Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture

by Linda Mizejewski

Can a gumshoe wear high heels? In a genre long dominated by men, women are now taking their place-as authors and as characters-alongside hard-boiled legends like Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. Hardboiled and High Heeled examines the meteoric rise of the female detective in contemporary film, television, and literature.



Richly illustrated and written with a fan's love of the genre, Hardboiled and High Heeled is an essential introduction to women in detective fiction, from past to present, from pulp fiction to blockbuster films.

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2004

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saw the author present about this book last night (at the Aldus Society here in Columbus, Ohio (http://aldussociety.com/), she was great! Most of the book is about the way the woman detective is portrayed in film and on TV, compared to one chapter that was focused on books. The contrast is fascinating, but perhaps not terribly surprising: Books are cheaper to produce, so a greater variety of voices are out there, and the ones that are popular don't have to worry about Hollywood's standards for what women are allowed to look like. Films are expensive, so female detectives have to be fit into the industry's ideas about what will make money at the box office. TV is in the middle, so sometimes they go for glamour, sometimes they can take more chances. (The book was published in 2004, so the explosion of TV since then is not covered.)

So now I'm curious about all sorts of movies and TV mentioned in the book (and last night), but I am also going to go back to some of my favorite authors to read the books they've published since I stopped keeping up.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent tour through mostly American fiction, television, and film. What I found most fascinating was how far in advance fiction was (perhaps still is) compared to TV and especially movies when it comes to liberating women detectives from all the accumulated cultural baggage. The reason? Mizejewski offers this:

And this is the quality of the woman investigator - her deep skepticism about men's relationship with women - that has made her so valuable in print, so scary in film. How can a sympathetic female movie character be this cynical about the sexes?

Theorizing that Hollywood can't go there and still make money.

Comprehensive summary of all the works discussed so even if you haven't read the books or seen the television shows or the movies you can still follow the analyses. Deep notes and bibliography allows further study if so inclined.

[L.M. Elm · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're looking for a good listing of troupes for the female private detective, this book is for you. Mizejewski is a fan of the genre and doesn't shy away from explaining her favorites and scorning those that do not make the list. This book was published in 2004, so many of the examples provided are dated and the vast majority are from television and movies. If you want examples found in literature beyond Sue Grafton, look elsewhere.

[Cloud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely useful work for my research, although the author often falls into speculative remarks without clear source, which makes it tricky to use this work in turn.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book very much and learned a lot from it. Mizejewski's writing style is straightforward and easy to grasp, I recommend it to everyone who is even mildly curious about the subject.