We are what we write?

C.L. Pirkis's Loveday Brooke

My "Women of Mystery" class at George Mason University has been examining the ways in which 19th- and early 20th-century women mystery writers have challenged contemporary attitudes about gender roles and gender relations. In a Victorian Era when men and women were assigned to "separate spheres" based on their "natural" characteristics (to quote a brief essay by Kathryn Hughes at the British Library), it was likely refreshing to see fictional female detectives taking the lead on investigations and besting men in the process. And even in our class's short sampling of work from the era, it's been fun to watch how the implied quickly gave way to the explicit. In C.L. Pirkis's "Drawn Daggers" (1894), for example, Loveday Brooke holds her own in conversations with her employer, Mr. Dyer—not backing down in disagreements about how to approach a case or where the truth might be found, and eventually proved right about her plans. Two decades later, Baroness Orczy could be much more direct in the first of her Lady Molly tales, "The Ninescore Mystery" (1912), where the narrator—a member of Scotland Yard's "Female Department"—states from the start: "We of the Female Department are dreadfully snubbed by the men, though don't tell me that women have not ten times as much intuition as the blundering and sterner sex; my firm belief is that we should haven't half so many undetected crimes if some of the so-called mysteries were put to the test of feminine investigation."

Even in 1912: You've come a long way, baby—right? Toss us a pack of Virginia Slims—from 1968.

Pauline Hopkins

With most texts, we've been zeroing in on the progressive elements—the ways in which these writers have conceived of their protagonists both within and then in opposition to prevailing feminine ideals, the ways in which the texts have commented on and subtly (or not) criticized the values of their eras. In the case of Pauline Hopkins' "Talma Gordon" (1900), generally considered the first mystery story by an African American writer, we've looked at how a writer can address racial issues as well as gender issues—two perhaps not unrelated parts of a more progressive agenda—both through the story that's told (the plot that unfolds, the racial themes within the story) and through a strategic awareness of the publication venue, its specific audience, and that audience's values and concerns.

What's interesting about Hopkins, however, is that even as she explores racial attitudes and gender issues with a progressive's eye, her story is more conservative on other issues, somewhere at the intersection of class, intellect, and morality—and Hopkins herself seemed to be so as well, advocating elsewhere the "amalgamation" of the races as a way to bring down racial barriers, but also stressing that it was the "worthy" blacks and white intermingling which would improve civilization, while those unworthy ones... well, as critic Sigrid Anderson Cordell explained it in a fascinating 2006 essay on Hopkins' work, those unworthy ones would be "'civilized' or removed from the gene pool."

Even in texts without the racial elements, my student saw that attention to gender equality often parted ways quickly with concerns about class inequality. Lady Molly and her companion in the Female Department were quick to dismiss men's attitudes and achievements, but the story was equally quick to villainize women of the lower-classes for greed and for sexual promiscuity—"slut shaming" them, as one of my students put it.

Much of this discussion came to a head this week as we discussed Nancy Drew—everyone's favorite girl sleuth (or nearly everyone's; see SleuthSayer B.K. Stevens' terrific dissent here).

As an icon perhaps even more than as a character, Nancy can—and certainly has—been celebrated from a number of feminist perspectives, from her first appearance still in the shadow of the 19th Amendment's ratification (just a decade before) and right up til today. As Priya Jain writes in her 2005 Salon essay "The Mystery of a Feminist Icon," Nancy was "a model citizen with a perfect balance of toughness and femininity, an icon of independence and poise. As such, she has provided a connective thread between the six generations of girls she has ushered into adulthood." And Jain links Nancy's "smarts, pluck and independence" to the passions of the first Carolyn Keene, ghost-writer Mildred Wirt, "a young college graduate filled with the ideals of suffrage and the women’s movement."

As a class discussing The Mystery at Lilac Inn, we worked through the ways in which Nancy could be considered a valuable role model (and, Bonnie, you'll be pleased to know that one student did ask, "But isn't that a lot of pressure to put on the girls reading this?"), and we circled again around that word "progressive" in terms of the images and messages in the text. But at the same time, we couldn't help but be aware of the hints of conservatism lurking at the book's core—those parallel messages about upper-middle-class values, nostalgia for the past (look what's being done to the Lilac Inn!), about respectability and social grace and unerring etiquette.

We read the 1961 edition of the book, but I also brought in the original 1930 text—almost completely different. (In case readers here don't know, the original books were rewritten beginning in 1959, so for most of us, the Nancy Drew books we grew up on were not the original Nancy Drews.) In that 1930 version, not only are class issues more evident but—perhaps hand in hand—so are some unpalatable references to race and ethnicity. When Nancy is tasked with hiring a new housekeeper to temporarily replace Hannah Gruen (called away by a sister's illness), Nancy first interviews a "colored woman" ("dirty and slovenly in appearance and [with] an unpleasant way of shuffling her feet"), then the next morning an Irish woman ("even worse than the one that came yesterday") and a "Scotch lassie" ("she hadn't a particle of experience and knew little about cooking"). Later in that edition, the villains are revealed to be working class, uneducated, and mostly dark-complexioned; one is distinguished by a "hooked nose."

What's most interesting here isn't necessarily the racial/ethnic prejudices—signs of those times, one might argue—or the fact that these were revised away in the 1961 edition, there already in the midst of the Civil Rights Era (and the Cold War too, my students pointed out, noting that Nancy in 1961 also keeps criminals from selling secrets to enemy agents). Instead, what's possibly most interesting is that Wirt in 1994, in an introduction to a reprint of the original Mystery at Lilac Inn, stressed that "judging from reader letters, [Nancy] never was offensive" in the same paragraph where she talks—without explanation—about the books being rewritten beginning in the late 1950s.

...all of which brought us back to our earlier discussions of C.L. Pirkis and Baroness Orczy and Pauline Hopkins and to the assumptions underlying those discussions that the authors were intentionally or strategically challenging gender stereotypes. But were they always? And even where statements about gender issues seemed explicit—as with Lady Molly and the assertions about the Female Department's superiority—was the author aware of the negative attitudes toward lower classes crying out from elsewhere in the text? Were those latter messages explicitly intended as commentary on class, or was the author simply blind to how her views (and prejudices) had snuck into the writing?

In short, I guess, how can you tell when a writer is commenting on the values of her era—and when she's simply reflecting them?

And to flip this around, how many of us writing today are explicitly championing certain values in our work—and how many of us are unaware of the values we're revealing in those same works?

A good discussion in class on these topics—and I hope maybe a good discussion ahead here.

Entering the Mainstream

In the many years I’ve been collecting them, I’ve come across only three anthologies of crime short stories by black writers. The first two are Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century edited by Paula L. Woods in 1995, and Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Writers edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland 2004. 

Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African American Writers, edited by renowned editor Otto Penzler in 2009, is the third and probably the most important because Mr. Penzler’s recognition brings African American writers of crime fiction solidly into the mainstream. 

In the introduction Mr. Penzler observes that as society changed in the 20th century “modest numbers of blacks entered such mainstream elements of the culture as academia, law, medicine, science, and the arts.” However, “very few…detective novels” were written by African American writers, and it was not until “the past twenty years or so that there has been a regular flow of detective stories by black writers.” He concludes that their “stories... transcend race and genre to fulfill their primary purpose—to inform and entertain” (emphasis added). 

One author in the late 1800s and one in the early 1990s used the crime genre to tell stories about the relationship between white fathers and their mulatto children. 

The subject of Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Sheriff’s Children,” published in 1889 in the New York Independent, is the relationship between white masters and their black female slaves and the harmful psychological effects on the children of such relationships. After the Civil War in the village of Troy, NC a mulatto stranger is arrest and accused of murdering Old Captain Walker. To protect his prisoner from a mob, Sheriff Campbell unlocks the cell door so he can escape if the mob breaks in. When Campbell turns from the window after encouraging the mob to disperse, the mulatto is pointing a pistol at him. He says he didn’t kill Walker and that he came to town to kill the Sheriff. He is Tom, the son whom the Sheriff sold before the war along with his mother, Cicely, to pay his debts. Sorry for the spoiler.  

Published in 1900 in the Colored American Magazine, Pauline E. Hopkins’s “Talma Gordon,” a locked room mystery, is “one of the first ’impossible crime stories’...by an American and the very first…by an African American.” Talma and her sister Jeannette are the daughters of Jonathan Gordon by his first wife. After Jonathan, his second wife, and their son are pulled from the fire that burned down their house, and it’s discovered that their throats were cut, Talma is accused of murdering them because her father was going to leave everything to his son while leaving her and Jeanette only $600.00 each because they are half Negro. The ending is disappointing because it smacks too much of a deus ex machina.

In the years before 1980, black writers, if they used the crime fiction genre, did so to deal with the problem of racial prejudice. The change in social conditions due to laws passed in 1950s and 1960s caused the flowering of crime stories by black writers in the 1980s. To enter the mainstream, the writers had to create characters of different ethnic groups, and the stories did not and do not always deal with the “problem.”

However, before the 1980s, Chester Himes and Hugh Allison each wrote a story featuring black and white characters that were published in two mainstream magazines, indicating some editors recognized their talent and took a chance that their readers would also.

In February 1942, Esquire published Himes’s “Strictly Business,” about a hitman nicknamed “Sure” who works on salary for a mobster. Aside from Himes’s storytelling talent, what is interesting about the story is the main character is white. I wonder if Esquire would have published the story if he had been black?

In July 1948, after Hugh Allison challenged the claim of EQMM’S editor that no subject matter was taboo, the magazine published his story “Corollary” in which black detective Joe Hill, while questioning a black chauffeur about his part in a series of robberies and the murder of five people by his white partners, realizes something the chauffeur says might help solve an unrelated kidnapping case that began with a finger a small black girl delivered to Joe. EQMM to me was more courageous than Esquire, taking a chance on readers accepting a black main character. (no photo available)

The two stories above show gradual acceptance before 1980s of black writers by mainstream magazines. As white readers began to read them in the 1980s, boatloads of novels and short stories by black writers of crime and mystery fiction flooded into the mainstream.