I grew up in a very gender-rigid environment. It was the late 80s and early 90s, it was the suburbs of leafy Berkshire in the middle-class heartland of England. It was not a great time and place to be gay but not the worst either. I learned almost everything I knew about attraction, sex, love from reading books and watching TV which, given the limited materials available at the time (there was no YA in those days to tell me I was normal) often left me feeling confused and ashamed. My sexual awakening didn’t come until a lot later on and these early experiences consisted of an occasional flash of Barbara Windsor’s boobs in the Carry On films, and one, somewhat embarrassing moment when I read Escape to Athena by Patrick Blake. It was a war novel my father had given me, and I gleefully shouted out to my mum to find out what a whore house was. My mother never let my father choose books for me again.
So because of this time, or possibly because of my father’s love of spy thrillers, war films and westerns, I grew up in a world where men were men, and women were dangerous, untrustworthy sexual predators. As liable to stab you in the back as seduce you, and always more scantily clad. These were the Femmes Fatales.
Although popularized largely by the film noir era of the 1940s and 50s, the Femme Fatale actually has a much longer tradition in narrative fiction, one that goes back almost as far as storytelling itself. A recent Guardian article (Ten of the best femme fatales), cites Circe as the earliest, the sorceress who beckons Odysseus to her bed in Homer’s Odyssey. They are mysterious, seductive women who use their charms to ensnare lovers, leading them into compromising, dangerous and possibly even deadly situations. They are always beautiful and intimidating, causing the protagonist no end of grief, even as they tempt him with pleasure. They are sexual creatures with their own agendas, albeit ones that can only be fulfilled via the bedroom; and they often come to a sticky end (pun intended).
My earliest encounters with these archetypes were the Bond women but I later encountered the literary version as well, in the form of the seductive double-crossing Vivian Rutledge, who muddies the waters of Philip Marlowe’s investigation in The Big Sleep. Private detectives, it seems, are particularly vulnerable to the machinations of these women. Sam Spade sleeps with Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, even though he knows she killed his former partner, Miles Archer.
But I wonder now if my interest in these strong, dangerous women wasn’t somehow connected to my closeted upbringing. Wary of women for reasons I could not even begin to understand at that time, there’s something almost counter-intuitively attractive to the Queer gaze about these sirens who call our heroes onto the rocks. Something that makes them gay icons just as much as the legendary actresses who played them on celluloid.
* * *
When I started writing Firewatching, I didn’t consciously set out to write an homage to noir crime but I can see now the influences are there. To begin with though, I didn’t even realize I was writing a crime novel. I had some characters and about ten thousand words by that point, and I only threw a body in as a desperate attempt to dig up a plot after the creative writing tutor who was mentoring me demanded I find one. I suppose it wasn’t a coincidence, given my reading habits over the years, but it wasn’t in any way a plan—I was making things up as I went along.
Because of this, I had a gay protagonist long before I had a detective protagonist, and when I finally accepted I was not only writing a crime story but a police procedural as well, it never occurred to me to change the sexuality of DS Adam Tyler. How could I? Even when it was pointed out to me by some early commentators that no one would want to read a crime novel with a gay lead character. “Women read crime fiction and they want to believe they can fall in love with the protagonist,” I was told at one point. Leaving aside the questionable accuracy of the first part of this “maxim”, I failed to understand the second part entirely. As far as I’m concerned you’re welcome to fall in love with Adam Tyler. He’s as unobtainable to you as his heterosexual fictional counterparts (or Miss Marple, for that matter). To change his sexuality would have been to change the character entirely. It would have made more sense for me to write another book. So that first twist of convention occurred by happenstance. The next however, was a bit more planned.
At the start of the novel, Tyler’s called to the scene of a crime where a body has been found bricked up in the cellar of a country house. The body is presumed to be that of Gerald Cartwright, a missing financier of dubious morality who owes a nod or two to the kinds of men found in a classic noir crime story. In fact, were he still alive, I can easily see Gerald hiring Philip Marlowe to track down some missing diamonds or to follow his wayward wife. At the crime scene, Tyler’s introduced to Cartwright’s son, Oscar, who is (coincidentally?) the man he has picked up in a bar the night before and slept with.
Oscar was very much intended to be my homage to the Femme Fatale. He is seductive and dangerous, and ridiculously good-looking. The morning after the night before, Tyler watches the man sleeping and tries to convince himself this could be something more than a one-night stand. He decides it can’t, because the man is too good-looking. Too confident by far in his ability to charm. Too perfect, he thinks. Perfect never works. Perhaps Tyler has read a few hard-boiled crime novels himself. He has a sense, even then, of how untrustworthy the man is. Later, when Oscar speaks to Tyler in his apartment, filling him in on his family’s checkered history, he does so dressed in nothing but a pair of bright yellow jockey shorts, languishing artfully on Tyler’s windowsill, oozing with all the sexuality of Lauren Bacall. And sure enough, before long we uncover the fact he may well have an agenda that he’s been keeping from Tyler. Have these two men met by coincidence? Or is there something darker and more dangerous at the heart of this perfect man?
* * *
Oscar is l’Homme Fatal and follows in the footsteps of many other unsavory male literary characters. In the play Gaslight, written by the often underrated novelist Patrick Hamilton, Jack Manningham is the overbearing husband who tries to convince his wife she is going insane by repeatedly dimming the lights in the house. While there is arguably less of a sense of a sexual motive behind the crime, Manningham does use his position as lover and husband to further his own agenda. This is classic Femme Fatale modus operandi.
But the well-explored trope of the cad or bounder—Jilly Cooper’s Rupert Campbell-Black springs to mind—has long been a staple in women’s fiction and romance. They might well use women for their own ends, but often it’s for the sexual gratification itself, rather than any other motive. And the stakes are generally not as high. Daniel Cleaver might be an all-round bad egg but at no point do we believe he might cause the death of Bridget Jones. In fact, he’s quite fond of her in his own, boorish way.
So if we’re exploring men who are dangerous to women, by that reckoning, perhaps we should return to Ian Fleming’s hero as well. Bond uses his sexuality as flagrantly as any Femme Fatale, often with devastating consequences for the women in his life, and while his agenda might be sanctioned by Her Majesty’s Government, and the women he seduces rarely die by his own hand, I think a case can be made that this is a very dangerous man who uses charm to achieve his ends.
Or further back still, there’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If there has ever been a more dangerous seducer in male form it’s hard to think of one. The Count seduces and beguiles his way across Europe, from Transylvania to Whitby, and more recent realisations of the character, like Steven Moffatt’s BBC adaptation, have emphasized how he uses this ability to seduce men as well as women, just as the Vampire Lestat seduces Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire series. (I look forward to the day we see James Bond jumping into bed with a man to get what he wants, as ruthlessly as he does with women. But enough about my fantasies!)
However, if we’re looking for the true Homme Fatal I think we need to stay closer to the genre their female equivalent is most associated with. And we need look no further than The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Playing with gender stereotypes became Highsmith’s raison d’etre and my own Oscar owes a great debt to the fabulously amoral Tom Ripley, arguably Highsmith’s greatest creation.
Tom is a restless, pathological sort who never settles at anything for long and fixates on others because of something broken deep within himself. Highsmith never openly states that he’s gay but Tom often protests his innocence of homosexuality, or any sexuality for that matter, “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” In a manner that suggests the Gentleman doth protest too much. There are also several hints of his sexuality from others who encounter him, views that paint him as a somewhat unreliable narrator. He remembers his Aunt Dottie’s taunts when he was a child, for example, “He’s a sissy from the ground up.”
His friendship with Dickie Greenleaf is dangerously obsessive—he’s caught trying on the man’s clothes and mannerisms in front of the mirror. So much so that, when he realizes he can’t have the object of his desire, and that, in fact, Greenleaf is pulling away from him, he plots to murder the man instead and take his place. He acts out of frustrated desire but the incredible genius of Highsmith’s writing is that we fully understand his motivations. “It struck Tom like a horrible truth… that he would never know them, and… that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them…” This is a man who desperately tries to fit in somewhere in a world that has no place for him, who manages to for a brief moment, and then has his hopes dashed so thoroughly that he takes the most extreme deadly action.
He’s an incredibly complex creation, as darkly compelling as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and it’s a credit to Highsmith that Ripley rises higher than many of his Femme Fatale counterparts, by making it to the role of main protagonist. In fact, Highsmith went on to write four more Ripley novels after the first. He may not be as sexually assured as the average Femme Fatale but he is far more dangerous, taking whatever cold-bloodied, calculated action he needs to in order to get away with assuming another man’s life. At one point he realizes he is learning Italian too well and “…studiously kept himself from learning the proper uses of subjunctive.”
There are echoes of Ripley in Highsmith’s earlier creation, Charles Anthony Bruno in Strangers on a Train too. Though the sexuality here is less overt there’s the same sense of dangerous obsession in Bruno when he meets Guy Haines and offers to swap murders with him.
To me, it is these characters who best mirror the Femme Fatale of noir literature and film. There is the same sense of narcissism here, the same pathological ruthlessness, the same threat of violence and death. These are the men I had firmly in mind when I was crafting Oscar’s character in Firewatching. Feel free to fall in love with him too, if you want to. I just wouldn’t recommend it.
