Volume 9, No. 4, Winter 1993-94
Subversion is natural to a lesbian writer. Already perceived as
subversive readers (spotting the lesbians, transforming male lovers
into female), when we set pen to paper we find it temptingly easy to
play with convention. And what convention could be more alluringly
overturnable than that of the crime novel, once the bastion of forces
of social order and patriarchal law and now a riotous free-for-all
field of literature that still, strangely, has rules and
expectations.
When the reader picks up a science fiction novel, she expects to
be transported in time and place to another, perhaps extraterrestrial
or alien, culture where she will come across odd landscapes and
unusual technology, invented words and imaginative social behaviors.
When the reader picks up a crime novel, she expects, if not a murder
or two, then at least an unexplained disappearance, a kidnapping, a
theft or a heist. She expects a wide variety of characters with
hidden pasts and dangerous motives; she expects even the most
pleasant person in such a novel to be capable of murder or at least
cheating, stealing and dissembling. The reader also expects decent
characters who are falsely accused and characters with small faults
that loom large. The reader expects a central character who has some
notion of justice, some curiosity and some guts. An investigator who
never takes no for an answer, who asks questions and demands or
puzzles out answers. She who is philosopher, detective, prosecutor
and judge. She who is neither victim nor bystander; she who rejects
the role of passive observer in favor of speech or action.
Although crime novels seem realistic, they are not. They are
shadow plays, and what is being dramatized is not so much good and
evil, but truth and lies. It is in the juxtaposition of social
realism and stylization, in the elision between expectation and
invention, that the subversively-inclined crime writer may find her
subject and style.
Let me count some of the subversions I've tried to perform on
convention: murder among a small closed circle of acquaintances, a
circle that happens to be a collective (Murder in the
Collective); the search for a teenage hooker -- a staple of male
detective novels (Sisters of the Road); the murder of a
prominent person with a hidden, unsavory past that only gradually
comes to light (The Dog Collar Murders). In these novels, the
question and answer method of investigation is used extensively, not
only to elicit alibis and confessions, but to create a dialectical
voice. However, in each novel, I also work with such issues as
racism, prostitution and pornography to create a dialectic on
subjects that are often part of the unexamined, but titillating,
backdrop to murder mysteries.
All three of these Pam Nilson novels follow certain conventions of
their own, and in this they are quite in tune with other overtly
feminist crime novels of the '80s. The crimes focus on injustice
towards women and explore family secrets and institutionalized
aggression. They also call into question some of the hypocrisy and
rhetoric of the feminist movement. The novels show an independent but
not autonomous female investigator in the process of forming and
acting on feminist values. As a lesbian, Pam is not immune from
injustice and stigma, nor invulnerable to violence against women.
Indeed, the incident at the end of Sisters of the Road did not
shock because it is uncommon, but because it goes against what we
expect in crime novels. Investigators may be threatened, drugged,
beat up, tortured and left for dead, but their sexual boundaries are
never disturbed.
With my fourth crime novel, I decided to try subversion from a
different angle. The pressure I'd felt in the 80's to write as a
social realist was lifting and I wanted to experience my playful,
even frivolous, spirit again -- to laugh more and sermonize less. I
found my new narrator in Cassandra Reilly, a translator of Spanish
and South American literature, a woman who travels frequently and
lives nowhere. Gaudi Afternoon is a farce, a mystery without a
murder, a caper in which the precious item stolen back and forth is
animal, not mineral. The plot plays with the notion of disguises and
false identities so dear to the hearts of crime writers. Set in
Barcelona, the novel introduces an investigator who is also a working
translator. As a translator myself, I see Cassandra Reilly's
profession as a device that gives her a plausible reason to travel as
well as allowing her to engage in all the word games and
misunderstandings that the juxtaposition of languages can create.
Trouble in Transylvania, the second in the Cassandra Reilly
series, takes up some of the themes of the first novel -- motherhood,
lesbian desire and the question of home -- and does so in a more
mythologized fashion. At heart it is a serious book that circles
around my preoccupations with tolerance of difference, and with loss
and death. The delight to me is being able to talk about these
essential themes in a circus atmosphere.
The stylized form of the mystery has always lent itself to parody,
pastiche and satire -- witness Mary Wings' deliciously over-the-top
Raymond Chandler act in She Came Too Late. Satire has always
appealed to me as well, but it is in wordplay and slapstick, in
intellectual and physical action, combined with the structure of
naming a crime and investigating it, that I've found some of my
happiest writing moments, dancing with the expectations of the genre.
