Femme Fatale

Posted on 2016-06-01 by Carol Balawyder

June is National Crime Reading Month. What better time to introduce my Femme Fatale Series.

What I like about the Femme Fatale character is her independence, her intelligence, her strength, her high sense of self-esteem and her belief that she can have whatever she sets her heart on.

photo found http://csarringtonchs.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/filming/

The Femme Fatal is an extremely gorgeous woman who knows how to use her sexuality as a weapon to get what she wants from the men in her life, sometimes leading them into very dangerous and murderous situations.

Source: www.flickr.com/photos/stf-o/14099398573/

The male protagonist (often a detective on her trail) who inevitably falls for her, is immediately in trouble. At best, he will suffer from a heartbreak, but more usually, she will convince him to commit crimes in exchange for the promise of having her.

Lauren Bacall: To Have and Have Not

If one were to package the Femme Fatale the warning on it would read:

Beware: May cause death.

I hope you’ll drop by my blog so that together we can discover these lethal women staring in some of the best of Noir fiction.

Femme Fatal:Gloria Denton

Posted on 2016-04-01 by Carol Balawyder

Femme fatale Gloria Denton is smart, tough, crooked, ruthless, glamorous and unlike traditional Femme Fatales (Vera Caspary’s Bedelia and Dorothy B. Hughes’ Laurel Gray) Denton is approaching middle-age.

In the casinos, she could pass for thirty. The low lighting, her glossy auburn hair, legs swinging, tapping the bottom rim of the tall bettor stools. At the track, though, she looked her age. Even swatted in oversized sunglasses, a wide brimmed hat, bright gloves, she couldn’t outflank the merciless sunshine, the glare off the grandstand. Not that it mattered. She was legend.

The unnamed first person narrator of Queenpin is a book-keeper, some twenty years younger than Denton and whom Denton takes on as her protégé. In the seedy world of gangsters and racketeers Denton teaches her young apprentice how to prosper :

I gave him my best walk, half class, half pay broad. If you can twist those two tightly, fellas don’t know what hit ‘em. They can’t peg you. It gets them — the smart — ones — going. Spinning hard trying to fix you. You’re like the best parts of their grammar school sweetheart and their first whore all in one sizzling package.

Although Queenpin was published in 2007, the author, Megan Abbott, sets her novel in the 40’s but with a feminist twist.

Traditionally, a femme fatale is completely male-defined: the fatale becomes what they desire because it grants her power over them. Gloria does no such thing. She embodies power, respect, and the promise of violence. She does not mince her words or flaunt her body, and she ALWAYS does her own wet-work… “If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else”. SOURCE

Noir Crime Fiction Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott has won awards the length of my arm starting with the Edgar Award for best paperback original novel for Queenpin from the Mystery Writers of America. She’s picked up such prizes as The Barry Award, Booksense Notable Pick and was nominated for the Hammett Prize, The Shirley Jackson Prize, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The Folio Prize. Her novel The Fever (2014) was listed by Amazon as one of the best books of the year while The New York Times, People and Entertainment Weekly named it one of the best books of the summer. The list of accolades for Meagan Abbott goes on and on.

Here’s more on Queenpin and Megan Abbott:

http://www.meganabbott.com/

http://noirwhale.com/2012/02/25/noir-crime-fiction-queenpin-by-megan-abbott/

https://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/queenpin-by-megan-abbott/

http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.ca/2008/05/noir-sex-and-betrayal-interview-with_12.html

Femme Fatale: Bedelia

Posted on 2014-08-23 by Carol Balawyder

Bedelia is a sexy, sensitive, emotional fragile female who is good at playing the role of the submissive, doting, perfect housewife in need of protection by a strong man.

Husband beware. There is another side to this attractive damsel in distress.

As her mask slowly slips away, Bedelia is revealed not only as a pathological liar but as a woman who has learned to manipulate men’s expectations of women with deadly efficiency. Bedelia is a complex killer protagonist; instead of driving men to crime and destruction, Bedelia is a hard-boiled murderer herself… (Afterword in Bedelia, p. 204).

Although Bedelia’s bank account increased with each of her husband’s supposedly natural deaths, Caspary is more interested in commenting on the few ways that women at that time (the novel was set in 1913 although Caspary wrote it in 1943) had of getting ahead.

Continue reading →

Femme Fatale: Blanche Lake

Posted on 2014-08-08 by Carol Balawyder

What makes Blanche Lake a femme fatale?

She doesn’t try to seduce the detectives who are investigating the case of her missing daughter as did Kitty Keeler in The Investigation.

Although Blanche Lake is an attractive woman who has just moved into New York City with her three-year old daughter she is not drop-dead gorgeous as is Jennifer Rockwell in Night Train.

Nor is she money hungry like Dolly Henderson in Honor Bound.

Blanche Lake is very frightened and very disturbed.

Though little physical violence is present in the novel, Piper brutally deals with the psychological violence that is a common theme throughout her noir thrillers.

Evelyn Piper was Merriam Modell’s pen name. She has also been referred to as Miriam Levant, the name she was given on her birth in Manhattan in 1908. Her novel The Innocent – a domestic suspense novel was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and Bunny Lake is Missing was made into a Hollywood film.

Continue reading →

Femme Fatale: Gypsy Rose Lee

Posted on 2014-07-28 by Carol Balawyder

Content Image

Gypsy Rose Lee in 1937 (AP Photo)

What makes Gypsy Rose Lee stand apart from other Femme Fatales I’ve written about so far, is that she is both author and protagonist of her noir thriller, Mother Finds a Body.

Written in 1942, Mother Finds a Body is an off-the-wall novel set in a desert mobile home inhabited by wacky burlesque characters. Gypsy Rose Lee was herself an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She made her New York Broadway debut in 1931 at The Republic theater.

Mother Finds a Body was Lee’s second murder mystery, although there is controversy as to whether Lee hired Craig Rice ( Queen of the Screwball Mystery) as ghost writer or collaborated (as editor, perhaps) on the writing of Mother Finds a Body.

Continue reading →

Femme Fatale: Jennifer Rockwell

Posted on 2014-07-14 by Carol Balawyder

Jennifer Rockwell, the Femme Fatale in this contemporary novel is dead and it is up to Detective Mike Hoolihan- an emasculated female detective (“If you take intelligence from me, if you take it from my face, then you really don’t leave me with very much at all.”) – to find out why.

Night Train is Martin Amis’ literary police procedural crime novel and true to literary type novels, character comes before plot. Hints that Jennifer Rockwell is a femme fatale are dropped throughout the novel.

Continue reading →

FEMME FATALE: JEAN MCVEIGH

Posted on 2014-07-07 by Carol Balawyder

The Husband

Unlike many femme fatale, Jean McVeigh is neither beautiful, nor curvy. She was too thin, sallow flesh, too pale in tone for her untinted brown hair covered her jutting bones sparsely. No artifice enhanced her womanhood but this, in a certain way, gave her class.

Jean McVeigh does, however, have what most femmes fatales want: money. She comes from a family of wealthy people on both her father and mother’s side. And like most femmes fatales she is lonely.

In a hotel bar in London, she meets Stuart Howell, a dashing, young man with a series of failed investments and in love with Valerie a girl he desperately wants. (We know where this is going, don’t we?)

Her (McVeigh’s) preoccupation with him was out of all proportion to the circumstances, or to sanity. She told this to herself over and over but failed to weaken her intense longing for another meeting. Jean was at a bad point of her life, the end of one phase and the beginning of nothing.

Continue reading →

Femme Fatale: Dolly Henderson

Posted on 2014-06-30 by Carol Balawyder

The copy of Honor Bound which I read in the special collection of the National Library was so old (1934) that I was not allowed to take it out. I had to be careful as I turned the rough, yellowed pages so as not to have them disintegrate into dust in my hands.

Dolly Henderson in Honor Bound appears to be sweet and wanting to do the right thing. But here’s how Faith Baldwin describes her:

“She found herself thinking of money not in terms of coinage, but in terms of power: What it made of life, the channels it dug, the harbors it created, and the ramparts it threw up around the person who possessed it. It was terrifying.”

Engaged to Hank Ellis, a man who is over his head in debt, Dolly elopes with Vankennen Norris, an extremely wealthy man.

Continue reading →

Femme Fatale : Laura Hunt

Posted on 2014-06-23 by Carol Balawyder

Like most Femmes Fatales, Laura Hunt is beautiful, elegant, utterly ambitious and mysterious. Her charm makes it difficult for men to resist her, including the detective suspecting her of murder.

Laura is a brilliant mystery both in its plot and structure. Each of the men in love with Laura is a narrator in the novel. There’s Laura’s fiancé, who is unfaithful to her even on the eve of their wedding, her jealous friend Waldo who drives her lovers away and the hard-boiled detective who can’t resist her charms.

In this passage, where Laura thinks of Shelby, the man she is supposed to marry, writer Vera Caspary shows not only literary talent but sharp insight into Laura’s psyche.

Continue reading →

Femme Fatale: Laurel Gray

Posted on 2014-06-16 by Carol Balawyder

Femme Fatale Laurel Gray is a failed and lonely actress who hooks up with a lonely, washed-up screenwriter, Dix Steele – a man with a murderous psychotic mind.

Dorothy B. Hughes, author of In A Lonely Place, introduces her Femme Fatale when she runs into Dex, who lives in the same apartment building as she does.

The girl didn’t move for a moment. She stood in his way and looked him over slowly, from crown to toe. The way a man looked over a woman, not the reverse. Her eyes were slanted; her lashes curved long and golden dark. She had red-gold hair, flaming hair, flung back from her amber face, falling to her shoulders. Her mouth was too heavy with lipstick, a copper-red mouth, a sultry mouth painted to call attention to its promise. She was dressed severely; a rigid tailor suit, but it accentuated the lift of her breasts, the curl of her hips. She wasn’t beautiful, her face was too narrow for beauty, but she was dynamite. He stood like a dolt, gawking at her.

Although In a Lonely Place has a tense, dark atmosphere, it isn’t without its smart-ass humor. Hughes delivers this through Laurel, a tough woman not about to fall into Dix’s charm.

Continue reading →

June is National Crime Reading Month. What better time to introduce my Femme Fatale Series.

What I like about the Femme Fatale character is her independence, her intelligence, her strength, her high sense of self-esteem and her belief that she can have whatever she sets her heart on.

The Femme Fatal is an extremely gorgeous woman who knows how to use her sexuality as a weapon to get what she wants from the men in her life, sometimes leading them into very dangerous and murderous situations.

The male protagonist (often a detective on her trail) who inevitably falls for her, is immediately in trouble. At best, he will suffer from a heartbreak, but more usually, she will convince him to commit crimes in exchange for the promise of having her.

If one were to package the Femme Fatale the warning on it would read:

Beware: May cause death.

I hope you’ll drop by my blog so that together we can discover these lethal women staring in some of the best of Noir fiction.

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Bedelia is a sexy, sensitive, emotional fragile female who is good at playing the role of the submissive, doting, perfect housewife in need of protection by a strong man.

Husband beware. There is another side to this attractive damsel in distress.

Although Bedelia’s bank account increased with each of her husband’s supposedly natural deaths, Caspary is more interested in commenting on the few ways that women at that time (the novel was set in 1913 although Caspary wrote it in 1943) had of getting ahead.

Share this:

Like this:

What makes Blanche Lake a femme fatale?

She doesn’t try to seduce the detectives who are investigating the case of her missing daughter as did Kitty Keeler in The Investigation.

Although Blanche Lake is an attractive woman who has just moved into New York City with her three-year old daughter she is not drop-dead gorgeous as is Jennifer Rockwell in Night Train.

Nor is she money hungry like Dolly Henderson in Honor Bound.

Blanche Lake is very frightened and very disturbed.

Though little physical violence is present in the novel, Piper brutally deals with the psychological violence that is a common theme throughout her noir thrillers.

Share this:

Like this:

What makes Gypsy Rose Lee stand apart from other Femme Fatales I’ve written about so far, is that she is both author and protagonist of her noir thriller, Mother Finds a Body.

Written in 1942, Mother Finds a Body is an off-the-wall novel set in a desert mobile home inhabited by wacky burlesque characters. Gypsy Rose Lee was herself an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She made her New York Broadway debut in 1931 at The Republic theater.

Mother Finds a Body was Lee’s second murder mystery, although there is controversy as to whether Lee hired Craig Rice ( Queen of the Screwball Mystery) as ghost writer or collaborated (as editor, perhaps) on the writing of Mother Finds a Body.

Share this:

Like this:

Jennifer Rockwell, the Femme Fatale in this contemporary novel is dead and it is up to Detective Mike Hoolihan- an emasculated female detective (“If you take intelligence from me, if you take it from my face, then you really don’t leave me with very much at all.”) – to find out why.

Night Train is Martin Amis’ literary police procedural crime novel and true to literary type novels, character comes before plot. Hints that Jennifer Rockwell is a femme fatale are dropped throughout the novel.

Share this:

Like this:

Unlike many femme fatale, Jean McVeigh is neither beautiful, nor curvy. She was too thin, sallow flesh, too pale in tone for her untinted brown hair covered her jutting bones sparsely. No artifice enhanced her womanhood but this, in a certain way, gave her class.

Jean McVeigh does, however, have what most femmes fatales want: money. She comes from a family of wealthy people on both her father and mother’s side. And like most femmes fatales she is lonely.

In a hotel bar in London, she meets Stuart Howell, a dashing, young man with a series of failed investments and in love with Valerie a girl he desperately wants. (We know where this is going, don’t we?)

Her (McVeigh’s) preoccupation with him was out of all proportion to the circumstances, or to sanity. She told this to herself over and over but failed to weaken her intense longing for another meeting. Jean was at a bad point of her life, the end of one phase and the beginning of nothing.

Share this:

Like this:

The copy of Honor Bound which I read in the special collection of the National Library was so old (1934) that I was not allowed to take it out. I had to be careful as I turned the rough, yellowed pages so as not to have them disintegrate into dust in my hands.

Dolly Henderson in Honor Bound appears to be sweet and wanting to do the right thing. But here’s how Faith Baldwin describes her:

“She found herself thinking of money not in terms of coinage, but in terms of power: What it made of life, the channels it dug, the harbors it created, and the ramparts it threw up around the person who possessed it. It was terrifying.”

Engaged to Hank Ellis, a man who is over his head in debt, Dolly elopes with Vankennen Norris, an extremely wealthy man.

Share this:

Like this:

Like most Femmes Fatales, Laura Hunt is beautiful, elegant, utterly ambitious and mysterious. Her charm makes it difficult for men to resist her, including the detective suspecting her of murder.

In this passage, where Laura thinks of Shelby, the man she is supposed to marry, writer Vera Caspary shows not only literary talent but sharp insight into Laura’s psyche.

Share this:

Like this:

Femme Fatale Laurel Gray is a failed and lonely actress who hooks up with a lonely, washed-up screenwriter, Dix Steele – a man with a murderous psychotic mind.

Dorothy B. Hughes, author of In A Lonely Place, introduces her Femme Fatale when she runs into Dex, who lives in the same apartment building as she does.

Although In a Lonely Place has a tense, dark atmosphere, it isn’t without its smart-ass humor. Hughes delivers this through Laurel, a tough woman not about to fall into Dix’s charm.

Share this:

Like this: