> But are they hard-boiled or noir?
All the ones I've mentioned are hardboiled. Some are edgier
than others. Barbara Seranella, of course, had a very tough
protag--a drug addicted female auto mechanic who once hung
out with motorcycle gangs. I've only read HOW LIKE AN ANGEL
by Margaret Millar. She had a male protag named Quinn in that
one--a traditional hardboiled PI. The ending is downbeat, as
I recall, and the story twists like a pretzel, right up to
the last line.
I think Mercedes Lambert's protagonist, Whitney Logan, was
particularly tough. She's a struggling lawyer who's become
estranged from her wealthy family in Maryland to start her
own practice in LA. In her first book, DOGTOWN, she hooks up
with an Hispanic prostitute to solve a murder connected to
one of her cases. The prostitute (who makes a great
streetwise foil to Whitney, who's still learning about the
streets) ends up being her sidekick in future books. Her
client, in true hardboiled fashion, lies to her and uses her,
and Whitney ends up in a physical confrontation with her that
makes VI Warshawsky look like Mother Teresa (but you don't
dislike Whitney for it, because the client's treated her so
shabbily). Lambert's second book SOULTOWN, was hardboiled
with a noirish ending. The third, GHOSTTOWN, was hardboiled
with an ending that incorporated elements of the thriller,
noir and magical realism of all things (hard to picture, but
it did). Not what I normally read, but it re
ally w orked for me. Lambert was pushing the limits of
the genre with that one. A very unusual story.
Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton are considered
among the first women to write about hardboiled female
detectives. Of the three, I'd say Paretsky's VI Warshawski is
the toughest.
Certainly, none of these women would be mistaken for cozy
writers.
Debbi
-- Debbi Mack IDENTITY CRISIS A Sam McRae Mystery http://www.debbimack.com
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