I write thrillers and I eat food. I love doing both. If I didn’t write thrillers, I’d want to be a food critic. That way, I could eat and write at roughly the same time, plus get all those free meals at the finer restaurants. “Sizzler continues to amaze….”
But I digress.
I trace my thriller roots back to the glory days of pulp fiction. Black Mask magazine, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner. And the film noir genre that began with The Maltese Falcon in 1941 (and ends, if you want to know, with the Orson Welles classic Touch of Evil, 1959).
In so many of those stories and movies we have the character known as the femme fatale. I love me a good femme fatale, and I’ll tell you why in a moment.
Then I’m going to give you a recipe of mine named for this character.
The Rise of the Femme Fatale
My theory is that the “deadly female” character took off after adoption of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote in 1920. Suddenly, men got very nervous. Women voting? What was the world coming to? More to the point, where was it going?
The New York Times, of all rags, editorialized against women’s suffrage, writing: “The function of government is not to please or amuse. It is to maintain order and enforce justice. And it is in these stern tasks that woman, with her tender sensibilities, has no place.”
But get the vote they did, just as another cultural wave was hitting the domestic shores—the flapper.
If you look at newspaper editorials from the early 20s, you’ll find much concern about young women wearing shorter hair and shorter skirts, smoking and wearing rouge…in public!
In the silent movies you begin to see such women luring men to their doom, especially older, monied men.
Sexual allure was the flapper’s weapon of choice. In silent films, Clara Bow played this character to perfection.
As the 20s progressed, the flapper got older and wiser, more aware of her power.
That’s when the femme fatale as we know her today became a mainstay of pulp fiction.
And none more famous than Brigid O’Shaughnnesy in Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon (1929).
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