By Dorothy B. Hughes. Copyright 2004 (reprint), The Feminist Press at CUNY.

Buy it now from Amazon.com

The world of hardboiled fiction is pretty male-dominated. There were plenty of female writers active in the pulp scene, but they were relegated primarily to the romance and lesbian pulp genres, with a few forays here and there into stories about women in the old west. But detective and espionage thrillers -- those were the domain of the men. Well, at least most of the time. A few strong female writers managed to break into the genre and enjoy a high degree of success and popularity. Chief among these pioneering women writers was Dorothy B. Hughes, whose novel In a Lonely Place became one of the hallmarks of both noir fiction and, when it was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart, noir cinema. Although Hughes' In a Lonely Place is by far her most famous story, it's by no means her only foray into the genre, nor is it her only good foray into the genre. The Blackbirder is another solid entry into the male-dominated world of crime and spy fiction, and although it may lack the complex psychology of In a Lonely Place, it still ranks as a top-notch thriller with strong characters and plenty of twists and turns that will keep readers guessing until the end.

The modern definition of a "strong female character" is to basically take a beautiful woman and make her act and talk exactly like a man, to have her fly around and do kungfu and whip about heavy weaponry in a nonchalant fashion fully incongruous with the fact that the actress in question probably barely weighs a hundred pounds. Hughes' older work, however, is a far more believable and far more complex approach to the strong female protagonist. The character at the center of the action in The Blackbirder, Julie Guilles, behaves and thinks largely as a woman of the era might -- a psychological realness that comes, no doubt, from the fact that the character is being written by an actual woman, rather than by a twenty-something male screenwriter with very little life experience. Julie Guilles is feminine, but there's nothing in that, that makes her the least bit weak. She gets tired, confused, and makes wrong decisions, but all of that has more to do with being an actual, believable human character than it does with gender.

Julie has been living a modest but comfortable existence in New York City, and no one around her knows her true identity, or that she was previously being raised by a wealthy French family and had to flee the country as the German army swept through it. Although she has American parents, she is functionally French and without any American passport or papers, so she does her best to keep a low profile amid the growing paranoia over Axis spies in the United States. Her simple life falls to pieces when she runs into an old acquaintance from Paris, who after their meeting, ends up dead outside her apartment. Afraid that whoever killed him might be interested in her, and doubly afraid of going to the police for fear of showing up on the FBI radar and ending up in an internment camp or deported, Julie decides to go on the run. The appearance of her old acquaintance also puts her on to the fact their long lost love is still alive and, it seems, involved in some way with a "blackbird" operation -- flying European refugees clandestinely into America over the Mexican border.

She decides to travel across the country to Santa Fe, to a location she finds in the dead man's address book, presumably that of the blackbirder who can reunite her with her lover and spirit them to safety before the police and FBI link the murder to Julie and uncover the thin veil of disguises she's employed to protect herself. Unfortunately, it looks like someone might be following her as she makes her way by train, bus, and car across America, and before too long, she discovers that there's a lot more going on around her than just a murder.

Hughes' characters are expertly drawn, and the author creates an incredibly submersive feeling of desperation and paranoia in the story. Everyone is believably sinister, and Hughes' exploration of Julie's mental state as she attempts to navigate the murky waters of subterfuge, secret identities, and espionage in which she finds herself is razor sharp. It doesn't take too long for the reader to become just as wary and just as suspicious of every pair of eyes the story introduces. Julie is a wonderful protagonist, competent and determined, but also prone to despair and simple weariness -- traits that make her both likeable and believable, far more so than the gun-toting comic book characters of today's entertainment. Hughes relies on one of the most effective tricks -- that of putting a very normal person into an extraordinary situation, then allowing the reader to watch the character rise to the occasion.

The supporting characters are excellent as well, as are the various locations Hughes employs as her heroine flees the snowy streets of New York City for Chicago, and ultimately, the rustic streets of 1940s Santa Fe and surrounding desert and mountains. Everyone, from the man in the gray suit to the nurse on the train, from the weird weasly guy to the blackbirder himself, are believably written to invoke suspicion without being clumsy or obvious. To obviously make someone suspicious in a thriller is to practically telegraph their eventual innocence, but Hughes plays things on a more subtle level, and as a result, the tension never relents. Who's FBI? Who's a German spy? What's the sinister secret that has led everyone to the nondescript house of a meek man on the outskirts of Santa Fe? This is the very definition of a page-turner, and Hughes executes it with panache, originality, and an unfaltering sense of excitement and danger. It would have made an excellent Hitchcock movie, though I don't know if Hitch would have been as keen on being sympathetic to the female lead as the story demands. I'd say it's a shame the story was never adapted for the screen, but it really isn't, since we have the book, and that's even better.

There is a definite and detectable difference in the way a woman writes this story as opposed to how a man may have written it. The book was recently reprinted by the Feminist Press, who recently began a campaign to resurrect a whole host of pulp novels by female writers and thus highlight the important but often ignored role they played in the pulp scene. Most of these stories, as I said earlier, are lesbian romance novels that aren't of much interest to me. Turgid romance novels are turgid romance novels, regardless of the sex of the primaries. But Dorothy Hughes explored territory that was ordained the property of male writers, and her take on the subject of World War II espionage is both thrilling and acutely personal. I don't know that a man writing the same story would have explored the psychology of the female lead quite so successfully. Julie becomes a very real character, and the danger around her is also very real. There is no sense of the fantastic, no outrageous moment of derring-do, although the book is certainly packed with thrilling chapters and plenty of action. I don't want to indulge too much in the "what if" scenario of comparing and contrasting what a woman did write to what a man might have written. What matters is that, regardless of gender, Dorothy Hughes wrote a thriller that measures up admirably to any standard, male or female, by which you'd care to measure it.

Labels: Espionage