"We'll do more. But let's take a break."
It was only then that she realized that he wasn't aroused.
She pulled her knees up to her chest.
"I've gotten ugly," she said. "You don't want me."
"Lynn, honey, it isn't that. I do want you." He poured two more glasses and brought them back to the bed. He sat down next to her and handed her one. "But I'm not as young as I used to be."
Someone else had said that to her, those same words.
Ross. And the words had always meant that he was having an affair, had slept with another woman the night before.
"Who is she?" Marilyn asked.
"What?"
"The woman you're sleeping with. Who is she?" She brought the glass inside her knees, so that she could hide her body and drink at the same time.
"A friend. Someone I've been seeing. She's not important." His voice was tight, though, and she didn't believe him.
"Does she know about us?"
"No. No one knows about us. We agreed."
"We agreed to wait."
"Come on, Lynn, you didn't think that meant I'd be celibate, did you?"
"I thought you'd wait." She had to stop herself from screaming at him. "How are we going to look for a place to live tomorrow morning when you have a girlfriend who doesn't know about us?"
"A place to live?" He moved away from her. "I think it's a little soon for that, isn't it? I thought we were going to wait."
"I did wait. I did my time. And now I want to get on with my life. If you don't want to be with me, get out."
"Get out? You don't mean that."
"I mean it. I changed my mind. I don't want you after all." She began to sob as she realized it was true. "I killed Ross for you, oh God, I killed Ross for you. And now you can't even get it up for me. I mean it. Get out."
"Not so fast." Ed's voice was cold, unloving. "I'm not ready to leave. You killed Ross for you, not for us. Although I won't say I haven't benefited. But don't forget that I'm the one who brokered that plea bargain, so you only did a year. Let's not quite say you owe me. Still, I've looked forward to tonight, and I'll be really disappointed if you send me away too soon."
Ed's face had changed. His eyes had become icy with anger. He grabbed Marilyn's arm, holding on too tightly. And his anger was arousing him. Like Ross.
Her heart was pounding, no longer from joy, though, and she couldn't think of anything to say to him.
His grip was bruising her as he pulled her closer.
She forced a smile, stopping him long enough to place her glass on the table. She looked at the champagne bottle, but she wasn't certain it was heavy enough. The lamp on the bedside table was a Tiffany replica with an iron base. The lamp might be better.
It would mean another plea bargain and another year before she was truly free. Surely she could negotiate the sentence herself this time.
"Whatever you want, dear," she murmured in Ed's ear.
She felt him relax just a little as they began to kiss. She pulled him close, allowed him to slide into the warm, moist place between her legs.
"Oh, yes," she whispered, as his thrusts became urgent.
Her right hand closed around the lamp.
Sense and Sensibility
Female PIs in the Nineties
From the time the first of the Freddie O 'Neal books was published, I would talk to anyone who would listen-mostly at places like Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime-about taking a Woman Warrior on the Hero's Journey, using mythic images in a female PI series. Thus, when Bob Randisi asked me for a contribution to a book, Writing the Private Eye Novel, I knew what I wanted to say. And I remain grateful for the opportunity to get it in print.
During the years when my desk faced a wall, instead of a window as it does now, I had a corkboard at eye level where I could tack notes, cartoons, quotations, and anything else that struck me as at least momentarily inspirational. The arrangement was random, subject to the whim of the morning. Few thoughts remained tacked to the wall for long.
One of my favorites, one I have kept on the original three-by-five card with a tack hole through it, is from an essay by Natalie Shainess on Antigone, heroine of a Greek tragedy. The daughter of Oedipus, Antigone accepted a death sentence from her uncle Creon rather than agree to a blasphemous but politically expedient act.
"Antigone is not the average woman," Shainess wrote. "But she is what the average woman might become: a person of autonomy, high principle, not narcissistically self-involved, and not defensively suffering, but willing to take risks to live authentically."
I can't come up with a better description of a contemporary female private eye than the one Shainess has given a character from the 2,500-year-old Greek myth.
I wanted to start with that thought because more attention has been given to the female PI's debt of character to her male counterpart than to her place as a direct descendant in a long line of heroic fictional women.
All in the Family The family resemblance between male and female PIs is real, of course. The private eye is one of the two distinctly American heroic archetypes (the other is the cowboy), and the only one that could easily accommodate a gender switch when twentieth-century American women began to break out of traditional roles. Or when, as Gloria Steinem put it, we became the men we wanted to marry.
The male private eyes we read about and admired were fearless loners, without friends or family. The Continental Op didn't even have a name. But each of them had a code of honor, a commitment to seeing justice done.
The female private eyes kept the fearlessness, the code of honor, and the basic idea of autonomy. But autonomy didn't necessarily mean disconnection and alienation, the way it did for the men. As often as not, these women have risked their fictional lives not for strangers, because they have nothing to lose, but for friends, because they care.
And this has been true virtually from the beginning, in 1977. Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone is considered the first of the modern female private eyes. The name of Sharon McCone's agency-All Souls-is a clue that things are different. Maxine O'Callaghan's first Delilah West novel was published in 1980. In that book, Diamonds Are Forever, Delilah solves the murder of her husband.
So for female private eyes, autonomy isn't quite the given that it is for men. Instead, it is a quality of character to be carefully protected. And through the tension between autonomy and connectedness, the female private eyes of the nineties are beginning to explore the question: What happens to the story of the hero's journey when the warrior taking the trip is a woman?
Heroine with a Thousand Faces According to Joseph Campbell, the myth of the hero's journey occurs in some form in every culture. There are echoes of the myth in every quest plot, every story of a search for a Holy Grail. But the young warrior enduring the perils of the adventure is almost invariably male.
In this culture, however, in the last fifteen years, as women have become police officers and firefighters and attorneys general in life, fictional women warriors in great numbers have been taking the trip-in the form of female private eyes. The new PIs call forth echoes of classical figures such as Antigone, who gave her life rather than allow her brother's corpse to be desecrated, or the Sumerian goddess Inana, who went to the depths of hell to rescue her lost lover.
So what does this mean to someone who wants to write her own private eye series? It means that in the best series fiction, the central character is slightly larger than life-not the average woman, but what the average woman might become-facing ethical dilemmas and physical danger with equal courage, and developing wisdom through the course of the books.
Do I think reading Greek myths before you start is necessary? No, but I think it helps. One of the truisms of writing is that you write what you read. Thus, all creative writing teachers urge beginning writers to read good books. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who wrote The Ox-Bow Incident, urged students to read a thousand words for every one they wrote. Clark only wrote three novels, though, and I'm sure Charles Dickens would have argued with him.
I read more when I wrote less. Other writers can do both at the same time, a talent I admire.
You can learn from reading bad books, too. But reading good books gives a writer something to strive for. So read mysteries, good and bad, to get a sense of what is going on. You're surely a fan, or you wouldn't be contemplating writing your own. Thus, you've read Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller, and probably some of the lesser-known figures. (Maybe even Catherine Dain.) But you should also read fiction that has lasted across time and culture to get depth and breadth and bring something new to your character.
You may or may not have read something by Amanda Cross, who writes the Kate Fansler series. If you like hardboiled private eyes, this won't be your taste. But if you haven't read Writing a Woman's Life, the book written by Amanda Cross's alter ego, Carolyn Heilbrun, run right out and get it. Now. You will receive valuable insight into the character of the nontraditional woman.
You will also learn why we have tended to view the quest plot as male territory and the romance plot as female.
Heilbrun explains that young men have been encouraged to see themselves as the centers of their own story, as striving and ambitious, while young women have been encouraged to see themselves as the princesses waiting to be rescued by the Other, who is the true heroic center of the tale. She argues persuasively for more women to take the quest, as writers and their fictional protagonists.
Hear Her Roar
But you do want to start with character, not plot. Writers tell the same stories over and over, whether framed as quest or romance. Erie Stanley Gardner said that he never worried about plot because all his plots were the same-A murders B and C gets blamed for it. I've used that plot a couple of times, and I'll probably use it again. Readers knew they weren't going to get any surprises in Gardner's books. But they kept coming back for a beloved character, Perry Mason.
As you think about your own character, remember that you'll have to live with her for a long time if the series is a hit. Many writers start with an idealized version of themselves. I didn't do that because I couldn't see my real self-and certainly not an idealized self-dealing with the kind of physical danger I had put Freddie O'Neal in. So for Freddie O'Neal, I started with something close to what I would want my daughter to be. It was easier to imagine a fearless daughter figure than a fearless ideal self.
Fearlessness is important. Female private eyes have to be even braver than their male counterparts. A number of male private eyes have what Dick Lochte has called a "sociopathic stooge" for a sidekick, someone to call on for extra muscle when the going gets tough and the odds are bad.
But if she asks for help, a reader may wince. In the first of the Freddie O'Neal books, Lay It on the Line, I thought it was enough that Freddie had the wits to make a telephone call for assistance without her captors realizing that was in fact what she was doing. A fan told me how disappointed she was that Freddie was helped out by a man-and that was even though the man was an aging African-American security guard, far from the traditional knight in shining armor (and far from the "sociopathic stooge"). I've had her ask for help since then-balancing her autonomy with connectedness-but I'm always careful to make certain her competence isn't in question.
So your female private eye must be capable of handling danger by herself. And she will be in danger-your editor will surely insist on it. Or at least mine has. And other women writers have said that their editors have taken the same stance. Antigone must still be threatened with the tomb for taking on the forces of evil. Only now she has to fight her way out to come back in the next book.
What About Love
When you add fearlessness to autonomy, doesn't it become all the harder for her to have any kind of romantic attachment? Certainly. I think that's why so many female sleuths become involved with cops. There are advantages to the idea. The PI has access to police information that way, for one thing. For another, the police officer has a nonromantic reason to be there. No extraneous subplots necessary to deal with the relationship.
But the most interesting advantage has to do with a built-in tension between them. Here is a man who wants to save her from trouble-whose job it is to save people from trouble-and she has to maintain identity and autonomy against that pressure. It saves the author from worrying about a happily-ever-after book in which he becomes the center of her world, otherwise known as the romance plot.
Janet Dawson makes it clear in the Jeri Howard series that the cop and the PI can't live happily ever after. Jeri's ex-husband is a cop.
I've gone in a different direction with Freddie O'Neal's romantic attachments, but that has to do with my personal interest in reversing gender roles in the hero's story. As I mentioned earlier, the goddess Inana went through hell searching for her lost lover. This is a traditional heroic theme-Orpheus and Eurydice are only the most famous pair.
In Lament for a Dead Cowboy, Freddie O'Neal had to go through hell to save a lover falsely accused of murder. I used an Elko, Nevada, jail cell in a blizzard as my version of hell. An interesting thing happens when she finds a way to free him, however. He can't quite throw himself into her arms as they ride away into the sunset.
That left her free in the next book to become involved with a university professor who isn't stuck with traditional conceptions of gender roles in relationships. The mythic counterpart to that is the hero's dalliance with a nymph-Odysseus and Calypso, for example. (If a university professor who is open to nontraditional romantic relationships isn't your idea of a nymph, don't write to tell me. Write your own book.) I didn't expect the relationship to last through a second book. It almost survived a third.
Other PI writers handle the tension between autonomy and connectedness in various ways. I mentioned that Delilah West started out as a grieving widow who had to solve her husband's murder in 1980. Half a dozen books and a decade or so later, Delilah has recovered. But her romantic attachment to a real estate developer whose values are very different from her own assures the reader that Delilah isn't likely to remarry.
Of course, there's no law against a married PI. Some classical male heroes were married (Odysseus, again), a very few male private eyes have been as well (just last year Earl Emerson's PI was added to their ranks), and a number of contemporary amateur sleuths have sworn to love, honor, and cherish, if not obey. Nancy Pickard, Anne Perry, and Sharan Newman have all negotiated that curve successfully with heroines Jenny Cain, Charlotte Pitt, and Catherine LeVendeur.
Nevertheless, I think Nancy Drew will grow up and marry Ned Nickerson before Kinsey Millhone or V. I. Warshawski seriously contemplates marriage. For women, even more than for men, there is still a sense that marriage is the end of the adventure and the beginning of the second shift. We've seen that too often in the romance plot. Thus, I can guarantee you that Freddie O'Neal will never be worrying about getting home in time to cook dinner.
A reviewer of Lament for a Dead Cowboy commented that the mystery was more important than the relationship. That's true of any novel descended from the quest plot. With a married PI, the romance plot would be tugging at your ear for equal time. Unless you have Nick and Nora Charles as your model (and if you think that's a good idea, reread The Thin Man before you start-he was the professional in the family, and they both drank too much), some kind of commitment to single living is the way to go.
Cracking the Code
That brings us to the code of honor. Just as with autonomy and fearlessness, I think this is even more important for a female PI in the nineties than for a male. While there is a certain end-justifies-the-means ethic in much private eye fiction, I wouldn't try to take it beyond breaking into the villain's apartment and opening his mail, or tinkering with her computer files.
Again, this probably reflects a personal bias. Nevertheless, if your female private eye kills somebody, even justifiably, I believe that as a person of high principle, she ought to deal with the consequences. One of these days we're probably going to see a female PI with a sociopathic stooge-even a female sociopathic PI-but I'm not enthralled with the idea of a female antihero. Check out Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell for the closest thing to a "good" female sociopath in print and decide for yourself.
The Rest Is up to You Beyond those three qualities-autonomy, bravery, and integrity-you're free to make whatever choices appeal to you. Cats or no cats springs immediately to mind. I write that lightheartedly, but it isn't a trivial decision. If you have a cat, you have to use her. Linda Barnes tells of receiving a phone call from her editor asking if Carlotta Carlyle's cat had died. Barnes had forgotten to include the cat in the story.
I've heard arguments at recent mystery conferences that a new PI trying to get attention needs to have some sort of gimmick. A gimmick may help-the female PI novel receiving the most attention as I write this stars Martha Lawrence's Elizabeth Chase, who is psychic-but it won't eliminate the need for a strong, likable character in a well-told story. And Lawrence delivers these, too.
As for the story...the story is what you have when you add character to plot. Story is more than plot. Plot is A murders B and C gets blamed for it. Story is how your own very special detective figures out what happened.
Writing one novel-length story about your character requires commitment, and writing an entire series requires compulsion. There must be stories about the character that you need to write.
But that's a subject for another essay.
Additional copyright information: "Dreams of Jeannie," copyright 2003 by Catherine Dain. An original story published by arrangement with the author.
"Too Many Cooks," copyright 1995 by Catherine Dain. First published in Murder Most Delicious.
"Billy the Goat," copyright 1998 by Catherine Dain. First published in Lethal Ladies II.
"Caught in the Act," copyright 1995 by Catherine Dain. First published in For Crime Out Loud.
"Self-Defense," copyright 1990 by Catherine Dain. An earlier version of this story first appeared in Network magazine.
"Defrauding the Cat," copyright 1994 by Catherine Dain. First published in Feline and Famous.
"Here Today, Dead to Maui," copyright 1995 by Catherine Dain. First published in Cat Crimes Takes a Vacation.
"The Fountain Street Ghost," copyright 1997 by Catherine Dain. First published in Marilyn: Shades of Blonde.
"Cat, the Jury," copyright 2001 by Catherine Dain. First published in Murder Most Feline.
"Not in the Stars," copyright 2001 by Catherine Dain. First published in Death by Horoscope.
"Many Happy Returns," copyright 2002 by Catherine Dain. First published in Flesh & Blood: Dark Desires.
"Senses and Sensibility: Female PIs in the Nineties," copyright 1997 by Catherine Dain. First published in Writing the Private Eye Novel.
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