Tag Archives: femme fatale

More Indie Books I’ve Read

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Here are two more books by fellow bloggers that you might enjoy reading.

 

Get your copy of P.S. I Forgive You today!

 

Like all of D.G. Kaye’s books, I was eager to read her latest – a follow up to Conflicted Heart.  P.S. I Forgive You – A Broken Legacy  is Kaye’s most heart wrenching and intense book to date. Not surprising, considering the subject of this memoir.  It is D.G. Kaye’s and her siblings’ attempt of freeing themselves from the clutches of emotional neglect.

P.S. I Forgive You – A Broken Legacy is a testimony to the painful effects of her mother’s gambling addiction on her and her siblings. Anyone who has lived with an addict knows how destructive it can be, how much it creates guilt, resentment and a feeling of low self esteem.

P.S. I Forgive You  is heartbreaking to read but D.G. Kaye’s strength and ability to offer an honest examination of her experience is an inspiration to anyone who has found themselves with the difficult decision of turning away from a toxic relationship. Most importantly, in Kaye’s difficult journey to self love and acceptance she offers hope in her struggle to love a mother who was not able to provide the same for her children.

A tender, well written book.

Visit D.G.Kaye’s blog here: http://dgkayewriter.com/

 

 

Glass Slippers and Stilettos is a collection of ten short stories as seen through the eyes of Linden’s protagonist, Regina. In the story titled Driving Regina, whereby Regina is involved in an accident, Ana Linden writes: Little does he (the driver of the car Regina has run into) know that Regina has such emergencies once a week. This pretty well sums up Regina, along with this other line:  Men lovers are  her recreational drug.

Linden’s characters don’t have names. Instead she refers to them as Boyfriend, Lover, The Assistant, Kid, Mr. Impeccable Pedigree, and Inconsiderate. Using this technique is clever as it allows the reader to identify easily with the characters. Haven’t we all met such people in our own lives?

In some ways, Regina is a contemporary femme fatale (minus the crime) for she possesses traits often found in this archetype of literature: gold digger, selfish, heartless, manipulative, opportunist, sense of entitlement both with her friends, lovers and at work and an accomplished liar.

Although it is difficult to like Regina it is also difficult to put her down.

You can read excerpts from Glass Slippers and Stilettos here.

 

 

 

Femme Fatale

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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

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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

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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.

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.

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Femme Fatale: Blanche Lake

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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.

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Femme Fatale: Gypsy Rose Lee

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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. 

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Femme Fatale: Jennifer Rockwell

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NightTrain.jpg

 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.

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Femme Fatale: Dolly Henderson

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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.

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Femme Fatale: Laurel Gray

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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.

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Femme Fatale: Kitty Keeler

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How would you react if you were told that your two young children were murdered?

And then, not only have you seen their dead bodies at the morgue, but you are being interrogated by The District Attorney about your love life.

Kitty Keeler is not a woman to take accusations of murder lightly.

Dorothy Uhnak, Policewoman in The NYPD  for 14 years, draws from her experience to bring us a character that has all the traits of a femme fatal.

She slid around in the chair and blazed at the men standing on the side of the room. “You bastards been having fun? Listen you,” she turned back to Neary, “you want to know about my love life, my sex life, you just ask me. Ask me and I’ll tell you whatever the hell you want to know to get your kicks, to make your day.” She leaned back in the chair, folded her arms, tilted her head to one side. “And that’ll save you time, so you won’t have to send all these goddamn overpaid son-of-bitches digging into my private life. And then maybe, maybe, you can start finding out who killed my kids.” Her anger fed itself, generated an even greater fury, strengthened her, made her more than equal to deal with all of us.

Is Kitty sincere? Do you believe her distress?

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