Dangerous Women

INTRODUCTION

What makes a woman dangerous? No doubt there are any number of opinions, depending upon the experience of the man or woman who responds.

Personally, I think the most dangerous women are those who are irresistible. Each of us may have a unique weakness, an Achilles’ heel that is unfathomable to others, or we may share universal sensibilities that everyone understands. It may be a woman’s great beauty that wins our hearts, or her charm, or intelligence. It may be the way she brushes her hair back from her eyes, or the way she laughs, or the way she sneezes.

She may be acutely aware of her power, or utterly innocent of it. One will use it as a steel-edged weapon, another as a fuzzy security blanket. The intent neither increases nor diminishes the power, and that is the terrible danger to those who may be in thrall to it.

Power is dangerous. We may know it, even fear it, but if we want the heat from that flame, we will risk everything to get as close to it as possible.

Dangerous women have always been with us. Remember Delilah? Authors have understood the ferocious attraction of dangerous women and used them as literary devices relentlessly. Most of the great women of history, as well as most significant female literary figures, have been dangerous. Perhaps not to everyone, but frequently to those who have fallen in love with them. Men have killed for dangerous women, betrayed their countries, their loved ones and themselves, given up thrones and committed suicide. Sometimes the dangerous women may even be worth it-worth risking everything and giving up all one holds dear.

Many literary detectives have been aware of the dangerous woman. Sam Spade fell for one, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, while Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer are often chased by them; they have been known to allow themselves to be caught.

Sherlock Holmes, although he allowed himself to be enamored of Irene Adler (“the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet”), had a famously powerful aversion to most members of the opposite sex. “Women are never to be entirely trusted-not the best of them,” Holmes stated in The Sign of the Four. “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money.”

Although Archie Goodwin loves women, his boss, Nero Wolfe, generally speaks and behaves like a misogynist. “You can depend on women for anything except constancy,” he said. Further, while in a particularly foul mood, he declared, “The vocations for which they [are] best adapted are chicanery, sophistry, self-advertisement, cajolery, mystification and incubation.”

And neither Holmes nor Wolfe ever met the dangerous women on these pages. They would have been shocked and appalled. But, as I predict you, too, will be, they would have been fascinated. They would have been helpless in their desire to know what they were up to, where they would lead, what adorable little tricks they had up their sleeves.

It is clear from the enduring success of Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Doyle and Rex Stout that they understood much, including the appeal, of a kind, of dangerous women. The authors in this book have proven to be no less accomplished in providing an array of femmes fatale to delight you- and cause you to shudder in relief that they are not women who matter in your life. At least, for your sake, it is to be hoped that they don’t.

Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of six books, including the controversial Sleepers, which became a New York Times number one best seller both in hardcover and paperback, as well as a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Bacon and Minnie Driver. He is currently a writer and producer for the NBC series Law and Order.

After a successful career as a journalist, Michael Connelly turned to fiction writing and produced The Black Echo, which introduced his LAPD detective Hieronymous Bosch and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He followed this with three more Bosch novels, Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde and The Last Coyote, then wrote a standalone thriller, The Poet. As one of the world’s most beloved authors, his books have become automatic best sellers in many countries.

The young Irish writer John Connolly has worked as a bartender, a local government official, a waiter, a dogsbody at Harrods department store and a journalist. The former policeman Charlie Parker was introduced in 1999 in Every Dead Thing, and followed in Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind and The White Road. Connolly’s most recent novel, Bad Men, is a stand-alone thriller. No writer working today better combines the detective novel with elements of the supernatural.

When the Mystery Writers of America gave Thomas H. Cook the Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Chatham School Affair in 1997, it was an overdue honor for one of America ’s finest crime writers. He had been previously nominated for Edgars in two other categories, Best First Novel and Best Fact Crime, and had won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Short Story of the Year for “Fatherhood.”

Jeffery Deaver was working as a journalist when he decided to go to law school so that he could become a legal writer. Instead, he practiced law for several years and, while taking long commutes, began writing suspense fiction with extraordinary success. He has been nominated for four Edgars and won the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for best short story of the year three times. His Lincoln Rhyme novels are staples on the bestseller lists; The Bone Collector was filmed with Denzel Washington as the paralyzed former forensic officer and Angelina Jolie as the young cop who helps bring a serial killer to justice.

Few writers sell as many books as Nelson DeMille, whose blockbuster thrillers have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Notable for their impeccable plotting and distinguished literary style, his best sellers include The Lion’s Game, Plum Island, Spencerville, Gold Coast, Word of Honor and The General’s Daughter, a pure detective novel successfully filmed starring John Travolta, with a screenplay by William Goldman. “Rendezvous” is his first short story in twenty-five years.

J. A. Jance did not have an easy time becoming a best-selling author. She was denied entry to a creative writing program because the professor thought women should be teachers or nurses, and her alcoholic husband agreed. After her divorce and his death at the age of forty-two from acute alcohol poisoning, she wrote from 4:00 to 7:00 a.m. before sending her kids off to school. Her series about Detective J. P. Beaumont began modestly as paperback originals but now are regulars on bestseller lists.

Writing as Andrew Klavan and using the pseudonym Keith Peterson, the author has won two Edgars but has somehow failed to make the best-seller list, though he has had great success in Hollywood. Clint Eastwood directed and starred in True Crime, about a journalist trying to save an innocent man; it also featured Isaiah Washington, James Woods, Denis Leary and Lisa Gay Hamilton. Two years later, Michael Douglas and Famke Janssen starred in another film based on a Klavan novel, Don’t Say a Word.

Often regarded as the finest crime writer alive (Newsweek said maybe the best ever), Elmore Leonard has had twenty consecutive best sellers, including Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies and the short story collection When the Women Come Out to Dance. Numerous films have been made from his work: Hombre, 3:10 to Yuma, The Moonshine War, Stick, The Big Bounce, Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Jackie Brown. He has been named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement.

Three of the first four books Laura Lippman wrote were nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Awards, a feat unmatched in the history of the Mystery Writers of America; Charm City won. The series of detective fiction novels featuring Tess Monaghan also won Shamus, Agatha and Anthony awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Malice Domestic and Bouchercon conventions respectively.

Evan Hunter and Ed McBain are two best-selling novelists living in the same body. Hunter’s first adult novel, The Blackboard Jungle, shocked a nation, as did the wildly successful film made from it. As McBain, he has written more than fifty novels, including the iconic 87th Precinct novels, which essentially defined the police procedural for a half-century. Hunter also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. He is a Grand Master and was the first American to be given a Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement by the (British) Crime Writers Association.

If a single writer could be held up to the light as the personification of cool and hip in the 1980s, it was Jay Mclnerney, who rode to instant stardom with his first book, Bright Lights, Big City. While he has seldom ventured into the world of crime fiction (unless you count drug use and abuse), his short story “Con Doctor” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 1998.

Even if Bill Clinton had not told the media that Walter Mosley was his favorite mystery writer, the Easy Rawlins series would have been successful. It made its debut with Devil in a Blue Dress, which was nominated for an Edgar and then filmed with Denzel Washington and Jennifer Beals. As one of the most original voices in the world of crime fiction, Mosley has seen such Rawlins novels as Black Betty and A Little Yellow Dog make the New York Times best-seller list. He is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Among the world’s most distinguished living authors, surely Joyce Carol Oates ranks as the greatest not to have won the Nobel Prize, although rumors abound that she has been short-listed several times. She has produced a wide variety of work at a prodigious rate, and it seems unlikely that any living American writer has received more accolades and awards, far too many to list here, but including six National Book Award nominations (including the winner, Them, in 1970) and three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Among her most recent books are Take Me, Take Me With You, Rape: A Love Story and The Tattooed Girl.

After writing and being rejected for twenty years, Anne Perry’s first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published in 1979. Since then, she has averaged more than a book a year, mainly the beloved Victorian-era detective novels that have put her on the best-seller list. The first series was about Inspector Thomas Pitt and his wife Charlotte, while the second is a darker series about Inspector William Monk. She won an Edgar for her short story, “Heroes,” which featured college professor and chaplain Joseph Reavley, now featured in a new series beginning with No Graves As Yet.

Not many crime writers make it into The Guinness Book of World Records, but Ian Rankin did when he had seven best sellers on the London Times list at the same time. He has won three Daggers from the (British) Crime Writers Association, two for short stories and one for Black and Blue, which was also nominated for an Edgar. His Inspector Rebus novels, beginning with Knots and Crosses in 1987, have served as the basis for a BBC television series. He was also one of the first winners of the prestigious Chandler-Fulbright Award.

S. J. Rozan’s novels about Lydia Chin and Bill Smith are among the most honored of recent years, winning Shamus, Anthony, Macavity and Edgar awards, with Winter and Night winning the Edgar for Best Novel in 2003 to join the statue of Poe she won for best short story. Lydia is a young American-born Chinese private eye whose cases mainly originate in the Chinese community, while Smith is an older, experienced PI who lives above a bar in Tribeca. They work together smoothly in carefully constructed (the author is, after all, an architect) plots, essentially taking turns as the dominant figure from book to book.

These giants of the mystery writing world have put together a bevy, a veritable harem, of dangerous women of all kinds. The gentler sex? Don’t make me laugh. And stay on guard, lest they win your heart, because they’d like to have it. Perhaps with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Otto Penzler