FEATURE
Deadly blondes and dead blondes: Writing female-centred crime In the wake of her latest YA novel, Trouble is my Business, local author Lisa Walker examines the entrenched gender stereotypes that once defined crime fiction – and how they can be dismantled. I borrowed the title of my new book Trouble is my Business from a Raymond Chandler short story collection. Writing in the 1930s, Chandler was the master of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. I love Chandler’s pared-back writing and the dark atmosphere of his novels. But I am thrilled that crime fiction has moved on from onedimensional depictions of women. 08 | SUMMER 2022 northerly
‘All blondes have their points,’ muses Private Investigator Philip Marlowe, in Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Chandler goes on to forensically describe seven types of blondes: ‘the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach’; the ‘small, cute blonde’; the ‘big statuesque blonde’; the blonde who ‘smells lovely and shimmers’; and so on. Chandler’s female
characters are either femme fatales or dead women – deadly blondes or dead blondes. This characterisation of women as either victims or villains is par for the course in noir crime novels. In the early days of crime fiction, being a detective was depicted as a hyper-masculine activity. As Chandler says, ‘A Hero, he is everything. He must be a complete
