The Big Read: Tough Gals

Enjoyed a delightful panel discussion at the Mercantile Library last night. The subject was Tough Gals: The Influence of Sam Spade on the Contemporary Female Detective. Author Jane K. Cleland acted as moderator. Jillian Abbott, Alafair Burke, Cordelia Francis Biddle, Karen E. Olson, and Sharon (S.L.) Linnea all took part. (Click here for more info on them.)

I truly enjoyed the discussion, although none of the writers seemed to feel that Dashiell Hammett's depictions of women had anything to do with their own female sleuths. A common feeling expressed was that the women of the Maltese Falcon are all personifications of stereotypes, those stereotypes being male fantasies. That might be true, but to an extent, especially when it came to Bridget O'Shaughnessy, those "fantasies" were nightmarish.

Like much of noir, the lead female character in the Maltese Falcon is a shapeshifter, hard to get hold of, both vulnerable and vicious, both lover and liar. To use an apt if overworked cliche, she's like a diamond, if you will, apparently transparent, but multifaceted in a way that let her hide secrets. So yes, I think the women of the Maltese Falcon have more depth and psychological layering than the panelists seemed to want to give them credit for, especially when it came to O'Shaughnessy.

(I was also surprised that none of them commented on the fact that the women of the 1920s took part in one of the first full blooms of modernity and the women's liberation movement. They were gangsters, bank robbers, doctors and lawyers. They helped men kill and did their own fair share of killing. So I disagree with Olson's dismissal of them out of hand.)

O'Shaughnessy in particular strikes me as a tough babe. By the time she walked into Spade's office, she'd been around the world and back, traveled through some of the world's roughest countries and trafficked with some of the roughest trade. She was tough all right, and beneath her sweet exterior, as hard as nails.

Did she or any other of Hammett's characters influence my work? Of course, they did. Hammett portrayed a world of desperate people, folks who looked neat and pretty and pampered on the outside, but who were miserable, troubled, deceitful and vacuous on the inside. His sleuth was the classic cynic: the disappointed idealist who sticks to his moral guns and does the job no matter what, a guy on the outside looking in who, for the most part, doesn't like what he sees, but accepts it, works with it, moves with it.

I'm sure that Hammett's work, just like that of Somerset Maugham, also a man who wrote about marginalized people and hypocrisy within class distinctions, informed my work. I keep collections of their short stories by my bedside, just so I can read them every now and then and get a shot in the arm, so to speak. I love them every bit as much as Michael Connelly loves Raymond Chandler, whose depictions of women, by the way were no more sweet than Hammett's.