Can a Gumshoe Be a Woman?
The short story linked here, DollFace Catches Lead, is probably my biggest what if question ever. What if I created a story about Jennifer Abbey, a recently widowed woman?
- What if
- the story takes place in 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?
- she has the name Dollface, and the only people who call her by her real name are the clients who still have manners and/or respect?
- I make her a Private Investigator who takes over her deceased husband’s private practice to survive?
- people don’t take her seriously as a PI, and she must take cases other PIs won’t take, because of either the client or the type of case?
- there’s this cop who kind of wants her to stay out of things because she’s a dame?
- this copper maybe likes this dame? (not sure on this)
I created this short story in a writing class I took about a decade ago. I love the era of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Casablanca, all the old black and white classics. It was a class about writing Pulp Fiction. The class was taught by a fantasy/sci-fi pulp fiction author named Philip Athans. I spent several weeks trying to wrap my head around the concept of pulp fiction, with its formula created by Lester Dent. He told me I had a knack for understanding the pulp fiction concept.
I had to do remember what is was like as a woman back then, and no electronics to help. I even found a couple of dictionaries of the lingo back then and had to make sure the words made sense in context, so the reader wasn’t pulled out of the story.
What’s Coming in Short Stories
On top of this short story about the construction industry, I have about ten other short stories (bakery contest, missing/stolen animals, insurance fraud, adoption searches, thefts, etc.). If I can think of a crime that someone would be willing to hire a dame back in the forties to solve, I’m all about writing it. I am trying to polish to submit to anthologies, open calls, and magazines where this kind of pulp fiction fits. Or who knows. There are publishing houses who create anthologies for one author. Maybe that’s the way I will go with it. Or I could try to self-publish the short stories on Amazon. Or I could put them here for my subscribers to read.
My ultimate goal would be to write a trilogy of Jennifer looking into her husband’s cold case murder while she solves crimes to pay the bills. I imagine it being called The Dollface Chronicles.