Way back when phones were the size of a stevedore’s lunchbox, fictional, home-grown PIs came only one way—hard-boiled. We knew them by their trench coats and pulled-down fedoras, and by the Chesterfield cigs dangling rakishly from their jaded lips. Thanks, Hammett, Chandler, Himes, Spillane!
Fedora guy kept it loose, easy. He talked tough, lived tough, drank tough. He was a loner, disagreeable to most, the death of any cocktail party. He was up when the city slept, asleep when it hummed. He trolled mean streets, playing both sides, taking up for little guys with names like Mugsy or Squeak, who lived their entire lives getting the short end of the stick. This PI, both hero and antihero, meted out his own brand of justice, often with hands that weren’t so clean.
In PI Guy’s world, right was complicated and wrong, well, wrong was situational and likely announced itself by a sap strike to the back of the head or a violent rough-up from dumb goons with cast-iron fists. This iconic PI, his ethos, the armchair peek at society’s underbelly was fiction gold.
But as good as the stories were, as recognizable as PI Guy became, even as a kid, I could see no good reason why Samuel Spade couldn’t just as easily have been a Samantha. I mean, Nancy Drew solved crimes in River Heights all the time. Granted River Heights wasn’t exactly Hell’s Kitchen, but, hey, she got it done. . .and without a hat. So where was hard-boiled PI Woman hiding out? She would have seen right through “Miss Wonderly” and solved that whole Maltese Falcon thing lickety split.
We had soft-boiled female sleuths galore, of course–often the brash, rich, nothing-but-time-on-their-hands kind, who tooled around the English countryside in roadsters. These noisy Nancys, for want of anything better to do, accepted weekend invitations to lavish manor houses where they invariably stumbled upon the dead body of Colonel Mustard, or some such, sprawled on the floor of his study. Oh the constables are called, sure, but Ms. Soft-boiled, bored out of her gourd, and in possession of a ravenous curiosity strong enough to fell a dozen cats, takes it upon herself to unmask the murderer herself. . .just in time for tea and crumpets. Thanks, Dame Christie (no first name required).
Christie wrote more than eighty mystery novels, and I think I read them all. I’d buy a paperback, start in on it, and then stuff it in my back pocket or backpack till I could get back to it. When I finished the book, I’d add the well-thumbed copy to my teetering book pile, pluck another one off the top, and start the whole process over again. The stories featured the egg-shaped Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, or the keen-eyed elderly spinster Jane Marple from quiet St. Mary Mead. There was also Tuppence Beresford, and her husband Tommy, and Ariadne Oliver, the mystery writer, whose career I hoped to someday emulate. There were others, of course. I loved them all. They were all so genteel, so civilized, and so devilishly fun. There were hunting parties and masquerade balls, high tea, low affairs, and enough poison to dispatch half of Hampshire. I was an African-American kid from the South Side of Chicago. It wasn’t a fit you’d expect. Eventually, every pair of jeans I owned had one worn pocket.
Then 1982 rolled around.
Every Sunday, it was my habit to listen for the Chicago Tribune to hit the front porch. At which point, I’d barrel down the stairs, open the door and grab the massive thing off the mat before anyone else in the house got any ideas. At the kitchen table, I’d tear the paper apart to pluck out the book section and hold it in my hot little hands. I waited all week for that section. It was a thing. Section. Check. Bowl of Cheerios. Check. Show time!
From front cover to back, I’d read about all the genius writers whose new books would soon be added to my leaning pile of fiction. As far as I was concerned, they were fairy people who could conjure up entire worlds out of thin air and write it all down for the rest of us to gasp at. They were rock stars, friggin’ word warriors, and, strangely, I felt a kinship, though it would be years, years before I wrote anything that didn’t stink.
This Sunday, my eyes eventually drifted down to a review of a new book titled Indemnity Only, by a writer named Sara Paretsky. The book featured a female PI in Chicago named V.I. Warshawski. Hmmm. I lived in Chicago, I thought to myself. Didn’t I love PI Guy? Hadn’t I been the one wondering where Samantha Spade was hiding? Well, here she was. My Cheerios went soggy. I hit the bookstore the next day.
Yes, bookstore.
These were pre-Amazon days when there were tons of bookstores all over the place and you had to actually walk into one of them, find the right genre and search the shelves (alphabetically by the author’s last name) until you found the book you came in for. You could stay for hours in a bookstore, browsing, reading, deciding, without a single soul shooing you out the door. And that new book smell? There’s nothing like it. You can’t get that from an e-reader. But I digress.
I found Warshawski. She was right there on the shelf, brand, spanking new—Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski, V.I. for short. Sam Spade in a designer suit and heels. And she wasn’t alone. When I checked, of course I checked; there were others like her—Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone. Others followed—Linda Barnes’ Carlotta Carlyle, Karen Kijewski’s Kat Colorado, Barbara Neely’s Blanche White, many, many more. It was as if someone opened up a pirate’s chest and dumped a huge pile of rubies at my feet. I didn’t have nearly enough pockets.
Where had these characters been all my life? The real question was where had I been. I’d been in St. Mary Mead with the tea and the crumpets. . .and I’d nearly missed Samantha Spade! No offense to Dame Christie (Agatha, if you really need the nudge), but this was a fictional sea change. So long dusty drawing rooms on English estates. Vaya con dios poisoned thimbles and stabby passengers on deluxe trains departing from Istanbul. PI Woman had arrived.
But something was different; something besides the gender shift. The PI had been turned on its ear since the days of tank-like Studebakers and crowded automats. PI Woman, unlike PI Guy, had a life. She had people, pets, plants, lovers, daddy issues. She still championed the underdog, the streets were still mean and the goons hadn’t gone too far, but PI Woman lived in the world, not on its fringes. She was capable and smart and dogged. She didn’t type memos or make her boss coffee. She was her boss. She didn’t wait for someone to save her; she bloody well saved herself. (Oops, went English there for a second. Still a little Christie in there.) PI Woman stood her ground, pushed the envelope, and didn’t give a fig what anyone thought about it.
PI Woman came in all shapes and sizes. She was black, white, Asian, Hispanic, straight, gay, complicated, easy. She was the world in microcosm, and I couldn’t read the stories fast enough.And PI Woman came in all shapes and sizes. She was black, white, Asian, Hispanic, straight, gay, complicated, easy. She was the world in microcosm, and I couldn’t read the stories fast enough. My bookshelf collapsed under the weight of all the new books I piled on top of it. And somewhere along the way, I managed to voice my own aspirations to create my own characters, write my own stories, and now, knock wood, I do. No fedora. No cigs. No trench coat. Plenty of snark, though, and goons. Goons are good. Goons make me happy. (Scratch that: Fictional goons make me happy. Don’t come at me, bro.)
My PI Woman stands on the shoulders of giants, and I’ve gone all in to put my own spin on the fearless gumshoe, the hard-headed tec with more nerve than good sense, who will follow a lead all the way to the gates of Haddes and back. I don’t know, maybe I could toss in a trench coat one of these days, maybe even a fedora just for the heck of it. It’ll be my hat tip (ha) to the heroic outsider.
And maybe one day some kid will run down for the Sunday paper, pluck the book section out of the mess and see a review of my book there. I hope so. I also hope the review is good. I’d hate to mess up now. But that kid won’t have to ask why there isn’t a Samantha Spade. Thanks Paretsky, Grafton, Muller, Neely, (seriously, no first names required), and many, many talented others. PI Woman is out there doing the thing, dodging bad guys, solving the case, and I can’t wait to read what she does next.
