SOURCE: Walton, Priscilla L. and Manina Jones. “Does She or Doesn't She?: The Problematics of Feminist Detection.” In Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, pp. 86-117. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Walton and Jones discuss some ways in which various hard-boiled detective novels written by women, and featuring a female detective, transform the hard-boiled genre by questioning elements of the tradition.

If feminism is now an uncomfortable part of the thriller's cultural repertoire, it is one which necessarily calls the achievements of Hammett and Chandler into question. Down these mean streets no easy male/female transpositions are possible.

David Glover, “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of”

Negotiating the Generic Contract

Many feminist scholars of detective fiction have been skeptical about the potential of women's practice of the hard-boiled detective novel to negotiate resistance, critique, or change within in a literary genre typically...