Dave wrote:
"Mark, I guess I just bought in that she's a female version
of Mike Hammer."
See, that's it, exactly. Instead of being built as a female
from the ground up, Michael Tree is built in the image of
Mike Hammer. So everything about her is framed in
relationship to his maleness. So in places Collins is
underlining her femaleness as contrast and in other places
overplaying the "anything you can do . . ." aspect, but it's
all presented as "The Other" to hegemonic masculinity.
Collins also overplays the lack of opportunity for female
cops, that they're all clerks, none on the streets. The idea
feels like it's taken from the intro to Charlie's Angels.
Might have been accurate a decade or three ago, but not now.
As someone else commented, much about this book seems like it
is set decades ago, so much so that mention of current
technology seems incongruous.
None of this bothered me in the comic, which seemed to be set
in its own out-of-time world. And it doesn't really bother me
that much here -- I am enjoying the book for its
self-conscious pulpiness -- but I am sometimes drawn out of
the story by these things. Frankly, what I find far odder is
that I am enjoying the book when I'm not much of a fan of
Spillane, who, as Dave pointed out, casts a very long shadow
over this book.
"I would never have guessed Wise Blood or any of Flannery
O'Connor's other works that I read were written by a
woman."
I first read O'Connor for an English class. I remember being
very surprised the first time the professor used she or her
when referring to her in class.
Mark
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