A Woman’s Eye Read online

  “MOVE OVER, MARLOWE, OUTTA THE WAY, SAM SPADE. FROM THE BIG SCREEN TO THE BEST-SELLER LIST, FEMALE PRIVATE EYES ARE IN THE SPOTLIGHT.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  … AND THE TOP WOMEN MYSTERY WRITERS STEP INTO THE LIMELIGHT WITH A WOMAN’S EYE

  “A Woman’s Eye is simply one of the best collections of mystery short stories to come down the pike in years. Editor Sara Paretsky, one of the smartest and best of the new breed of feminist crime authors, now proves that she has as fine an eye for others’ work as her own…. This is the perfect book to read [and] savor.”

  —Toronto Globe & Mail

  “These are real mysteries, both entertaining and absorbing, and these are spirited writers who give you emotional as well as mental stimulation…. Each story will not only keep you awake, it will make you think.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Absorbing … twenty-one short crime pieces by the cream of the female murder mystery writers’ crop…. What more needs to be said?”

  —The Anniston Star

  “A delightful way to discover authors.”

  —Cincinnati Post

  “All-new short tales … [by] most of the best-known women police and private investigators on the current scene.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  CONTENTS

  EYE OF A WOMAN: AN INTRODUCTION

  LUCKY DIP by Liza Cody

  “FULL CIRCLE” by Sue Grafton

  BENNY’S SPACE by Marcia Muller

  THE PUPPET by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  THE SCAR by Nancy Pickard

  MURDER WITHOUT A TEXT by Amanda Cross

  DISCARDS by Faye Kellerman

  GETTING TO KNOW YOU by Antonia Fraser

  A MATCH MADE IN HELL by Julie Smith

  THEFT OF THE POET by Barbara Wilson

  DEATH AND DIAMONDS by Susan Dunlap

  KILL THE MAN FOR ME by Mary Wings

  THE CUTTING EDGE by Marilyn Wallace

  LOOKING FOR THELMA by Gillian Slovo

  DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT by Margaret Maron

  A MAN’S HOME by Shelley Singer

  HER GOOD NAME by Carolyn G. Hart

  GHOST STATION by Carolyn Wheat

  WHERE ARE YOU, MONICA? by Maria Antonia Oliver

  SETTLED SCORE by Sara Paretsky

  THAT SUMMER AT QUICHIQUOIS by Dorothy B. Hughes

  EYE OF A WOMAN

  an introduction

  by Sara paretsky

  “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.”

  The Angel in the House spoke these words to Virginia Woolf when Woolf first tried to write for publication. The Angel was a phantasm, but its speech crystallized all the voices Woolf had heard from childhood on, telling her that women should never have a mind or wish of their own. Woolf says she struggled with this Angel for years, trying to kill it so that she could find her own voice. “She died hard,” the artist reports. “Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

  Women have been wrestling with that Angel for many centimes. It is a difficult phantom to overpower because it speaks in so many voices and with so much authority behind it. In some cases the authority is quite specific. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, wrote in 1645 that the poet Anne Hopkins “has fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, … by occasion of giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books.” He added that “if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women … she had kept her wits.”

  This kind of authority, this active pressure to keep women doing “such things as belong to women,” made it difficult for women to join the ranks of storytellers. Of course, we all look admiringly at the poet Sappho-all except the Athenian men who destroyed much of her work because she was praised more highly than their favorite Pindar. And we see the Lady Murasaki, the eleventh-century creator of the first novel, whose father-recognizing her talent-lamented she had not been born a boy. She only had the minor hurdle of learning to write by secretly looking over her brothers’ shoulders-her lamenting father had forbidden her direct education.

  By 1700 we find more than one woman writer per century, but to see a continuous chain of female storytellers we can look back only two hundred years. During those two centuries women struggled hard for the right to be published and read. In the nineteenth century they often wrote under men’s names to gain an audience-Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell for the Bronte sisters; George Eliot for Mary Ann Evans; and George Sand for Lucie Dupin Dudevant. George Sand wrote most of her enormous oeuvre at night, starting work at two or three in the morning after finishing with the management of her large household or her numerous lovers. And it is only in this century that we find enough women writing that we no longer see ourselves as odd, or worry, like the seventeenth-century poet Anne Finch, that the masculine art of poetry is making us crabbed and unwomanly.

  In some cases, women struggling to express themselves faced a bombardment of wholesale anger-furious reviews, social ostracism, public excoriation-so intense that they stopped writing. Kate Chopin experienced this reaction after publishing The Awakening in 1899. The anger against her was so intense that she wrote nothing else for publication. She died five years later at the age of fifty-three, broken by the forcible silencing of her voice.

  Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, married, with two children, leaves her husband in order to paint-and in so doing falls in love with a younger man. She commits suicide in the end, but this fate did not exonerate her or her creator, either in 1900 or today. Over and over reviewers have castigated Chopin for Edna’s “selfishness.” In 1970 George Spangler condemned Chopin for Edna’s “ruthless determination to go her own way” that is “disturbing, even alienating.”

  Contrast Chopin’s fate, and that of her heroine, with Goethe and Faust. At the end of a long life of debauchery Faust “ist gerichtet, ist gerettet”-he is judged and saved-a fate his creator, who glorified his own numerous seductions in poems and journals, no doubt expected for himself. Do any biographers of Goethe take him to task for “selfishness” or find Faust “disturbing, even alienating”? The strong expression of sexual desire is not just condoned in the male hero-it makes him more heroic.

  In a woman that desire is a sign at best of selfishness, at worst of psychosis. The character Glenn Close plays in Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest, shows that we still find female sexuality-outside of marriage, and specifically married maternity-so shocking and debasing that the character must be deranged. And as with Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, the only fitting end for Alex Forrest is death.

  It is the struggle to find a voice, to kill the Angel, to figure out what women really want, what our stories really are, that absorbs the energy of many women writers. The voices that tell us we can’t do it, or we shouldn’t do it, continue to blare at us. They may be loud and raucous, like Norman Mailer, addressing International PEN a few years ago while head of PEN USA, and saying that it isn’t possible for women to write as well as men. It’s not hard to imagine what threat women present to Mailer’s vision of his masculinity that drives him to insist that you “have to have balls” to write well; it is hard to understand why an organization dedicated to freeing imprisoned writers should elect him president.

  Mailer’s statements are so extreme that many people laugh at him, but he’s far from alone in pushing down women’s voices. Other people merely express themselves more softly. Women who write strong, even angry stories are no longer told that they are “unwomanly�
�� or “selfish.” Today, as Carolyn Heilbrun points out, we hear that we are “shrill,” “strident,” or, worst of all, feminists. We also find most women excluded from the sacred mystical canon that Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and others keep firing. And a Chicago area critic recently explained that feminists by definition cannot write great books.

  In addition to needing considerable courage even to tell stories, we women have also had to figure out what our stories are. The image of ourselves as inconstant, duplicitous, stupid, illogical, using our bodies to seduce and subvert men is such an ancient, ingrained part of our tradition, reinforced in fairy tales, epics, history, that to counteract these images by telling women’s stories makes for very heavy work. Writers as different as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf suffered from migraines brought on by the stress of this work and the self-doubts that come from countering so widely accepted an authority.

  It was Virginia Woolf who first clearly spelled out the central problem of the female artist: the conflict between her interior vision and the expectation that she subordinate that vision to her perceived primary role as a self-sacrificing angel.

  Just being able to articulate this problem was an important step toward resolving it, But many women artists-including the crime writercontinue to experience stress in taking their own visions seriously. Agatha Christie, who wrested total artistic control for production from her publishers in the twenties, and whose residuals brought in over a million pounds a year at her death, often told reporters that she regarded herself as a wife first, a writer second. One should take this statement seriously: as a sign not of poor-mouthing, but of internal conflict between her success and what she thought her womanly role should be.

  In writing mysteries, women for many years created primarily male heroes: Sayers with Wimsey, Tey with Grant, Marsh with Alleyn. When the detectives were women, they were women who did not upset male stereotypes. Jane Mar-pie is everybody’s elderly spinster aunt, essentially asexual. While sharp and perceptive, she uses her insights to shore up the patriarchal society in which she lives and operates on its fringes rather than as a professional crime investigator. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard was a bit more daring, but Baroness Orczy assures us repeatedly that Lady Molly never lost her feminine daintiness. Dorothy Sayers created a complex character in Harriet Vane, but could not allow her-or the female dons of Shrewsbury-to solve their own problems. They fester in an environment of fear and mutual suspicion for almost a year before Peter Wimsey arrives. He is able to see through the situation at a glance and in a matter of days resolves the problem for them.

  Since Sayers created Harriet Vane sixty years ago women have developed active careers in many spheres. In 1878 the U.S. Supreme Court barred women lawyers because of their “natural timidity and delicacy.” Now we have a woman Justice. When I started my first book twelve years ago, Chicago women were fighting for the right to be homicide detectives and patrol officers instead of matrons at the women’s jails. Today ten percent of the force is female. We don’t think twice about seeing women on the beat, in the courtroom, the operating room, or other exciting arenas.

  It’s because we see women doing so much that the horizons of our fiction have expanded. We can create heroines who act independently without guilt-not Jane Marples, or even Harriet Vanes-but Kate Fansler, Sharon McCone, or Kinsey Millhone, who are all present in this anthology. And our unmarried women can have affairs without needing to kill themselves afterward, or turning out to be villains like Brigid O’Shaughnessy or Chandler’s Dolores Gonzalez.

  Does that make this group of writers better than Sayers? By no means. Nor in terms of craft and talent does she have many equals today. But what we do have is the freedom to present an independent woman hero without fear of excoriation.

  Kate Chopin, the Brontes, and other pioneers made it passible for us to believe in the female artist. They turned publishing into a routine, accessible, acceptable business-they obviated the need to publish under the cloak of an anonymous lady, as Austen had to, or under a man’s name, as Sand and Eliot felt compelled to. Sayers, Woolf, and others, taking advantage of this ease of publication, made us start thinking about what a genuine woman’s voice might be.

  Twenty-five years ago Amanda Cross delighted readers with Kate Fansler in In the Final Analysis. Kate, professional, witty, feminine, took over where Dorothy Sayers left Harriet Vane: she could solve her own problems. She could investigate and resolve a murder. She could have a warm and wonderful lover but stand apart from him. Cross presented the hero we’d been waiting for all our lives.

  What began as a trickle of strong women a quarter of a century ago-with Christy Oper working a New York Transit Authority beat, followed by Cordelia Gray doing an Unsuitable Job for a Woman-has grown into a great outpouring of women’s stories. Marcia Muller gave us Sharon McCone in Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977. Five years later Sue Grafton and I flung Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski on an unsuspecting world; English PI Anna Lee joined us at the same time. Since then the number of interesting women heroes has grown past counting. They range from the private eyes to Julie Hayes in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s books, whose efforts to find her own strength mirror the struggles many American women have gone through in the last twenty years.

  This book gathers together a sample of what women have to say about women in the final decade of our century. The collection begins with Liza Cody’s story “Lucky Dip.” Being homeless and on the street are issues that we all worry about. Cody goes beyond worry to show us through Crystal’s eyes what that life is really like. A street girl, Crystal is presented without gloss or sentimentality. The horrors she witnesses, and how she copes with them, may chill you, but will also give you food for serious thought.

  The collection ends with another young girl in a different situation. Emma, in Dorothy B. Hughes’s “That Summer at Quichiquois,” is trying to sort out the passions of the adults around her. This haunting story shows us many different ways to view people, passion, and even forensic evidence.

  Between Cody and Hughes we see women struggling with a range of problems. Nancy Pickard takes a new look at jealousy and possessiveness in “The Scar.” The New Zealand setting is unusual and arresting, but the feelings, brought to life with delicate realism, have been with us for thousands of years. Private eyes Kinsey Millhone, Sharon McCone, Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, and Lònia Guiu solve cases that are far from conventional. Famous amateurs like Jemima Shore, Julie Hayes, and Kate Fansler are here. Along with these professional crime solvers are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, social workers, and Barbara Wilson’s startling story about one of the world’s most revered dead poets. We have the debut of Carolyn Wheat’s new hero, New York Transit cop Maureen Gallagher, whose struggles with sobriety and authority are as important as the torched subway bums she fights for.

  Mary Wings’s “Kill the Man for Me” is guaranteed to provoke late-night discussions: how far is it permissible to go in seeking justice or revenge? And if her solution shocks you, ask yourself if you were also offended by Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

  The one thing these stories have in common is the message that there is no one way to view women. Nor is there one way women see themselves. What we have all learned in the last three hundred and fifty years is that the reading and writing of books are “such things as belong to women.”

  LIZA CODY is the winner of a Creasey Award for her very popular Anna Lee series of mysteries and has also been nominated for the Edgar. Her rich novels featuring private eye Anna include Under Contract Sad Company, Dupe, Head Case, and Stalker, while Rift is a stunning novel of suspense set in East Africa, She makes her home in England.

  LUCKY DIP

  Liza Cody

  He was sitting against a bit of broken wall, looking almost normal. I could see him because of the full moon. It was a lovely moon with wispy clouds like old lady’s hair across its face.

  I watched the man for a couple of minutes, but he didn’t move. Well, he wouldn’t,
would he? I could see he didn’t belong-he was far too well dressed-and I wondered how he got there. This is not a part of the city men dressed like him go.

  He had not been dead long. You could tell that at a glance because he still had his shoes on. If you die here you won’t keep your shoes for ten minutes. You won’t keep your wallet for ten seconds, dead or alive.

  With this in mind I had a quick look, right and left, for anyone lurking in the shadows. If I’d seen anyone bigger than me, I’d have stayed where I was. Moon shadows are blacker than hearses, and I knew I wasn’t the only one out that night. But in the Trenches only the big are bold, and someone big would have been rummaging in the remains already. So I hopped out from behind my pile of rubble and made a run for it.

  I reached him in no time at all and grabbed his left lapel. Seven out of ten men are right-handed, and the chances are seven to three anything valuable will be in a left-hand inside pocket. I took a swift dip and came up with the winnings.

  By now I could hear stirrings-a snap of rotten wood, a slide of brick dust. I flicked his watch off his wrist and almost in the same motion made a dive into his jacket pocket. Then I got on my toes and legged it.

  I legged it out of the Trenches completely, because, although there are plenty of places to hide, the people I wanted to hide from know them as well as I do. The Trenches are useful as long as it’s only the law you want to avoid. Robbing a corpse isn’t nice, and I didn’t want to take all that trouble only to be robbed myself.

  It was just a quick jog to the High Street. On the way I stopped under a street lamp to look at what I had in my hand. The wallet was fat snakeskin, the watch was heavy gold, and the loose change was all pound coins and fifty-pence pieces. For once in my short life I’d struck oil.