From “A Scandal in Bohemia” to The Big Sleep, from the LA of James Ellroy to the Harlem of Chester Himes and far beyond, there has always been a close relationship, a complicity, perhaps even a romance between crime fiction and sex work in all its forms – from prostitution and concubinage to burlesque and pornography. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder – ex-cop and ex-drunk, finds love with a high-class escort who opens an antique shop on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho, leftist gourmand and PI, is roused to action by his girlfriend, Charo, when she and her fellow prostitutes from the Barrio Chino are wrongly blamed for a murder. Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, a Hollywood detective, is driven to seek justice for his mother, a slain prostitute. Even Sherlock Holmes finally meets his match and bête noire in the form of “well-known adventuress” Irene Adler.
In my own modest efforts, from The Serialist or Mystery Girl, to my Joe the Bouncer series, sex work of various kinds seemed to keep popping up naturally. One could blame my dirty mind or just growing up in New York, especially in the 70s and 80s. But when I set out to write what became Behind Sunset, a neo-noir set in the porn world of LA, and inspired partly by my own adventures working for Hustler as well as Chic and Barely Legal, I began to give the matter some more serious thought. Here, for your consideration, is what I came up with:
One might say: of course these two types end up crossing paths; they both dwell in the world of crime. And one would be right, yet the sheer ubiquity of the sex worker’s presence – in everything from Klute or Body Double to the Paris of Simenon or the Sicily of Camilerri, far exceeds other common offenders like bank robbers or car thieves. This is due, I believe, to the intimate nature of of the places where, all puns intended, they rub up against each other.
For one thing, we are not just dealing with crime here, we are dealing with what the police might still somewhat quaintly call “Vice.” Gambling, drugs, bootlegging – all these forbidden pleasures that become bad habits generate a particularly potent breed of compulsion and obsession – as well as OCD itself – and sex work is the most seductive, most addictive and at times most toxic of all. Then there is the inherent secrecy of it, the raw vulnerability of even the toughest characters when they are naked in the dark. Not too mention the many unmentionable secrets sex workers keep – adultery, fetishism, queerness in the age of the closet. As Simenon’s wise Inspector Maigret observes: most killers have a need to confess to someone, “even if it’s just a prostitute.”
This leads us into the realm of motive, which is to say human drama, most of which is summed up in the phrase “Romance and Finance.” Or to put it another way, “Sex and Work.” More than just a description of a field it is a formula for excitement and trouble, thrills and chills. Whether it is a blackmail scheme, an erotic obsession, a doomed love triangle or a serial killer – sex work produces plot lines. That volatile combination is a potent generator of Lust, Love, Jealousy, Greed, Shame, Rage and Fear. Whether these are sins or not is for others to debate, but as a crime novelist I will dub them the The Seven Deadly Motives. No wonder that, while minding their own businesses, detectives and sex workers are constantly bumping into each other.
My ultimate thought about the synergy or sympathy between crime fiction and sex work applies specifically to the denizens of that extra demi level of the demimonde: hardboiled detectives and the noir world in which they thrive. As we all know, the books that line this shelf of the mystery section are particularly modern, urban, doomed and dark, both romantic and cynical in the way that only hopeless romantics can be. It is also, in origin at least, distinctly American, a homegrown genre that has spread around the globe, wherever lovers kiss passionately while knifing each other in the back.
These books and films portray characters fighting to survive in the urban jungle, or in a hollowed out countryside transformed by industrialization, loners seeking home or escape, hunters after vengeance or justice, hustlers chasing one last big score. Governments are corrupt, cops are bent, religion a con, activism uselessly naive. All businesses are essentially rackets. Friendship is transactional. Society is a giant machine designed to crush us into pulp. And love? Love is lust in a silk dress, or whispered by a slick liar, in other words, a sucker’s game. And when it is real, and “true”? That’s when it is most dangerous, as one noir hero and heroine after another fatally fall for each other.Who in this gritty, hard-edged, anti-sentimental world is even more streetwise than the private dick? The streetwalker, that’s who. She is the one who truly walks down these crooked streets alone. And in high heels.
Essentially, this is a world in which everyone and everything is for sale, including love. In other words, a capitalist world, of an especially late-modern, all American style. And this is, for me, the real heart of the matter, the reason that the sex worker is in some ways the crime fiction character par excellence. After all, who else features as often in all the main roles: victim, suspect and motive?
During my own sojourn in the world of porn, one of the main lessons I learned was how much the “sex industry” (again the name says it all) was not only an extreme, outlaw, underground aspect of society – it was paradoxically also right at the center, providing me with a kind of direct, dare I say, naked, view into the mechanisms that drove the culture. Here was desire in all its forms, and flesh in all its flavors, being processed into money on a vast scale, and every player, from customer to provider, top to bottom, was caught up in the game.
But so, to some extent, is everyone who has a job, or needs one, in our fallen world: whether chained to a desk, stuck in a factory, working in a field or working Wall Street instead of the Deuce, we are all trading our time and bodies for money and hoping to trade that for our desires. Many dream of winning the game. Some even dream of getting out.
Most of the folks I met were just working girls and boys trying to make their way as best they could, peddling whatever they had to lonely joes looking for human warmth in a cold world while trying to outrun the predators. Some were tragic victims. A few were ruthless operators, getting fat off the unfulfilled longings of others and using everyone as objects. Sound familiar?
And this, I submit, is exactly the world that all the great modern crime writers tried to show us through the eyes of their detectives, from Hammett and Chandler on up to the present, a drama equally on display in every porn site or strip club, if you only have eyes to see.
So then, who is the hardboiled detective, who has somehow saved the shreds of their own soul, going to finally fall for? It is their true partner, of course, the other wised-up survivor seeking love in the wrongest places, the hooker with the heart of gold.
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