I refocused my attention on the campfire, realizing belatedly the skillet had been abandoned and neither twin was in sight.
“Can I help you?” someone asked. One of the two was standing right behind me, about a foot away.
I jumped and my shriek was as piercing as the one I emit when a mouse jumps out of my kitchen junk drawer. “You scared me!” I said, patting my chest to soothe my thundering heart.
He said, “Sorry, but we spotted you earlier and my brother and I would like to know what you’re up to. Nice jacket, by the way. It looks warm.”
“Thanks, it is. It’s also machine washable. Speaking of which, I guess I might as well come clean. I know who you are. I’ve seen pictures of you and your brother plastered in the news everywhere. As it happens, the three of us have something in common. I’m a bit of a twisted sister, attracted to criminals of every size and kind. I also have a passion for dissembling.”
“For doing what?”
“Fibbing. Telling lies. Of course, you don’t have to fess up, but I’ve been wondering if you’re the brother who tells the truth or the one who lies.”
He hesitated and then said, “I’m the one who tells the truth.”
I stared at him. “But wouldn’t you say exactly the same thing if you were the twin who perpetually lied?”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a .357 Magnum Colt Python I knew would rip right through my water-resistant Supplex nylon shell.
The other Puckett twin stepped out of the dark. He took the gun from his brother and pointed it at me. “That’s right. Only one of us pulled the trigger when our parents went down. Ask him, if you don’t believe me.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said as I looked from one to the other. “Just taking a flier here, but which one of you did it?”
“You figure it out,” the second brother said. “Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll put this loaded gun on the ground between us. If you come up with the right answer, the weapon is yours and you can make a citizen’s arrest.”
“Guess wrong and you’re dead,” the first brother inserted for the sake of clarity.
“Seems a bit severe, but why not?” I said. I thought about the situation for a moment and then turned to the first brother. “Let’s try this. If I asked your brother who killed your mom and dad, what would he say?”
He shifted uneasily, avoiding his brother’s eyes. After a moment’s reflection he said, “He’d tell you I did it.”
I said, “Ah. That’s all I need to know.” I leaned down and picked up the gun, pointing it at the second brother. “You’re under arrest.”
“Why me?” he said, insulted.
I smiled. “Well, if he told the truth that would mean that you’re the brother who lies. He’d know you’d lie about the murder and you’d tell me he was the shooter. If he’s the liar, that means he knows you’d tell the truth, so he’d twist the facts and reverse your answer. His claim would be that you’d admit to the shooting yourself thinking I’d be fooled. Therefore, since he accused himself the answer he gave is false, which is the only reason you’d agree. You killed them, right?”
The second brother smirked. “Sure, but what difference does it make? We can’t be tried twice for the same crime. It’s double jeopardy.”
“But this time you won’t be tried for murder, you’ll be tried for perjury.”
“Only if you manage to get out of here alive. As it happens I also lied about the weapon. That gun’s not loaded,” he said, indicating the .357 Magnum.
I tossed the .357 Magnum aside. “But mine is,” I said. I reached into my exterior cargo pocket and removed my little semiautomatic and a pair of handcuffs that I snapped on his wrist. “Don’t pull any funny business or I’ll shoot to kill. I’ve done it before and that’s the truth.”
Later, I did wonder if the brother who lied had lied when he told me about the gun being loaded, but I never figured that one out.
entr’acte
An Eye for an I:
Justice, Morality, the Nature of the Hard-boiled Private Investigator, and All That Existential Stuff
I WAS RAISED ON a steady diet of mystery and detective fiction. During the forties, my father, C. W. Grafton, was himself a part-time mystery writer and it was he who introduced me to the wonders of the genre. In my early teens, on the occasions when my parents went out for the evening, I’d be left alone in the house with its tall, narrow windows and gloomy high ceilings. By day, surrounding maple trees kept the yard in shadow. By night, overhanging branches blocked out the pale of the moon. Usually, I sat downstairs in the living room in my mother’s small upholstered rocking chair, reading countless mystery novels with a bone-handled butcher knife within easy reach. If I raised my head to listen, I could always hear the nearly imperceptible footsteps of someone coming up the basement stairs.
Mystery novels were the staple of every summer vacation when, released from the rigors of school days and homework, I was free to read as much as I liked. I remember long August nights when the darkness came slowly. Upstairs in my bedroom, I’d lie in a shortie nightgown with the sheets flung back, reading. The bed lamp threw out a heat of its own and humidity would press on the bed like a quilt. June bugs battled at the window, an occasional victor forcing its way through the screen. It was in this atmosphere of heightened awareness and beetle-induced suspense that I worked my way from Nancy Drew through Agatha Christie and on to Mickey Spillane. I can still remember the astonishment I felt the night I leapt from the familiarity of Miss Marple into the pagan sensibilities of I, the Jury. From Mickey Spillane, I turned to James M. Cain, then to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Richard Prather, and John D. MacDonald, a baptism by immersion in the dark poetry of murder. I think I sensed even then that a detective novel offered the perfect blend of ingenuity and intellect, action and artifice.
During the thirties, hard-boiled private eyes seemed to be spontaneously generated in pulp fiction like mice in a pile of old rags. After World War II, the country was caught up in boom times, a bonanza of growth and cockeyed optimism. “Our boys” came home from overseas and took up their positions on assembly lines. Women surrendered their jobs at defense plants and (brainwashed by the media) returned to Home Sweet Home. In that postwar era of ticky-tack housing and backyard barbecues, the hard-boiled private eye was a cynical, wisecracking, two-fisted, gun-toting hero. We could identify with his machismo, admire his ruthless principles and his reckless way with a .45. He smoked too much, drank too much, screwed and punched his way through molls and mobsters with devastating effect. In short, he kicked ass. In his own way, he was a fictional extension of the jubilance of the times, a man who lived with excess and without regard for consequence. He embodied the exhilaration of the faraway battlefield brought back to home turf.
Through the forties and fifties, the hard-boiled private eye novel was escapist fare, reassuring us by its assertion that there was still danger and excitement, a place where treachery could threaten and heroism could emerge. Despite the mildly depressing lull of the postwar peace, detective fiction proved that adventure was still possible. The core of the hard-boiled private eye novel was a celebration of confrontation, as exotic as the blazing guns of the old West, as familiar as the streets beyond our white picket fences. In fictional terms, the hard-boiled private eye provided evidence that the courage of the individual could still make a difference.
Crime in those days had a tabloid quality. Murder was fraught with sensationalism and seemed to take place only in the big cities half a continent away. Justice was tangible and revenge was sweet.
With his flat affect, the hard-boiled private eye was the perfect emissary from the dark side of human nature. War had unleashed him. Peace had brought him home. Now he was free to roam the shadowy elements of society. He carried our rage. He championed matters of right and fair play while he violated the very rules the rest of us were forced to embrace. Onto his blank and cynical face, we projected our own repressed impul
ses, feeling both drawn to and repelled by his tough-guy stance.
There was something seductive about the primal power of the hard-boiled narrative, something invigorating about its crude literary style. For all its tone of disdain, the flat monotone of the narrator allowed us to “throw” our own voices with all the skill of ventriloquists. I was Mike Hammer. I was Sam Spade, Shell Scott, Philip Marlowe, and Lew Archer, strengthened and empowered by the writers’ rawboned prose. Little wonder, years later, in a desire to liberate myself from the debilitating process of writing for television, I turned to the hard-boiled private eye novel for deliverance.
Times have changed. In the years since Mike Hammer’s heyday, rage has broken loose in the streets. We live in darker times, where the nightmare has been made manifest. Violence is random, pointless, and pervasive. Passing motorists are gunned down for the vehicles they drive; teens are killed for their jackets and their running shoes. Homicide has erupted on every side of us in a wholesale slaughter of the innocent. Even small-town America has been painted by its bloody brush. The handgun is no longer a symbol of primitive law and order; it is the primogenitor of chaos. The bullet makes its daily rampage, leaving carnage in its wake. We are at the mercy of the lawless. While the cunning of fictional homicide continues to fascinate, its real-life counterpart has been reduced to senseless butchery. Murder is the beast howling in the basement, rustling unleashed in the faraway reaches of our souls.
In this atmosphere of anarchy, we are forced to revitalize and reinvent a mythology from which we can draw the comforts once offered to us by the law. The fictional adventures of the hard-boiled private eye are still escapist and reassuring, but from a topsy-turvy point of view. The hard-boiled private eye in current fiction represents a clarity and vigor, the immediacy of a justice no longer evident in the courts, an antidote to our confusion and our fearfulness.
In a country where violence is out of control, the hard-boiled private eye exemplifies containment, order, and hope, with the continuing, unspoken assertion that the individual can still make a difference. Here, resourcefulness, persistence, and determination prevail. The P.I. has been transformed from a projection of our vices to the mirror of our virtues. The hard-boiled private eye has come to represent and reinforce not our excess but our moderation. In the current hard-boiled private eye fiction, there is less alcohol, fewer cigarettes, fewer weapons, greater emphasis on fitness, humor, subtlety, maturity, and emotional restraint. It is no accident that women writers have tumbled onto the playing field, infusing the genre with a pervasive social conscience. Entering the game, too, are countless other private eye practitioners, writers representing the gay, the African American, the Native American, the Asian, an uncommon variety of voices now clamoring to be heard.
The hard-boiled private eye novel is still the classic struggle between good and evil played out against the backdrop of our social interactions. But now we are championed by the knight with a double gender, from talented writers who may be female, as well.
Women have moved from the role of “femme fatale” to that of prime mover, no longer relegated to the part of temptress, betrayer, or loyal office help. The foe is just as formidable, but the protagonist has become androgynous, multiracial, embracing complex values of balance and compassion. I do not necessarily maintain that today’s hard-boiled hero/ine is cast of finer mettle, only that s/he is more diverse, more protean, a multifaceted arbiter of our desires in conflict. Because of this, the hard-boiled private eye novel is once more rising to the literary forefront, gaining renewed recognition. Now, as before, we are serving notice to the reading public that not only is the genre alive and well, but that we, as its creators, are still adapting, still reacting, and, with wit and perspicacity, we are still marching on.
part two
. . . and me
introduction
DURING THE COURSE of an interview once, I was asked about the influence my father, a mystery writer himself, had on my writing. I talked about what he’d taught me of craft, about surviving rejection, coping with editorial criticism. When I finished, the journalist looked up from her notes and said briskly, “Well now, you’ve talked about your father, but what did you learn from your mother?” Without even pausing to consider, I said, “Ah, from my mother I learned all the lessons of the human heart.”
One of the benefits of growing up as the child of two alcoholics was my lack of supervision. Every morning, my father downed two jiggers of whiskey and went to the office. My mother, similarly fortified, went to sleep on the couch. From the age of five onward, I was left to raise myself, which I did as well as I could, having had no formal training in parenthood. I lived in an atmosphere of apparent permissiveness. I read anything I liked, roamed the city at will, rode the bus lines from end to end, played out intense melodramas with the other kids in the neighborhood. (I was usually an Indian princess, tied to the stake.) I went to the movies on Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday. There were few, if any, limits placed on me.
My sister, three years older than me, spent a lot of time in her room. She and my mother clashed often. I was Little Mary Sunshine, tap-dancing my way through life just to the left of stage center, where the big battles took place. Discipline, when it came, was arbitrary and capricious. We had no allies, my sister and I. When life seemed unbearable, my father, to comfort me, would sit on the edge of my bed and recount in patient detail the occasion when the family doctor had told him he’d have to choose between her and us and he’d chosen her because she was weak and needed him and we were strong and could survive. In such moments, at the ages of eight and ten and twelve, I would reassure him so he wouldn’t feel guilty at having left us to such a fate. My father was perfect. It was only later that I dared experience the rage I felt for him. Not surprisingly, I grew up confused, rebellious, fearful, independent, imaginative, curious, free-spirited, and anxious. I wanted to be good. I wanted to do everything right. I wanted to get out of that house.
By the time I was eighteen, I was obsessed with writing. I was also married for the first time—twin paths, leading in opposite directions. The writing was my journey into the self, the marriage a detour into a world I thought I could perfect if I were allowed to make all the choices myself. I was convinced I could construct a “normal” household, unaware that I possessed only the clumsiest of tools. I was determined to have a picture-book life, and was dismayed to discover my efforts were as amateurish as a child’s. How could I have known I hadn’t yet finished growing up when it felt like I’d been running my own life since I was five?
In the years between eighteen and thirty-seven, when I began to fashion the “personhood” of Kinsey Millhone, writing was my salvation—the means by which I learned to support myself, to face the truth, to take responsibility for my future. I have often said that Kinsey Millhone is the person I might have been had I not married young and had children. She is more than that. She is a stripped-down version of my “self”—my shadow, my projection—a celebration of my own freedom, independence, and courage. It is no accident that Kinsey’s parents were killed when she was five. My father went into the army when I was three. He came back when I was five and that’s when the safety of my childhood began to unravel. Through Kinsey, I tell the truth, sometimes bitter, sometimes amusing. Through her, I look at the world with a “mean” eye, exploring the dark side of human nature—my own in particular.
If Kinsey Millhone is my alter ego, Kit Blue is simply a younger version of me. The following thirteen stories were written in the decade following my mother’s death, my way of coming to terms with my grief for her. I realized early in the process of the writing that I could take any moment I remembered and cut straight to the heart of our relationship. It was as if all moments—any moment, every moment—were the same. Every incident I had access to seemed connected at the core; that rage, that pain, all the scalding tears I wept, both during her life and afterward. All of it is part of the riddle I think of now as love.
r /> a woman capable of anything
KIT SAT IN her mother’s rocking chair, watching her mother smoke. Her mother lay on the couch with a paperback novel which she’d put facedown on her chest so that she could light her cigarette without losing her place. From where Kit sat, she could see the top of her mother’s head, the pale hair disarranged, the length of her mother’s body, wasted and thin. Her feet were bare except for the nylon peds she wore and her toes occasionally made a lazy circle, idle movement in that otherwise still frame. The hand which rested on the rim of the coffee table made the journey from the ashtray to her mother’s mouth and back, cigarette glowing, ash increasing until Kit strained at the sight, expecting at any moment, cigarette, ash and ember would tumble. There were already ridges burned into the table, black scars on the rug where fallen cigarettes had eaten away the fibers. Her mother’s hands were bony, fingers long and thin, the fingernails as tough as horn. Kit bit her own nails. Her fingernails were soft and ragged and she needed to work them with her teeth, gnawing at the skin at the tips until they were raw. She was fascinated by her mother’s nails, gnawed at them sometimes, taking her mother’s bony fingers, testing their mettle against that anxious hunger of hers. She had sucked her thumb as a child until her mother painted her thumb with something fiery hot. Her mother had even tried painting her own fingertips to keep Kit from putting them in her mouth but Kit had a taste by then for that acid heat that ate into her tongue like liquid ice.