The Gritty World Of Crime Fiction

In Black Widow’s Wardrobe, Gloria Damasco as a Chicana detective transgresses into a traditional masculine profession proving that women are capable to do an equal or better job than men. Historically most protagonists of the detective novels have been male, while female characters are portrayed ether as hysterical or as the damsel in

In the past few decades, a new stream of research has emerged in American crime and criminality. It entails the study of sensationalized murder stories. Such an inquiry is critical to understand Americans past in crime and criminality. Case studies such as the murder of Jewett are riveting thus creating a nuanced portrait of a historical moment. Such study paints a picture on important changes in American culture and society over time. With this in mind, the paper details the sensational murder of Helen Jewett. A cursory glance at the argument shows that Jewett personality and lifestyle shatters the common ideas particularly in popular minds about prostitutes as pathetic and broken persons living impoverished lives. However, understanding Jewett murder demand a closer look at the 1830s and 1840s prostitution.

“A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story written by Susan Glaspell in 1917 illustrates early feminist literature. The two female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, is able to solve the mystery of who the murderer of John Wright while their male counterparts could not. This short story had been adapted from Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles written the previous year. The play consists of the same characters and plotline as the story. In both works, Glaspell depicts how the men, Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale, disregard the most important area in the house, the kitchen, when it comes to their investigation. In the end, the women are the ones who find clues that lead to the conclusion of Minnie Wright, John Wright’s wife, is the one who murdered him. Both of Glaspell’s female characters illustrate the ability to step into a male dominated profession by taking on the role of detective. According to Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, written by Lois Tyson, a reader-response critique “focuses on readers’ response to literary texts” and it’s a diverse area (169). Through a reader-response criticism from a feminist lens, we are able to analyze how “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles depict how a patriarchal society oppresses women in the early twentieth century, gender stereotypes confined both men and women and the emergence of the New Woman is illustrated.

Social criticism can be involved in detective fiction, we see equality of the sexes being laughed at. Men in “A Jury of Her Peers” written by Susan Glaspell story, make fun of women, and Glaspell is deliberately critiquing the way men see women. Also, Klein argues that in detective fiction stories the detective is a detective male and the victim is always female. Which refers to in most detective stories women are just the laughing victims in the story and not the hero or seen as the favorite.

Lisa Scottoline in the novel, Lady Killer, skillfully illustrates the reality between the law and relationships. Scottoline supports her demonstration by telling the story between Mary DiNunzio, her work, and friendships. Scottoline’s purpose is to capture the reader with realistic events that are normally not talked about in order to grasp the interest of her readers, and reveal the reality of criminal justice. Scottoline writes in a conversational tone for her young readers without previous knowledge about criminals nor law.

Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, is a hard-boiled detective novel; a subset of the mystery genre. Before the appearance of this sub-genre, mystery novels were mainly dominated by unrealistic cases and detectives like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. As Malmgren states, “The murders in these stories are implausibly motivated, the plots completely artificial, and the characters pathetically two-dimensional, puppets and cardboard lovers, and paper mache villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.” (Malmgren, 371) On the other hand, Hammett tried to write realistic mystery fiction – the “hard-boiled” genre. In the Maltese Falcon, Hammett uses language, symbolism, and characterization to bring the story closer to

While most of the violent crimes that happens most are them are belongs to men, women have not been the wilting flowers promoted so heartily by Victorian adorers and (right or wrong) often evident in today's society. Before we get into detail about the fascinating phenomenon of the Black Widow, it is worth a brief overview of women's escalating role in the world of violent crime, particularly in the United States.

For years, men have been overrepresented as criminal while women have been ignored. However, in the late nineteenth century and mid twentieth century people were more curious to learn about women and crimes. Men and women commit crimes for a verity of reasons some of the reasons are extremely similar and some are completely different. Both are often involved in minor property crimes and substance abuse crimes (Steffensmeier, 2000). The gender gap in crime is seen when it comes to more serious crimes, such as robbery, murder, etc.

Feminists such as (Naffine 1997: 18) believe that criminology has been ‘dominated by academic men studying criminal men'. A major concern for feminist writers on this subject is that for many the world is seen as a masculine one, despite facts clearly proving that it is made up of feminine and masculine

The hardboiled-detective genre shares almost the same characters and crime setting. This type of genre typically has a protagonist, whom seems to always be the detective himself. Despite dealing with the legal system and daily crime, it isn’t uncommon for them to get wrapped up in a romantic and sexual relationship with the commonly seen, femme fatale. The detectives in the film Maltese Falcon and Chinatown have similar attitudes, they fall in love with the femme fatale, and end up being a hero in some way.

She is typically considered to be a bombshell, very seductive, and has dangerous intentions. The detective in the story is attracted to her and cannot seem to leave her, no matter how manipulative and cunning she is, and she is often placed in juxtaposition with the protagonist. Although she is often a criminal and has feminist beliefs, she has no physical flaws and is not representative of a typical woman in society. One of the most well-known examples of the femme fatale is Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. She is able to charm Spade the second she meets him and uses her sexuality as a weapon to obtain control over the men in her life. In an attempt to get away with murder, she emphasizes her physicality and tries to cover up for her crimes by seducing

William W. Stowe continues to create an understanding of the genre where “Detective fiction tends to affirm rather than question, to take social structures, moral codes and ways of knowing the given, rather than subjecting them to thorough, principled criticism. In detective fiction, crime is usually seen as a personal evil rather than a social injustice and the detective is depicted as an ideal incarnation of competitive individualism… the truth although elusive, is ultimately

In Part II: The Private Investigator of The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction it says, “The original world of the hard-boiled detective was clearly a male one, where women were suspect and dangerous.” (as cited in Mansfield-Kelley and Marchino, 2005, p.207). In the cases of Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder, and The Gutting of Couffignal, wrote by Dashiell Hammett, this is exactly the case. Both are, in the case of Double Indemnity based off of, hard-boiled detective stories in which the women are cunning, manipulative, and dangerous. The women are strategically oriented, have little regard to others, and are selfish.

There are women in classic film noir with a similar defiant attitude, to whom the male hero often experiences a sexual attraction: the femme fatale. These women are studied as symbols of ‘peculiar’ power: carrying guns, smoking cigarettes, and going after what they want, similar to the men in these narratives (Gledhill, 1998, p. 24). The femme fatales are mysterious, ambiguous and most significantly: deadly. These women and their power are however mainly defined by their sexuality and the men often still hold the voice of authority – mainly through voice overs and flashbacks (Gledhill, 1998, p. 24). They are both desirable and dangerous to men (Kaplan, 1998, p. 16). The film noir’s femme fatale has for a long time served as a record for anxieties about female sexuality and power, which will be discussed more deeply later in this chapter. The femme fatale fights against the male domination and often ends op losing her life or freedom. “The resistance of these femme fatales are always fatal, if not to herself, it will be to the men who fall for her” (Wager, 2005, p. 4). With the dangers that her sexual performance causes, the classic genre exposed the limitations of a female heroine. It suggests that terrible things would happen if men let these sexual women distract them from their quest, and that the power that these particular women hold, is profoundly dangerous. The sex and gender issues that derive from the femme fatale’s presence supposedly trigger the inevitable demise of herself and the hero, but it is nonetheless important to notice that these early film noirs offered audiences a female character that, although destructive, is not weak, but

The police procedural is a recent addition to detective fiction. This is because “[b]efore the 1980s the police novel was a minor, and somewhat maligned, stepchild in the field of crime fiction.”[5] As one of the early police procedural novels, Ed McBain’s Cop Hater was a factor in how detective fiction came to embrace the police procedural. In doing so, it had to deal with the attitudes that caused cop characters to be considered unsuitable protagonists. This process was facilitated by efforts to make the police characters relatable, and the procedural methods they use accessible. In doing so, McBain wrote a novel that paved the way for acceptance of the police detective.