Hardboiled and High Heeled

Linda Mizejewski is Professor of English and Chair of the Women's Studies Department at Ohio State University. She is author of Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture andCinema and Divine Decadence: Fascism, FemaleSpectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

"This intellectually rigorous history dishes out the bad with the good." -- Out"[S]timulating, well-written, and well argued." -- Choice"A light-hearted, accessible feminist account of the female detective...The central argument of this book is that the 'female dick'--as her very name suggests--is a profoundly unnatural figure whose very existence challenges the conventions of genre and gender." -- Rachel Adams, author of Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and theAmerican Cultural Imagination"Witty, thorough, and smart, Hardboiled and High Heeled is that rare thing in feminist cultural studies--an exploration of fans' pleasures in fiction, film, and television that is itself a pleasure to read." -- Lisa Maria Hogeland, author of Feminism and Its Fictions"Weaving together film, popular fiction, and television, Hardboiled and High Heeled reveals the power and significance of the female investigator within popular culture. Passionate, eloquent, and intelligent, Mizejewski's study is exemplary feminist scholarship." -- Yvonne Tasker, University of East Anglia"This slick, smart academic examination of the past 20 years of women in popular culture is also informative and readable." -- Globe and Mail

• Chapter One: Watching the Women Detectives Chapter Two: Grafton and Cornwell: Picturing the Best-seller List Chapter Three: Jiggle, Camp, and Couples: 1960s-1980s Prime-Time Woman Investigators Chapter Four: Under Suspicion: Women and Mystery in 1990s Television Chapter Five: Woman Detectives on Film: First Take . Chapter Six: Action Bodies :Women Detective Movies, 1995-2000 Chapter Seven: Clarice and her Fans: The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Endnotes Bibliography