Chick pulp? Remembering noir from women
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- September
- 16
I admit, I hadn’t heard much — anything, really — about women writing pulp fiction until the Brooklyn Book Festival last Sunday, where I found a book by an author lauded on the cover as “the Queen of Noir.”
Dorothy B. Hughes was her name, and the book is The Blackbirder, about a woman with a mysterious past who has escaped World War II Europe. I was taken in by the opening:
The waiter was looking at her. Not just looking. He was watching. Under black caterpillar eyebrows, his cold little black eyes were crawling on her face.
She whispered, “That waiter is looking at me.” For a moment she thought she had said it out loud, that Maxl had heard her. Her lips had moved but she hadn’t spoken, only to herself. She mustn’t let Maxl guess that she had noticed the waiter. Maxl might have ordered the man to watch.
Don’t you just love that stuff?
And, if I felt bad not knowing about these novels by female writers, the foreword from the publisher tells me I’m not alone.
“Women write pulp? It seems like a contradiction in terms, given the tough-guy image of pulp fiction today.”
Modern fans of the genre, the foreword said, “would be hard pressed to name a woman pulp author, or even a character who isn’t a menacing femme fatale.”
“But women did write pulp, in large numbers and in all the classic pulp fiction genres, from hard-boiled noirs to breathless romances to edgy science fiction and taboo lesbian pulps.”
The Blackbirder begins in Manhattan and, after a murder within the first few pages, the main character, Julie Guille (or is it Juliet Marlbone? Or Marguerite Duchesme?) is off to New Mexico to find a man named Fran. A blackbirder is someone who can get a person — such as a refugee from Europe — across the border from Mexico into New Mexico.
Julie, it seems, made it to the United States after leaving from Lisbon, which you’ll remember was a key embarkation point for those leaving Europe if you recall the movie Casablanca. Remember? That was the next stop for people trying to leave, if they could catch the plane out of Casablanca, although many of them could not get the proper papers and were forced to wait…and wait…and wait…
The book is one in a line labeled “Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp,” from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Others include Laura, which became the 1944 movie with Gene Tierney; In a Lonely Place, also by Dorothy B. Hughes, and the basis for a 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie; and The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee, featuring a character named Siggy the G-String Salesman.
Classic. Just classic.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm by Ken Valenti.
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