SOURCE: Johnson, Patricia E. “Sex and Betrayal in the Detective Fiction of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky.” Journal of Popular Culture 27, no. 4 (spring 1994): 97-106.

In the following essay, Johnson investigates the trope of sex and betrayal in the hard-boiled detective fiction of Grafton and Sara Paretsky.

This essay focuses on the updating and feminization of a basic trope that has appeared in traditional, male, hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir ever since Sam Spade met Brigid O'Shaughnessy: the professional detective who becomes sexually involved with a suspect who then turns out to be implicated in the crime. This occurs in several recent novels by female writers, in particular Sue Grafton's first Kinsey Millhone mystery, A Is for Alibi (1982), and Sara Paretsky's fourth V. I. Warshawski mystery, Bitter Medicine (1987), and I am interested in locating the differences that appear when female writers place female detectives in this classic situation...