman, the actual killer, unsuspected by any of her townsfolk because
she appears to everyone to be ‘the generic young suburban housewife’
(154). Hal Ellson’s Tomboy, a character whose inner life we come to
understand even more fully, is revealed as a frightened young girl who
has assumed a role - knowing and aggressive - which helps her to
survive in a tough urban world. This chapter looks at some of the pulp
fiction in which femme fatale stereotypes are deployed in an obvious
and straightforward way, but mainly considers the wide variety of ways
in which these stereotypes are challenged and undermined.

Tramps and tomboys

The repression of the ‘dangerous female’ in conventional film noir is
much discussed. Janey Place, for example, categorises film noir as a male
fantasy that first allows the expression of female power and then
destroys it, and argues that if cinema audiences remember film noir’s
‘potent stylistic presentation of the sexual strength of women which
man fears’, they will also remember the defeat of this transgressive

strength.⁸ Whilst the more sophisticated examples of literary noir play
knowingly with and ironically expose this male fantasy, there is also, of
course, a large body of pulp fiction that exploits stereotypical expecta-
tions just as unashamedly. In Harry Whittington’s Hell Can Wait, for
example, Angie, the femme fatale, is introduced to us as the very
embodiment of the tramp who drives men to raging jealousy, using sex
to acquire wealth, inconstant and opportunistic in her attachments. On
the opening page she is sprawled provocatively in a bikini, taunting the
adoring young man who stands over her with a look that establishes
her effortless ascendancy: ‘From the way she regarded him, you got the
faint sensation that she was looking down on him’ (5).

The reversal implied by Angie’s challenge to the male gaze is one of
the greatest inherent dangers associated with the fatal woman. She
appropriates masculine powers, creating a persona that both attracts
and threatens the noir male. Whittington’s narrator is insulated from
Angie’s charms by the fact that he is still grieving for his dead wife, but
noir plotting generally requires the protagonist himself to succumb.
This is a pattern often found in a strikingly overstated form in British
gangster paperbacks of the 1950s, which provide not just a wide

selection of femme fatale plots but a lively diversity of images contain-
ing the paradoxical combination of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits
that conventionally characterise the ‘potent’ woman. The murderous
woman, uniting exaggerated feminine attributes with a ‘male’ potential
for  violence  and  aggression,  is  explosively  embodied  by  Clara  in
Duke Linton’s Crazy to Kill (1950).  She is a woman whose softly

feminine attractions are themselves a deadly weapon: ‘Clara with two
ivory-hued  mounds  of  feminine  dynamite  exposed . . . to  an  inch
above the hard, detonating nipples’ (24). Alternatively cross-dressing
can be the correlative of this contradiction, as it is, for example, in
Dainty Was a Jane (1948), by Darcy Glinto (Harold Ernest Kelly), a novel
that is in many ways, as Glinto says, just ‘the old, old stuff’ about gang-
land violence, but with something that ‘added up different’ because one
of the main gang members is actually ‘a top class dame masquerading
as a guy’ (126). ‘Dainty’ Sabina, though doomed to death in the end,
carries a knife and is violent and ambitious enough to aspire to gang
leadership.

The ‘unnaturally’ sexual, aggressive, death-dealing woman is also
separated from the human norm by her association with images of ani-
mality and madness. The connection between unclean female sexuality
and mental instability is epitomised in the scene in Charles Willeford’s
Wild Wives (1956) in which the protagonist tries to interpret the dying

words of the husband he has helped to kill: ‘Something about sanitation

- sanity?’   (70-1). In British crime novels of the time, protagonists
encounter ‘completely screwy’ women transformed by drugs and female
hysteria into crazed animals ‘that clawed and shrieked’; they see ‘lovely
lips’ revealing a maniacal nature by being ‘curled back in a snarl’.⁹ The
equation  of  female  aggression  and  sexuality  with  perverse  moral
madness and mental sickness is one of the commonplaces of the time,
the strongest implication being that certain kinds of sexual behaviour
in women itself undermines ‘sane’ social arrangements. Just as sexual
recklessness is there for all to see on the average pulp cover, the signs
of underlying psychological imbalance are so standardised as to be
easily recognisable. In a run-of-the-mill American thriller of the late
fifties, Day Keene’s Dead Dolls Don’t Talk (1959), the murderess (‘a sort
of slob’s Jayne Mansfield’) is presented as the very image of her psychosis,
her ‘sins and excesses . . . beginning to show in her face. . . . The girl

couldn’t be really sane’ (7-16). In Bruno Fischer’s The Lady Kills (1951)
the clues to an unbalanced character are to be discovered in childhood
aberrations, such as her willingness to shoot an old dog (‘King’) that had
to be put down (48). When this ‘king-killer’ appears to have killed again
(69-70), she presents it as self-defence against male violence. What she
is constructing, however, is a duplicitous female narrative, which is in
due course discredited by male probity. As the father says ‘sardonically’,
‘“Women make pretty noble creatures of us men . . .”’ (31).

One way of partially altering the representation of the femme fatale
is to make it ‘the truth of the matter’ that female violence is only a
response to the violence of the ‘noble creatures’ themselves. Combined
with the kind of slick plot reversal more characteristic of the traditional
detective story, this strategy can be found in Fredric Brown’s The
Screaming Mimi (1949), which creates narrative suspense by revealing
the ‘ripper’ to be a woman rather than a man, but which compensates
the woman by its pop psychological explanation that she herself was
the victim of an earlier (male) ripper. A more serious exploration of male
culpability is John Franklin Bardin’s Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, pub-
lished in England in 1948 but (though Bardin was American) without
an American publisher until nearly 20 years later.¹⁰ It is a novel that has
strong affinities with the psychological focus and oneiric quality of
much classic film noir. Although it lacks the wider social resonance of
many male killer narratives, it develops the theme of patriarchal oppres-
sion through a haunting and sympathetic study of a mind unable to
escape from the prison of a male-dominated past. Her father was ‘a
strong man’ who ‘enclosed his family, locked them within the bounds

of his own personality’ (77-9), and the male world has continued to be
imprisoning  for  Ellen,  a  musician  whose  music  signifies  her  own
being, the inner, expressive self that is sacrificed in the effort to bring
her into conformity with a ‘sane’ role. Repressive male power is also
wielded by her husband, Basil, who has locked her harpsichord and
hidden the key, making her believe eventually that the key was in the
harpsichord all along - that is, that she herself ‘held the key’ instead of
the patriarchy. Ellen is encouraged by her psychiatrist to ‘stand aside
...and inspect herself’ (67), in effect to abandon her own perspective
and see herself with the eyes of others. Ironically, it is her second self,
‘Nelle’, that presides over her madness, separating itself from the
adjusted, social self of Ellen and dictating the violent adjustments she
makes to her world.

An environmental explanation of the action of the femme fatale can
work in an analogous way, shifting responsibility to a male-dominated
society that has (just as in the thirties gangster saga) inadvertently
formed an aggressor as a by-product of victimisation. Even a novel with
as clichéd a title as Wade Miller’s Kitten with a Whip (1959) can diverge
from the expectations encouraged by presenting the ‘kitten’ as ‘just a
pitiful kid, born with two strikes against her and a broken bat in her
hands’ (12), doomed by her background to ‘end up lousy’ (15). In con-
trast to the femme fatale in, say, The Lady Kills (a spoiled rich girl whose
female evil is clearly inherent rather than socially conditioned), the
‘kitten’, though almost equally close to the type of the slut (entrapping,
scheming and playing on her childlike appearance), is explained as a
product of a world that is itself ‘childishly muddled’ (36).

Whether naturally mad and bad or driven to aggression by a bad male
world, the femmes fatales considered so far have all been fated them-
selves to ‘end up lousy’, and this kind of containment of their disrup-
tive aggression and sexuality is fairly standard in the fiction as well as
the films of the time. Literary noir does not, however, require ‘a reasser-
tion of control on the part of the male subject’¹¹ and in fact offers ample
opportunities for the survival and even the prospering of the tough,
independent, sexual woman. In a canonical film noir like Out of the Past
(aka Build My Gallows High, directed by Jacques Tourneur, 1947), Kathie
Moffett (Jane Greer), the seductive and coolly calculating femme fatale,
must in the end meet her death. In the novel Build My Gallows High,
however, the Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) book on which the
film is based, ‘Mumsie’, as she is in the novel, is not killed. She is
throughout the true spider woman, ‘collecting’ men and willing to do
whatever it takes to acquire and hang on to money, a ‘realist’ who estab-

lishes for herself ‘a good life, all the dough she wanted. . .                . No illusions’

(109). In the end, the taciturn private eye - Red in the book (Jeff Bailey, the Robert Mitchum character in the film) - dies knowing that Mumsie, in spite of her utter cold-heartedness, will survive as part of a set of relationships that always operates.

The tough tart who seems able to survive in a male world better than
most men in fact becomes a familiar figure in both American and British
pulps of the time. She can be seen in her most caricatured form, for
example, in a British gangster novel of the fifties, Yellow Babe, by ‘Ace
Capelli’, one of the pseudonyms of Stephen Frances, who also wrote the
Hank Janson novels. The narrative centres on Lotus, a Chinese singer,
a ‘reigning moll-in-chief’ who is dismissed as a dumb broad, ‘just a little
yellow babe without all her buttons’ (10). Perfectly feminine but actu-
ally a manipulative survivor, she is not to be blamed for her treatment
of men because ‘“She learned in a tough school”’ (86). She has lived
‘with one gangster lover after another and always the minks that go
with them and the emotion growing cold inside her . . .’ (81-6). When
she and her lover are caught by the gang boss (‘Johnny was in a pair of
shorts. . . . She wasn’t dressed as formally as Johnny’ [84]), Johnny is
emasculated, but, tough as ever (and with no more use for the unfor-
tunate Johnny), Lotus emerges in one piece, eventually becoming ‘a
famous girl in her own light’ (88-90).

It is a relatively short step from allowing the survival of the powerful
woman to the more thoroughgoing enjoyment of her toughness and
allure. One of the most entertaining examples of such a figure is to be
found in another fifties series of British gangster paperbacks, featuring
the character of Miss Otis, who happily indulges her proclivities and
seems to regret very little. Ben Sarto’s (Fawcett’s) Miss Otis novels started
with Miss Otis Comes to Piccadilly in 1946. From a male point of view,
they can perhaps be seen as an over-the-top and therefore fear-free
indulgence in the ‘forbidden’ fantasy of the powerful and indestructible
female with all her erotic allure intact. In American sensationalist and
erotic paperbacks of the same period, there was a distinct market in
lesbian fiction¹² and it seems clear that Miss Otis had something of the
attraction of a leather-clad dominatrix, the same kind of ‘strong woman’
appeal to be found in the pulp erotica of the time. The opening descrip-
tion in Miss Otis Throws a Come-Back (1949) captures Mabie Otis in all
her glory: nearly six feet tall in her high heels, full-bosomed, posing
with a ‘cat-like voluptuousness . . . with an underlying suggestion of
strength and cruelty’, the silk of her dress stretched tightly over her
thigh, ‘making the limb look as if tautened for a spring. An experienced

dame, you would say’ (3). ‘The Otis’ is a kind of Thatcherite gangster’s
moll, running her own business and more than a match for the men
who try to take her on. This tough broad is the femme fatale given ‘hero
status’, unashamedly sexual, dominant, hard-headed, smart and calcu-
lating, manipulative - and hugely popular.¹³ In Miss Otis Throws a Come-
Back, she is in business with an ex-FBI officer who has become an
entrepreneur with ‘the many bucks any clever cop can get on the side’,
but who is not man enough to satisfy the Otis, who longs for a man
who can ‘ride up rough with her on occasion’. In Miss Otis Blows Town
(1953), when her current man is shot dead by a rival gang, she has to
decide which of the available men she will use to help and sexually
entertain her. Well able to remain cool and magnificent in a crisis, she
manages at the end to see off the hit man sent to kill her by taking his
gun away, slipping ‘the little gat from under her mink’ to disarm Swell
Jacky (109, 127).

A much younger and far less assured version of the strong woman is
created in Tomboy (1950), by Hal Ellson, who wrote (out of his personal
experience of working with violent teenagers in New York) over a dozen
juvenile delinquent novels, starting with Duke (1949), the story of a
black Harlem gang leader.¹⁴ Tomboy, Ellson’s second novel, is a reversal
of the more usual divided woman image. Rather than being a charac-
ter who conceals aggression under a softly feminine exterior, the pro-
tagonist must, to survive in a street gang, conceal her soft side. Even
more than Miss Otis, she acquires toughness in order to survive by the
rules of the male world. Tomboy, the sadistic bitch of the juvenile gang,
is also Kerry, a ‘lost soul’, a frightened child living a life of precarious
poverty, with a drunken father and an absent mother. As with the male
victim/transgressor protagonist, we see the ironic gap between public
self (tough, competent) and inner self, alienated, adrift, disguising fear
as bravado and cruelty. In a world in which only men are regarded as
capable of competent agency, Tomboy has deliberately and successfully
modelled herself on male behaviour. When she says she wishes she were
a boy, Mick replies, ‘Well, I don’t blame you for wishing that. It’s kind
of lousy to be a girl, I guess. A boy can do everything. Girls can hardly
do anything. . . . Except you, Kerry (40, 24). In initiating new members

into the gang, she is even more savage than the boys, in a willed
reversal  of  the  active-male  passive-female  duality: ‘Tomboy  struck

savagely and was the last to stop. . .            . ”I don’t have to take it,” Tomboy

said. “I hand it out”’ (25, 38). But the scenes in which she behaves in
a violent and sadistic way are interspersed with frequent reminders of
her terrified private self (‘there was nothing, nothing anywhere except

the sound of her sobbing’ [67]). It is only as part of the gang, that she
can briefly forget ‘that dark, bleak world outside’ (71). The sense of her
own dispossession surfaces repeatedly, leading to an end in which she
goes on the run with Lucky: ‘“Okay, we made it, kid. . . . We’re off for

somewhere. How do you feel?” “Scared,” Tomboy answered. “Scared as hell!”’ (150).

Seeing double

Ellson uses an internally divided female protagonist to challenge the
conventional judgement of conformity and violation of conformity. He
creates, in Tomboy, sympathy for a character who, superficially viewed,
seems sadistic and who apparently is completely separate from ‘decent’
society, turning instead to the juvenile gang for support and for her
sense of self. This fragmenting of identity, giving us access to a hidden
side of a character’s subjectivity, can also be an important element in
film noir, if, for example, directors find ways of giving the audience a
more complex image of the woman as someone who is herself involved
in performance and in the manipulation of her image, perhaps trapped
by the role she performs¹⁵ just as Tomboy is by her tough public image.
The  written  text  provides  more  obvious  opportunities  for  giving
space to competing narrative voices, and literary noir of the period
accordingly offers many more instances than does film noir of this
self-division.

Cornell Woolrich, for example, pays close attention to the subjective
experience of his women and to their ability to create different selves
as the occasion demands, a process dramatised in such novels as The
Bride Wore Black (1940) and I Married a Dead Man (1948, written as
William Irish.) ¹⁶ In Waltz into Darkness (1947, also written as William
Irish), Woolrich creates an archetypal destructive and seductive femme
fatale who is also ultimately a sympathetic character because of the
space provided for a counter-image of inner struggle to emerge. By
setting the story in the nineteenth century, Woolrich foregrounds the
‘modern woman’ iconography that marks Julia out as a femme fatale,
for example, the ‘slips’ she makes by smoking or by displaying her
more sexual side. Woolrich’s tendency to represent a woman’s apparent
nature not as a product of inherent traits but as something constructed
carries the implication that a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ role can be assumed by
any woman (the bad, of course, corresponding to the dark seductress
at home in ‘the world of cheap dives’, the good to the innocent,
redemptive woman capable of faithfulness and self-sacrifice).¹⁷  There

is also, however, a suggestion in Waltz that the ‘good wife’ image of
‘Julia’ is constructed out of some inherently childlike quality in her
other self, ‘Bonny’, that has been destroyed by her experiences. At the
end  of  the  novel, ‘another  face,  never  born’  peers  through  her

mask, strengthening our impression of a woman trapped by the roles she plays (302).

Writers of the time often handle the dark/domestic contrast with a
lightness which suggests how laughably stereotypical it was. Harry
Whittington, in You’ll Die Next (1954), for example, plays with the idea
of a protagonist who is anxiously uncertain about how the opposing
traits might be combined in his own wife, in the past a beautiful singer
who might really be a femme fatale. Can he trust her or does her past
contain secrets that have now surfaced to destroy him? Does her
domestic ‘performance’ hide a femme fatale who would betray him?
The domestic woman/sexual woman dichotomy dominates the opening
pages of the novel. Lila making Henry popovers for breakfast is juxta-
posed with her past in the Kit-Kat Club and with her skills in bed, raising
the question of whether the latter necessarily indicate a louche past, or
whether they are (as Lila implies) just a part of their ‘ordinary’ domes-
ticity, to be rounded off by a good breakfast.¹⁸

Opposing female types represented by the creation of pairs of women
are a recurrent element in both cinematic and literary noir. In film noir,
Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946), with Olivia de Havilland in a sane
twin-mad twin plot, is one of the most discussed examples of a
convention-confirming double-woman plot, in which the mad twin is
the embodiment of aggressive sexuality, female violence and duplicity.
An equally schematic literary treatment of the theme is James M. Cain’s
Sinful Woman (1948), in which contrasted twins are similarly used to
characterise female sexuality. Sylvia Shoreham is an actress who plays
both ‘good’ female roles (Edith Cavell) and ‘bad’ roles (‘ I Took the Low
Road’). Her sister, the deranged Hazel, acts as a kind of parodic version
of the femme fatale roles of Sylvia, imitating her gestures and expres-
sions while she engages in a series of casual liaisons that would ‘make
a hooker in the Red Mill at Tijuana look like a Minnesota schoolteacher’

(78).

Some of Margaret Millar’s psychological melodramas are also built
around this kind of pairing, using the coupling to mystify the reader,
as it does in Dark Mirror, but also to explore the subjective experience
of women trapped within socially constructed female roles. The Iron
Gates (1945), for example, creates two maternal perspectives, that of a
naive/angelic biological mother and that of a treacherous/phallic step-

mother haunted by her murder of the biological mother. Characteristi-
cally of Millar, the guilt is shared and sympathies divided: the ‘good
mother’ has been culpably passive and naive, and the suffering of the
murderess is fully represented as she experiences a terrifying rift between
her inner turmoil and the conventional social self that she ‘makes up’
when she looks in the mirror (34). In Millar’s Beast in View (1955) the
supposed female victim is actually the predator, a woman compensat-
ing for childhood humiliation by becoming her own version of the
‘good girl’ to whom she was always compared, and on whom the guilt
for her crimes appears to fall. There are similarities with Dark Mirror, in
which the bad twin, jealous of the favoured twin, accomplishes such a
reversal, though in the Millar novel it is the non-sexual woman, ‘the
prude’ (179), who is bad. Shamed by her realisation that her parents
think her incapable of fulfilling the ‘desired’ female role, she abandons
her real self and in revenge transforms herself into the stereotype of the
bad girl who is attractive to men, becoming her rival not as she is but
as Helen constructs her, the harpie, a ‘deformed twin’ (158).

Like her husband, Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), Margaret Millar
deals recurrently with the psychology of crime. Her novels are compli-
cated psychological puzzles that keep her readers in suspense as well as
working to dismantle the whore/angel duality. Other writers of the time
found a variety of ways, generally less convoluted than Millar’s, of build-
ing their plots around two women whose fates are intertwined and
whose story in some sense acts to counter conventional expectations
about female guilt and innocence. The most well-worn ploy is simply
the representation of the ‘bad’ woman as inherently good or the con-
ventionally virtuous woman as in reality culpable: so, for example, the
familiar figure of the whore with the heart of gold shocks bourgeois
assumptions in novels like William McGivern’s The Big Heat (1953); the
independent woman who has been misrepresented as a tramp because
of small-town prejudice is central to Charles Williams’ Stain of Suspicion
(1958) and Day Keene’s Notorious (1954).

One of the best-known film noir examples of the whore redeemed is
the Gloria Grahame character, Debby Marsh, in Fritz Lang’s adaptation
of McGivern’s The Big Heat (also 1953). The inner conflict she feels is
symbolised by the angelic and the disfigured sides of her face. The dis-
figured side, scalded by the coffee her gangster lover has thrown at her,
is hidden from view as she lies dying, asking Bannion how she would
have got on with his dead wife and in the process resurrecting her for
Bannion (she was ‘an Irish blow-top’). With great pathos, Debby asserts
an attachment to normal life. Mrs Deery, on the other hand, appears at

the outset as a suspiciously polished example of the perfect wife and
grieving widow. In McGivern’s novel (which Lang follows fairly closely),
Mrs Deery lives in a ‘clean, orderly little world’ in which she has ‘every-
thing about her . . . meticulously arranged’ (9), whereas Debby,with her
‘tall, spectacular body’ (94), is the very image of the high-class prosti-
tute. It is Mrs Deery, however, who is corrupt to the core. Before she
shoots Mrs Deery, Debby tells her (in Lang’s film version) that they -
the respectable wife and the gangster’s moll - are ‘sisters under the
mink’, but the comparison, of course, is just the crossing point en route
to the final reversal. In shooting Mrs Deery (so that her husband’s
suicide note, documenting the city’s corruption, will be made public)
Debby turns the femme fatale into someone who has acted violently
with our full approval. Through her usurpation of ‘male’ power, she has
actually made herself a more complete woman: ‘“I’m a tough guy. I did
what you couldn’t do, Bannion. I did it for both of us”’ (166). Drawn
to Bannion because he stood up to her gangster lover, she has finally
had the courage to resist her own objectification (‘he left me there like
an overcoat or something he forgot’ [109]), and in learning self-respect
has acquired the power to accomplish something wider, ultimately
acting not just for Bannion but for ‘“everybody . . . who lives in the
city”’ (171).

In one of the more common versions of the two-woman structure,
the protagonist is given the task of distinguishing between the two, as,
for example, in Blow Hot, Blow Cold (1951), by Gerald Butler, a British
writer who published half a dozen novels between 1940 and 1951.
Butler confronts his protagonist with the dilemma encapsulated in the
novel’s alternative title, Choice of Two Women. A weak-willed drifter and
adventurer is driven to choose between an apparently respectable, rich
woman and a French barmaid. Although he knows the former to be a
‘silly, spoiled child’ (68) and the latter to be true to him, he chooses
badly, joining in the shady activities of the real fatal woman and leaving
the devoted barmaid to reflect ruefully that she has not made him ‘any
better, any steadier’ (191). The more insight the protagonist is given in
telling innocence from guilt, of course, the less noir the narrative is
likely to be, and the closer to a ‘male defence of beleaguered virtue’
form, however seemingly unconventional the virtue is. This is most
transparent in a simple and only marginally noir novel like Hell’s Angel,
written by Stephen Frances under his Hank Janson pseudonym.¹⁹  An
ill-assorted group sheltering from an approaching hurricane in a coastal
hotel in Florida includes two women: ‘the Blonde’, Paula, who is ‘all
woman. All sex . . .’, and Muriel, ‘a young expensively dressed woman

who acted too superior to deign to notice that anyone existed outside
of herself’ (31). When we first meet them, neither woman is given a
name, which accentuates the typing, and the contrast is underlined by
their conflicts. Muriel, charging that Paula is no different from ‘“a pro-
fessional”’, is told by Janson that ‘respectable’ women only differ from
her because ‘“their price included a wedding ring”’ (90). It is, of course,
the blonde’s own fortitude and cunning that actually resolve the danger,
in a situation in which the ‘good woman’ is worse than useless.

The confined space of the hotel in Hell’s Angel is used to establish a
social microcosm, containing a representative collection of prejudices
and misperceptions. In American noir of this period, it is again very
often the small town that serves as this kind of microcosm, within
which negative judgements of the apparent femme fatale are used as a
measure of bigotry and of the limitations of a conformist ethos. In
Charles Williams’ Stain of Suspicion, the hostility of a small town is
turned against a woman, Mrs Langston, who appears to fit the stereo-
type of the femme fatale, and, in town gossip, is widely assumed to have
killed her husband in collaboration with her lover. The very respectable-
looking wife of the sheriff, Mrs Redfield, is, however, the actual mur-
deress, whom we eventually realise must be the femme fatale on the
novel’s 1961 cover. She has killed her previous husband as well for a
small insurance policy, but has not been found out because ‘she’s not
the type’ (129): ‘I was positive she’d killed a man, and maybe she’d killed
two, but you couldn’t really believe it. I looked at the modest cotton
dress, the flat slippers, the pony tail . . . this was the generic young sub-
urban housewife . . .’ (154). Day Keene’s Notorious is similarly plotted to
reverse a town’s ‘accepted’ assessments of two female characters: Marva,
a nightclub singer, who is typed as a loose woman from the moment
she returns to the town she had left in disgrace, and her opposite
number, the apparently regular and virtuous postmistress, Hannah
Merry, ‘one of the nicest girls in town’ (153). The latter not only kills
but uses her position to throw suspicion on Marva. By foregrounding
the real killer’s methods of manipulating local opinion, Notorious implic-
itly suggests the type of the femme fatale (nightclub singer, suspected
call girl) is a construct of the small-town mentality, a ready-made image
easily summoned up by a cunning rival.

In the above examples, it will be clear that what such novels often do
is to exonerate one strong woman (the supposed ‘scarlet woman’) whilst
identifying another kind of strong woman (the covert tramp and killer)
as the source of evil. The tough woman remains suspect and dangerous,
even though female independence seems to be endorsed, as when

Marva stands up to her accusers, showing that there is ‘nothing weak
or helpless about her’ (64). Several writers of the time, however, by
focusing on the culpability of female passivity, much more completely
overturn the bad/active versus good/passive dichotomy. Although there
is a sense in which these are also ‘woman-blaming’ narratives, they
implicitly  support  female  self-assertion.  John  D.  MacDonald,  for
example, who often conveys a sense of admiration for tough-minded
women, also includes in his novels numerous examples of female
characters who make the mistake of passivity and whose willingness
to submit to male violence serves to encourage it. Betty Mooney in The
Damned (1952) lets go of her ‘hard core of independence’ (139) in her
relationship with Del Bennicke, not only becoming dependent on a
brutal man but allowing ‘pain and humiliation’ to make her his prop-
erty. Sylvia Drovek in The Crossroads (1961), a masochist who responds
to being dominated and frightened, is used and victimised by the men
in the novel. Lois Atkinson, in The Deep Blue Good-by (1964), acknowl-
edges in her self-diagnosis that she is a natural victim who too readily
acts on a ‘concealed desire’ to accept the kind of domination inflicted
on her by Junior Allen, under whose sway she feels a kind of ‘terrorised
lethargy’ (42-4).

The point is made even more strongly in novels that pair the passive
woman with a more assertive and active counterpart, in the process
forcing us to see female aggression as a healthy contrast to obliging
weakness. Dolores Hitchens, for example, in Stairway to an Empty Room
(1951), juxtaposes the soft and compliant victim/villain Biddy, whose
crime has consisted of effacing herself (by pretending to be a murder
victim), with her sister, Monica, a resourceful detective figure and
self-declared ‘old maid’, fastidious and ‘picky’ (11). Controlled by a
manipulative scoundrel, Biddy has gone along with a plot to murder
another exploited woman, whose body is taken for hers - a crime for
which her own husband is wrongly imprisoned. The rightness of the
more forceful sister is confirmed through Biddy’s abandoned child,
whom Monica first calls ‘Biddy’, but then reflects, ‘She’s not soft and
sweet like Biddy. She’s - savage’ (17). It is a savagery that is ultimately
vindicated, since the child’s fierce proclamation of her father’s inno-
cence is proven right.

The reassessment of the apparently blameless, passive, victimised
female can also be seen in Prelude to a Certain Midnight (1947), by Gerald
Kersh, who was one of the most individual writers of British noir during
this period. Kersh’s novel, which centres on the murder of a child by a
sadistic killer, much more explicitly places the blame for male violence

on masochistic submission in women. Female abjectness is embodied
in Catchy, a woman who is so sweet-natured that ‘she gave everything,
took nothing, and forgave those who ill-treated her . . .’ (8-9). The
opening glimpse of an older Catchy creates her as a tearful, still
masochistic woman who becomes grotesquely drunk in order to forget
(‘I’d do anything for you, I’d lie down and let you walk on me. I’d be
your slave. . . . You’re so strong, so ruthless, so powerful . . .’ [13-14]).
Ironically, given that the murdered child Sonia ‘thought the world of
her’, it is the masochism of Catchy that stirs the sadistic impulses in the
murderer who kills Sonia. The investigating detective sets out in some
detail the theory of the ‘willing victim’: ‘any woman who gets a thrill
out of suffering and submission will . . . stimulate some man . . . to feel
he’s compelling her to suffer and submit’ (51-3). Although Kersh gives
only qualified approval to her main foil (Asta Thundersley, the ‘sympa-
thetic . . . Battleaxe’ [29]), he leaves no question as to Catchy’s guilt, and
the brutal last paragraph of the novel is given over to her ‘maudlin grief,
stale liquor and decay’, making the narrator long for a high wind ‘to
blow her and her kind from . . . the fly-blown face of the exhausted
earth’ (191).

One of those who most consistently works by revising stereotypes of
opposed female types is David Goodis, who was amongst the most orig-
inal and compelling of American paperback crime novelists in the fifties
and sixties. Critics have often observed that Goodis repeatedly creates
two types of woman, the fragile, waif-like woman, and the fat, aggres-
sive woman (an ‘obese, muscular caricature of female dominance, that
he really desires’, but who seems to the protagonist to block his true
happiness with his ‘true love’).²⁰  There is an element of truth in this,
but it is also the case that the repeated pattern is transformed into a
source of narrative and thematic interest by the ways in which Goodis
uses the central contrast to consider the femme fatale/good woman
duality.

In Cassidy’s Girl (1951), for example, the play with this dichotomy is
signalled by the title itself: is ‘Cassidy’s Girl’ going to turn out to be
Mildred (the sexually aggressive woman) or Doris (the waif)? The Doris
relationship is linked to a romanticised vision of a dream-escape to
South Africa; the Mildred relationship, on the other hand, is associated
with what seems throughout most of the novel to be a dead-end envi-
ronment. Having established the contrast, however, Goodis then over-
turns it. The ‘nightmare’ milieu is in fact inhabited by people capable
of taking control and asserting their own power, whereas Doris, a
princess-in-the-tower figure, does not want to be freed. One of the

strengths of the novel lies in its movement towards a refutation of the
more conventional noir association of urban sordidness with fatality,
and the irony centres not just on Cassidy’s delusion about the nature
of the choices available to him but on his misreading of the women
who define his options. The reader at first tends to accept Cassidy’s view
of Mildred as a powerful female luring him to destruction, an impris-
oning force who seems to have ‘put a curse’ on him (136-7); in his rep-
resentation of Doris, Goodis again uses metaphors that are deliberately
misleading, suggesting in the early scenes, for example, that she and
Cassidy can rise up together like ‘battered, choked animals’ (41). He also,
however, issues warnings about Doris which Cassidy himself refuses to
see, describing the ‘lost dead look far beyond caring’ (48). In a redemp-
tive final showdown, Doris sits oblivious to the scene while Mildred and
Shealy (a cynic who insists on recognising the extent of their entrap-
ment but who is also capable of purposeful action) demonstrate a
human strength that Cassidy has previously failed to recognise in them
because of his own self-contempt for being so ‘fallen’.

Goodis’ tendency is always to use his pairs of women to tease out con-
flicts within the protagonist himself, gradually revealing self-deception
and self-division, representing the crises faced in terms of choices posed
by contrasting relationships. In The Burglar (1953) both key women -
Gladden and Della - are sympathetic victims as well as fatal women,
and Goodis foregrounds from the beginning the inclination of the male
world to blame women alone for its failures. The plot hinges on the
choices that the protagonist has to make with regard to these relation-
ships, and we ultimately realise that this depends mainly on an unre-
alised and unresolved tension in his own mind, largely centred on the
‘child-woman’, Gladden: once again the sexually active female, the
‘typed’ femme fatale, turns out not to be the destructive force within
the novel. Street of No Return (1954) similarly uses contrasting women
to figure the protagonist’s own weakness. Female aggression is located
in the sadistic Bertha, a grotesque caricature of a woman who takes plea-
sure in beating a man into submission; female allure in the loved
woman, Celia, a contradictory combination of prostitute and childlike
purity. Although she is in thrall to the brutal Sharkey, Celia herself is a
sustaining force. It is only when Whitey finally gives up his hopes of
her that he loses his male purposefulness altogether and descends to
Skid Row (‘he could feel his spinal column turning to jelly’ [86]), and
it is only his final glimpse of her some years later that briefly gives him
back his ability to act with some integrity and courage. Celia, then, obvi-
ously forms part of a very familiar sexual triangle (the woman of a pow-

erful male whose possession of her is challenged by a weaker male), but in comparison to the traditional femme fatale, she is in herself a woman who strengthens rather than weakens the protagonist.

Seeing through men

In the same year as Street of No Return, Goodis published The Blonde on
the Street Corner, in which he more explicitly establishes his paired
women not just as the embodiments of male self-division but as con-
structions of the protagonist. Each woman is in her own way disturb-
ing to the male sense of self. The poor pale Edna is too good for ‘a
no-good bum’; the blonde on the street corner threatens to trap him
with her ‘bargain-counter merchandise’ (79-85, 1-2). In many of the
best noir thrillers of the period, the figure of the femme fatale in par-
ticular is seen through the eyes of a protagonist whose own views are
presented as warped, possibly even deranged, and the effect is to under-
mine the stereotype, revealing it to be the product of male fantasy,
desire and the will to dominate. This satiric exposure of male percep-
tions can be an important element in novels with multiple points of
view. John D. MacDonald, for example, in his non-Travis McGee novels,
uses multiple perspectives as a means of challenging stereotypes: in The
Damned (1952), when we are allowed access to the thoughts of the
mama’s boy, John Carter Gerrold, we see that his disturbed view of his
new wife as a murderess explains his capacity for violence towards her;
in The Neon Jungle (1953) we see women misperceived through the eyes
of such characters as Walter Varaki (who likes imagining that he is Mike
Hammer) and Vern Lockter (a psychopath who satisfies his power drive
by controlling women). In novels which focus our own perceptions
through a single protagonist, some of the most effective writers - espe-
cially Charles Williams, Charles Willeford and Jim Thompson - struc-
ture entire narratives around the satiric presentation of the male point
of view, implicitly reassessing the role of the tough and triumphant
femme fatale.

The destabilising of point of view is, of course, a crucial element in
film noir as well as literary noir, though it is not generally possible to
handle this as flexibly in film as in novels. Christine Gledhill, for
example, analyses the significance of the fact that the images of women
projected in film noir are produced in the course of male investigations.
Female sexuality is contained and rendered less progressive, though
voice-over and flashback structures can to some extent serve to under-
mine the male perspective, suggesting that the story a male narrator

tells is wrong, or at least part of a ‘complex web of stories’.²¹ In literary
noir there is often a much stronger emphasis on the distance between
the narrating voice, with its expressions of male judgements, and the
woman who is being observed and judged. This leaves room not only
for an ambiguous response on the part of the reader but for a more
radical reversal. It might permit a complete ironising of the male per-
spective, creating both a subversive representation of male stereotypes
and a space within which the strong, independent woman can get and
even sometimes keep the upper hand. The noir thrillers of this period,
in representing the male need to control women’s sexuality in order not
to be overwhelmed by it, are often looking critically at this male need.
They are in this respect comparable to the neo-noir films of more recent
decades (for example, Vertigo, Chinatown, The Grifters), in which the
threats posed to a man’s welfare or psychological stability are repre-
sented as the projection of male anxieties. Perceived threats reflect male
fears related to uncontrollable drives, the loss of will, subjectivity and
conscious agency.²²

An early example is Eve (1945), by James Hadley Chase, in which a
first-person narrative is used to ironise the narrator’s sense of ‘knowing
himself’. Both Eve and the narrator, Clive Thurston, are characters who
live many lies. His resentment of her duplicity is put into perspective
by our recognition of his own more serious deceptions. He leads a
‘secret’ life as an ‘exceedingly unpleasant person’, not only dishonest
but  unethical  and ‘worthless’ (21-2).  Clive  is  ironically  planning

to write a ‘satire on men’ when he himself is the figure in the novel
ripest for satiric exposure, inhabiting a spiritual-intellectual wasteland
summed up in the title of a work by a genuinely talented rival author:
The Land is Barren. Although Eve’s role is to tempt men and disorder
their lives (being both literally a whore and the mythic Eve), there
is, in contrast to most cinematic versions of the temptress, a strongly
sympathetic  explanation  of  her  nature,  and  she  remains  at  the
end a kind of eternal principle of tough female self-assertion, whereas
the narrator, who has assembled his male persona out of the qualities
of others, is punished by damning self-revelation: ‘I have . . . stripped
myself’ (9).

As with other strategies for subverting gender stereotypes, it does not
necessarily follow in such texts that the representation of female char-
acters is itself positive. Even if chief blame is shifted to male weakness,
the woman can still be duplicitous (like Eve) or as brutal as the men
with whom she is involved. This can be seen, for example, in Hurry the
Darkness (1951), by Maurice Procter, a British ex-cop who was mainly

known for a series of police procedurals written in the fifties and sixties,
such as Hell Is a City (1954).²³  In Hurry the Darkness, Procter creates a
femme fatale, ‘Bud’, who seems at first to have all the conventional traits
of the man-devouring spider woman. Although she does not, during the
course of the narrative, rise markedly in our estimation, a shift in per-
spective puts her at the end in the position of sympathetic transgressor
in flight from the inevitable consequences of her action. She has (justi-
fiably, we feel) shot the male protagonist, Jeff, whose perspective has
dominated the rest of the novel and whose views of her are explicitly
identified as a product of his own failings: ‘Because Jeff knew that he
had treated Bud unfairly he drowned a spark of regret - which he did
not understand - in a flood of abusive retrospection. . . . She would lie

down in the heather with any man who asked her. She was promiscuous, irresponsible, dishonest . . .’ (150).

Many American novels of the fifties expose in more thoroughgoing
ways self-serving male valuations of women. Wenzell Brown’s The Naked
Hours (1956)  begins  as  a ‘lost  weekend’  novel,  with  Jack  Cowan,

presented through close third-person narration, waking up next to ‘jail-
bait’. His first thoughts are murderous ones: ‘Cut it out, he warned
himself. You were thinking the same thing about Agnes only last night.
You got killing on your mind . . .’ (7). Cowan has a suppressed past
(prison and dishonourable discharge, followed by a mercenary marriage
to Agnes, ‘hitched to some old bitch that’s heavy with dough’ [15]).
Although he draws back from murder, the real violence of Cowan’s
nature is imaged in his twinning with a dark double, Bassie, who looks
so remarkably like him that he seems ‘an extension of his own being’

(75). Cowan reflects that ‘if he were Bassie’ it would be easy to silence
Lily by strangling her, and this suppressed violence conditions all of his
judgements. Having already agreed to the murder of his own wife, he
wishes he had ‘choked the life out of [Lily]’ earlier (149). When Cowan
is brought to trial for his wife’s death, readers are able to see clearly
how his actions appear to someone other than himself, and they are
given no reason to accept his own rationalisations. In the end, only
his panic and drunkenness seem to stand as extenuating circumstances.
Gil Brewer’s Wild to Possess (1959) is another close third-person narra-
tive that reveals the protagonist’s own character through his assessment
of the women with whom he has actual or potential sexual relation-
ships. Four women in all are presented through the eyes of this deeply
flawed and aggressively male character: one (the wife he has killed)
was ‘like a wanton. Greedy and insatiable’ (18); another is ‘a bitch . . .
a lay. To anybody who comes along’ (150); a third, ‘a knock-out in jet

and cream’, reminds him of his dead wife (64-5); and even Rita, who
is in a small way the heroine, is judged with male scorn (‘She was
going to be the helpful type. That was all he needed’ [62]). As he sums
up his position, he reflects, ‘“. . . you can’t trust any woman, so what
the hell?”’ (150).

It is in first-person crime novels, however, that the possibilities for
ironising male stereotyping of women can be most fully exploited. Pub-
lished in the year following Wild to Possess, Nude on Thin Ice (1960)
shows  Brewer  sharpening  his  satirical  focus  by  creating  a  heavily
ironised first-person narrator. Callously abandoning one woman, the
narrator speeds off in pursuit of another woman perceived in terms of
his own sexual fantasies. It is entirely appropriate that his punishment
at the end is entrapment with a woman who has ceased to maintain
herself as an imitation of male fantasy, instead reverting to the antithe-
sis of the blonde, sylph-like ideal - ‘that short fat girl with the oily black
hair’ (142). Charles Willeford also plays entertainingly with the figure
of the self-deceived narrator who alternately desires and fulminates
against the fatal women in his life. Willeford, writing paperback origi-
nals from the mid-fifties on, seems to have intended publishing with
Gold Medal, but as Lee Server says, his eccentricity, his ‘Nabokovian
sense of humour’ and his ‘generally insane’ protagonists interfered with
sales to the more established paperback houses.²⁴ In High Priest of Cali-
fornia (1953) Willeford presents one such protagonist, the cold and ma-
nipulative Russell Haxby, whose point of view is repeatedly undermined
by the ironising of his cynical judgements: Alyce’s concealment of the
fact that she has a syphilitic husband is particularly unacceptable to him
because it is ‘the kind of deal that men pulled on women - not women
on men’ (43). This is juxtaposed with patently insincere moralising. He
avers, for example, that marriage is a sacred trust and develops his com-
plaint about the way in which Alyce has treated ‘an upstanding fellow
who had the best intentions’ (43). Even in Willeford’s Wild Wives, a
more conventional treatment of sexual triangles, the narrator’s assess-
ments of Florence (the woman with whom he becomes involved) are
undermined by his characterisation as a contemptuous user who is
himself as guilty as Florence is of trading sex for money (74-5).

As will be apparent from these examples, there was, well established
by the mid-fifties, a varied and lively noir practice of ironising male self-
deception and the distortions of masculine conceptions of women.
Unquestionably, however, the two writers most fully identified with this
type of satirised protagonist (generally though not invariably a first-
person narrator) were Charles Williams and Jim Thompson. Contribut-

ing paperback originals to imprints like Gold Medal and Dell, Williams
showed himself to be one of the period’s most subtle crime writers,
demonstrating, especially in his novels of the mid-fifties, what Geoffrey
O’Brien calls a capacity for ‘relentless exploration of male character’.²⁵
Though  he  is  not  as  savagely  eccentric  and  original  a  writer  as
Thompson, he convincingly adopts the personas of narrators whose
shoddy morality, unscrupulousness and lack of self-knowledge are part
of the substance of the narrative. One of Williams’ most gripping pieces
of male self-exposure is Hell Hath No Fury (1953), probably better known
as Hot Spot, the title chosen for Dennis Hopper’s quite faithful 1990 film
adaptation. The descriptions of the femme fatale, Dolores Harshaw, all
suggest overripe sexuality. With her ‘bos’n’s vocabulary’, her drinking
and her vacillation between being kittenish and belligerent, she is a cari-
cature of woman as sexual predator: ‘God knows I’ve always had some
sort of affinity for gamey babes, but she was beginning to be a little
rough even for me’ (35). Although Dolores, like Victoria Haines in Whit-
tington’s Web of Murder, can objectively be said to possess many of the
attributes of the spider woman, Harry’s judgements of her are put into
perspective by the fact that he so readily categorises her with the other
women he thinks of as having bedevilled his life (‘What was my batting
average so far in staying out of trouble when it was baited with that
much tramp?’ [37]). His own complete amorality and self-interest are
revealed throughout to be the actual cause of his troubles, and are abun-
dantly apparent before he has anything to do with Dolores. Like the
protagonists of Nude on Thin Ice and Web of Murder, he happens upon
the femme fatale he deserves: ‘“We belong together. . . . We need each

other. You said I was a tramp; well, did you ever stop to think you’re
one too?”’ (113). Her ‘snare’ is her knowledge of his guilt, and Williams
devises a nicely ironic reworking of the eternal devotion theme: ‘“You
said nobody could ever take my place, and you’d never be able to leave
me. I thought that was awful sweet. Don’t you?”’ (109). It is crucial to
the plot both that she is triumphant and that she is, for Harry, a dread-
ful fate - and it is arguably a weakness in Hopper’s film that for Harry
to drive away at the end with a Dolores played by Virginia Madsen
seems too little like a punishment. In the novel, the grim ironies of the
end are made painfully clear: ‘I’ve found my own level again, and I’m
living with it’ (184-5).

In A Touch of Death (1953) Williams creates a narrator who, like the
protagonist of Hot Spot, claims a certain amount of sympathy. Again,
though, we become very aware both of his own uncertainties in judging
the femme fatale and of his corrupt and entirely mercenary motives. He

not only loses the contest with the femme fatale but ends confined in
a lunatic asylum, her schemes having so entirely discredited his narra-
tive of events that he is deemed crazy. The woman, Mrs Madelon Butler,
is the classic spider woman. She is also, however, allowed enough lati-
tude, within the narrative of Lee Scarborough, to establish a conceiv-
ably sympathetic explanation for her conduct, and, like the femmes
fatales in such neo-noir films as Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) and
Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), ‘ruthless and amoral’ though she is,
she has some admirable strengths - intelligence, sophistication, cool
determination - and uses these to safeguard her own interests. The nar-
rator’s attitudes towards women are established from the outset as
blithely exploitative. She asks, ‘“You take women pretty casually, don’t
you?”’ and he replies, ‘“There’s another way?”’ (14). His obsession with
the money becomes overwhelming, ultimately itself arousing sexual
passion, as when Madelon ‘stirred the loosened bundle with a caressing
slowness . . .’ (167). The effect of her poise and skilful self-fashioning is
that the narrator never knows whether she is acting or not, whether she
is teasing and mocking him. He feels he has the upper hand and will
literally and metaphorically screw her, but she turns the tables by simply
walking away with money that he ultimately realises she has been
carrying all along. What finally unhinges him and makes him ‘wake up
screaming’ is his uncertainty to the end about what her real intentions
were, and we, as readers, are left equally in the dark.

Another Williams femme fatale who resembles the potent women of
neo-noir movies is Mrs Cannon in The Big Bite (1957). Like Touch of
Death, this is a novel with a mercenary hard man as narrator, himself
satirised as he judges the femme fatale, displaying even more obvious
male prejudice than Harry Madox and Lee Scarborough. Mrs Cannon,
represented as much the more intelligent of the two, not only is able
to outmanoeuvre the protagonist but is capable of seeing through to
the real implications of the position she is in. It is she who is given the
bleak insights of the noir vision of the world:

I wonder how long that veneer of toughness would have lasted if
you’d ever had the intelligence to see, just once, how many ways
there are in this world you can be utterly destroyed by random little
sequences of events. . . . We’re all destroyed . . . for wanting too many

things and not caring how we get them (150).

Although she is doomed at the end, she takes ample revenge. With con-
siderable poetic justice she leaves the narrator, John Harlan, trapped by

his own arrogance and scheming. From their early conversations we see
the narrator’s judgements as over-confident and dangerously mistaken.
Williams drives the point home by having Mrs Cannon match his
macho comments with little parodies of male sexism, as when she puts
him down by returning his own insult, telling him, ‘“Just don’t be an
egg-head. You’re stacked all wrong”’ (106). When she turns the tables
on him, her appraisal is devastatingly accurate: ‘subtlety is not his dish
of tea’ and ‘psychological fine points’ are not his forte (137-40). In the
end, she sees to it that he receives both the money and an exactly appro-
priate revenge, rectifying his emotionally barren life by bequeathing
him ‘”the only emotion - besides greed - that I believe you capable of
feeling. Fear.”’ It is a sophisticated torment, allowing him to ‘“savour
[his] emotion to the fullest”’ (183). As in Hot Spot and Touch of Death,
Williams leaves his protagonist tortured with ironic appropriateness for
his greed and stupidity, outmanoeuvred by a woman he has underrated
and treated with condescension.

Jim Thompson often exposes the self-deluded ways in which even
quite ordinary men (like Roy Dillon in The Grifters) judge the mothers,
wives and girl friends in their lives. When he pushes the characterisa-
tion of his protagonists further towards the psychopathic, he creates a
sense that stereotypical representations of women are not just reflec-
tions of male greed and self-satisfaction but projections of disturbed
minds. Dusty, the narrator of A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), is, as his name
implies, someone who suffers from an inability ever to see things with
complete clarity. Afflicted by the illusion that he can return to a
womb in which everything will be solved and all desires satisfied, he
kills both of his father figures and tangles himself in a web of crimi-
nality. Without one of his paradisal women, Dusty feels completely
devoid of motive power. The ‘babe’ of the title is a Utopian vision of
womanhood, ‘not just one but all women’ (6), a personification and
refinement, ageless, suggestive of manatees or goddesses. Dusty thinks
of his entrapment as financial when in reality it is psychological, and
his construction of the eternal woman is symptomatic of his inability
to move beyond his own traumas.

In the same year, Thompson published his most disturbing portrait
of an unhinged male mind, A Hell of a Woman (1954), in which the nar-
rator is the door-to-door salesman, Frank ‘Dolly’ Dillon, whose nick-
name captures something of the inadequacy of a man who is forever
failing to assert himself in the male world. Thompson gives Dolly, who
is very evidently responsible for his own failures, free rein to rant against
the women in his life, creating with cumulative force the image of a

mind possessed by hatred. As the novel progressively distances the
reader from his self-pitying, self-justifying voice, it becomes clear that
to Dolly every woman is ‘a hell of a woman’, an emasculating tramp he
can blame for his troubles in the world. So, for example, when he hits
his wife, he adopts what to him is a reassuring manner: ‘I leaned against
the door, laughing . . . I hadn’t really hurt her, you know. Why hell, if
I’d wanted to give her a full hook I’d taken her head off’ (28). After she
throws him out, Dolly begins to tell us about how he got married to
Joyce:

No, now wait a minute! I think I’m getting this thing all fouled up.
I believe it was Doris who acted that way, the gal I was married to
before Joyce. Yeah, it must have been Doris - or was it Ellen? Well,
it doesn’t make much difference; they were all alike. They all turned
out the same way (31).

It is characteristic of Thompson’s darker novels that, towards the end,
almost every view Dolly expresses has acquired ironic force. In the sec-
tions written by ‘Knarf Nollid’, Frank Dillon reveals still more about
himself than he does in the other narrative, composing ‘Through thick
and thin: the true story of a man’s fight against high odds and low
women . . .’ (95). As the narrative becomes increasingly surreal, and
Dolly’s murders do not enable him to ‘depart this scene of many tragic
disappointments’ (103), he drifts on to an even more symbolic woman,
‘the lovely Helene, my princess charming’, at which point narrative
coherence breaks down altogether:

And right at the start it made me a little uneasy; I got to wondering
what was real and what wasn’t: And maybe if I saw her as she really

one more bag like all the rest

was, I wouldn’t be able to take it. But that was just at first . . . I mean she had to be

a bag in a fleabag, for Christ’s sake, and I couldn’t go any

beautiful and classy and all that a man desires in a woman . . .
(179-80)

One line of narrative recounts Helene’s (the emasculating harpy’s) castration of Dolly, another (which we take to be reality) his selfmutilation and suicide, the culmination of Dolly’s self-destruction -
‘. . . and she didn’t want it, all I had to give . . .’ (184-5).