Critics have argued that detective narratives are a rich index of cultural anxieties... Whether it is the purloined letter of an aristocrat or a bus crash full of high school students, detective fiction has marked its place as a significant index of cultural anxieties. Though the severity of the crimes have not changed since Dupin first solved the mystery of the strangled prostitutes in nineteenth century London, detective fiction has evolved past the trite ‘whodunnit’ that was used to reassert the strength of the aristocracy and has become a transcendent cultural novel that deals with race, socio-economic critiques, political analysis and gender concerns. The detective, himself, is also a character that has incredibly strong and powerful connotations that are linked to his work, work ethic and inevitable success. In essence, while the detective fiction form has developed into a highly sophisticated means in which social apprehension can be exploited and explained, the views on gender in the classical form and hardboiled form of detective fiction are still as archaic as the magnifying glass and trench coat. To commence, gender in the classical detective novel is used as a means to reestablish the authority of the elitist male. There is an extraordinarily noticeable lack of women voices in the classical detective novel, and the woman’s presence in the classical detective novel always come in the form of the helpless victim that needs the male to save her (Porter). In the Poe stories, the presence of women are portrayed as nothing more than fleeting ghosts that vaguely interact with plotline that they originally instigated. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, while a compelling read, does very little in terms of mustering up sympathy for the female prostitutes that are brutally murdered. In fact, readers are in such awe of Dupin’s investigative process in which he uncovered the murderer, that the unbelievable and truly unexpected killer - an orangutan, overshadows the deaths of the prostitutes. Moreover, The Purloined Letter, is a tale that deals with a male character – Minister D – discovering and stealing a highly compromising and racy letter of an influential and aristocratic woman (Poe). Minister D later uses the contents of the letter to blackmail the woman and she offers a reward to anyone who can retrieve her letter (Poe). While it is the stolen letter of said prominent female character that sets the plot in motion, she is never once introduced to the reader and for the entire duration of the novel, remains hidden away to preserve her identity and reputation (Poe). In effect, it becomes a trend in classical detective fiction where the female characters seem to exist solely to either die or hide in the shadows, but even posthumous or veiled, the women still need the male detective to protect them from the antagonist in the novel. Moreover, the classical detective novel implements several stylistic conventions that serve to re-establish male power in a time where male power was in crisis (Porter). The classical detective was used as a means to privilege the position of aristocratic male as hero. Instead of the brutish, workingman who would combat violence and crime with force and strength, the classical detective uses pretentious language and never engages in physical combat, but chooses to fight with his wit and intelligence (Porter). In essence, the classical detective was established to create a new, unsoiled type of heroic male that associated heroism with intellect, instead of might (Porter). For instance, the classical detective is described from a third person point of view, mostly their male sidekick, which serves to elevate the detective’s authority and superiority (Porter). The sidekick is juxtaposed against the detective, reaffirming the detective’s seemingly endless knowledge since the sidekick is always less intelligent (Porter). By having a clearly inferior male perpetually praise the detective’s intelligence and cunning, the readers begin to elevate the status of the detective. Soon, the detective’s authority and opinions are seen as having more clout than the police – the authorities authority. Furthermore, the detective story is described from a male perspective and the allure of intelligence becomes associated respect and prestige. Centuries later, when the classical detective is adapted for a North American audience, the role of the detective will once again be used as a means in which to establish the authority of the working-class male (Braithwaite). Contrasted, the classical and hardboiled detectives represent the gendered extremes of ‘man’. The detective continually undergoes a change so they are always associated with what is considered the alpha male of the times. The female also undergoes a change, yet in all major respects, she is removed from the background and inserted into the foreground as yet another way to stress the dominance of the males. The invisible females from the classical period become femme fatales in the hardboiled literature. Yet, even thought the femme fatale is not a weak and subservient female, they are always portrayed as being constantly in a state of war for the detective against the dream girl (Porter). The dream girl is the docile, perfect representation of a woman who submits to the detective whereas the femme fatale is uncontrollable and sexual and inevitably ends up punished due to her wild sexuality (Braithwaite). The femme fatales and the dream girls, much like the classical and hardboiled detectives, come to represent the two extremes of female: the whore and the Madonna, respectively (Braithwaite). The endings of hardboiled crime narratives are often times heavy handed and moralistic, denouncing the femme fatale by having her punished via the law or death. The detectives, still able to assert their power over the dream girl, then engage in a socially acceptable, heterosexual relationship that is the foundation of the atomic family. Through the stylistic conventions of the working class hero, the hardboiled detective is described as a man’s man. In a time where there was an encroaching vehemence to the upper class, the hardboiled crime stories almost always portray the rich as corrupt and an affront to the American Dream (Braithwaite). In order to properly deal with the sleaze that rots the very essence of America, the hardboiled detective becomes a working class Superman who takes on corruption and dishonesty with his twin fists of redemption. Where the classical detective used a sidekick, the hardboiled detective does not in order to maintain his tough, solitary status as an emotionally detached male. The classical detective is viewed as a sissy to the hardboiled detective who is street smart, rather than book smart, and aggressive (Braithwaite). The hardboiled detective engages in acts of violence to emphasize his masculinity and uses a colloquial, gritty language to further distance himself from the classical model of the detective (Chandler). The hardboiled detective becomes the emblem of masculinity and ferocity by single-handedly bringing the bad guy to justice, in a society that seems to perpetually spawn evil (Chandler). In the end, the classical and hardboiled detectives were used as a means in order to maintain the dominance of the male in the aristocracy and working-class, respectively. The detective becomes the link that bridges the reader to the not-so-fictional world of the novel, and because of this, engages in a gender critique that has managed to surpass time, geography, and social class. Although one might not acknowledge that the average detective/mystery novel is anything more than a means in which to pass the time on a rainy afternoon, when looked upon critically, detective fiction offers readers a change to disappear into a world that is a perfect caricature of their own and unconsciously engage in a deeply social critique of their society. The stories themselves, while being escapist in nature, do more than simply begin and end when the reader opens and shuts the book. The incredible ability the detective novel has, is that the stories manage to creep into everyday life and allow the readers to openly judge the nature of crime. While it is highly doubtful that an orangutan will ever strangle women to death, people can still take away a sense of justice from the novel when Dupin fingers the ape and the case is solved. This sense of justice is then related into the world of non-fiction when reports of the police apprehending killers and thieves – the bad guys in the real world. The detective is frequently characterized as a liminal & transgressive social actor... In the early 1960s, detective fiction underwent a dramatic shift. Soon enough, female counterparts, leading to the emergence of the female detective, joined male detectives. Although not perfect, Honey West, arguably the first attempt at the female detective, was seen as a revolutionary concept and established a solid foundation for future female detectives. In the early 1990s, V.I. Warchowski, the street smart, tough talking, saucy feminist, was created as the first hardboiled female detective, thus completely transforming a genre of detective fiction that had previously been exclusively male. Yet, Honey and V.I. stood as polar opposites to each other, one being exclusively feminist, the other, exclusively female. While extremely popular in their time, both Honey and V.I. still lacked a certain leeway that would appease all spheres of the female and feminine. In recent years, that ambivalence was answered with Veronica Mars, a teenage private eye with the tendency for getting into trouble and troubling relationships. Veronica becomes the buffer between Honey and V.I., emphasizing how detectives are not marginal and oppositional social actors. Although inspired by first wave feminism, Honey West is viewed as a flawed representation of a feminist (D’Acci). At the end of World War Two, there is a major shift in the women’s liberation movement (D’Acci). Women no longer stay indoors and tend to the house – they are out in the workforce and refused to turn back (D’Acci). With males no longer acting as the sole breadwinner, there is a dual crisis in the roles of the feminine and masculine. This crisis of the female role needed representation, and Honey West took up that challenge. Honey brought forth the first real attempt at taking women out of their secondary roles in detective literature and cementing them in the foreground, giving them the pivotal role of the hero (D’Acci). Sadly, but not surprisingly, Honey West is met with certain roadblocks that prevent her from ascertaining the maximum potential of her genre. Honey West was only a weekly, half hour show on ABC. With such little time to develop a truly in depth plot, characters or exposition, Honey had to make due with the pre-existing dialogue of the female (Braithwaite). The time constraint of Honey West is especially relevant, due to the fact Honey is forced into a stereotyped role of what the Swinging Sixties culture dictated was the newly liberated female, thus allowing for no dept of character to develop past the superficial miniskirts, gloss and hairspray (D’Acci). Feminist critics often comment on how Honey is blatantly sexualized, objectified, and relies on males to save her in the end (D’Acci). Yet, in the same regard, by having Honey portrayed as a sexy, smart, yet ultimately helpless female, Honey is also serving as an answer for the masculinity crisis that is occurring at the exact time. Honey is very clearly a female in a man’s world, yet she is not directly threatening to masculinity since she has effeminate, girly gadgets (like a lipstick camera and non-threatening car) to assist her in her detecting, as well as Sam, her loyal friend, to save her when the situation became too overwhelming (D’Acci). By still possessing traces of a feminine weakness, Honey helped, to a degree, to alleviate the fractures in the American male culture as they dug their way out of a war, only to discover their lives, and wives, were forever and irreversibly changed. The 1990s saw the birth of the first explicitly hardboiled, feminist detective with V.I. Warchowski. Created by Sara Paretsky, V.I. manages to completely transform the hardboiled form by taking a type of detective narrative that was, up until her, exclusively male, and make it female. Furthermore, V.I. goes onto introduce, establish, and address the concerns of a woman’s authority in a male dominated form of literature by destabilizing the male authority (Paretsky). Being hardboiled for her time, V.I. recognizes that the role of the feminist woman needs to be expressed, and successfully managed to do so (Paretsky). Paretsky, with the creation of V.I., introduces a hardboiled feminist that clearly follows along the same lines of V.I.’s precursor hardboiled, male detectives (Paretsky). Since Paretsky could not ultimately undermine the entire form and change fundamental, tropic elements of the hardboiled detective, V.I., at times, engages in acts that reveal her undeniable femaleness: her emotional attachment to Robbie Baladine and her blatant sexual objectification by the male gaze in both prison an her own home (Paretsky). Yet, in both cases, V.I. finds her inner strength and overcomes the degradation and humiliation and trumps all those that doubt her - and does so on her own terms (Paretsky). Moreover, V.I. takes on the traits of the male detective, but in an explicitly female context. V.I., like Marlowe and Spade before her, utilizes in a very masculine oriented linguistic code (Paretsky). V.I. often uses wise cracks and gritty language and has a sarcastic, nonchalantness to her that is both masculine and feminine (Paretsky). In fact, the one distinctive dissimilarity between the male hardboiled detectives that come before V.I. and V.I. herself, is her reluctance to use violence. Despite the fact V.I. is perfectly capable of defending herself, whether it be with a gun or with her physical strength, V.I. chooses to think first before she reacts. V.I.’s hesitance to use violence is what makes V.I. strictly feminist instead of feminine like Honey West (Paretsky). Yet, in the post-feminist world that we live in today, Honey West and V.I. Warchowski leave a vast gap between the two extremes of female detective. With the creation of Veronica Mars in 2004, this gap is filled (Braithwaite). Veronica is without a doubt a liminal character in how she approaches her job of detecting while simultaneously living as a teenager in California (Braithwaite). To begin, Veronica is a unique type of detective, seeing as how she is a teenage girl (Braithwaite). Veronica, to combat her stereotype, is a woman acts in a masculine role by adopting feminine femininity (Braithwaite). To gather information, she dresses up in girly guises and compensated for the threat of masculinity by engaging in girl-ling (Braithwaite). By being able to dressing up her sexuality and shed it at a moment’s notice, Veronica emphasizes the leeway there is between the masculine and feminine, proving that the two are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact, two sides to the same coin. As well, her age and social standing only serve to further emphasize her minor status. Teenagers are often represented as marginal characters, seeing as how they occupy a liminal space in society, yet detectives are often viewed as authority figures (Braithwaite). Caught in this dichotomy, for Veronica, the act of detecting and living become so interconnected that the two separate spheres of her professional and social life become so blurred that it becomes impossible to distinguish where one begins and the other ends (Braithwaite). This becomes especially prevalent seeing as how Veronica is perpetually walking into scenarios where she is the wrong body in the expected space (Braithwaite). Never taken seriously as a teenage detective in her professional life and unable to shed her detective title in her social life, Veronica represents the uneasy shift from adolescence into adulthood. Works Cited Braithwaite, Andrea. Class Notes Studies in Popular Culture 1. Winter 2007. Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 1953. D’Acci, Julie. “Nobody’s Woman? Honey West and the New Sexuality.” The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict. Eds. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin. New York: Routledge, 1997. 72-93. Paretsky, Sara. Hard Time. New York: Dell Publishing, 1999. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Purloined Letter. Tales, volume 1. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845. 200-218. Porter, Dennis. The Detective Hero. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 146-188.