Introduction
In 2001, Karin Slaughter published her
debut novel Blindsighted, (Slaughter,
2006ed) the first of what has since become
known as the Grant County series. Set in
the fictional town of Heartsdale in Grant County, Georgia, the series is
primarily a police procedural sequence of novels, featuring the close
collaboration of the Grant County Police force and the local coroner in solving
a range of crimes within its borders. Of
the novels in the Grant County series, this paper will focus on aspects of the
first six, Blindsighted (Slaughter,
2006 ed), Kisscut (Slaughter, 2003), A Faint, Cold Fear (Slaughter, 2004), Indelible (Slaughter, 2005), Faithless (Slaughter, 2006), and Skin
Privilege (Slaughter, 2007)[1]; these
novels cover a period of six years, with each novel focussing on a small
segment of time, ranging from a number of hours, to a week.
As well as uncovering crimes within each
novel, the series follows the experiences of three primary characters: Sara
Linton, the town’s paediatrician and pathologist, Jeffrey Tolliver, the Chief
of police for Grant County and Lena Adams, a detective working under Tolliver. Walton and Jones state in their collaborative
work Detective Agency, ‘the series
structure of detective fiction allows authors room to explore the
character[s]…and confront a variety of issues and concerns’ (Walton & Jones
1999, 56) something Slaughter achieves in the Grant County series; for Sara and
Jeffrey, this involves rediscovering trust and a rekindled romance, whilst for
Lena, her experience at the hands of a sadistic attacker in the first novel, being
‘raped and drugged into a nightmare world of pain and false transcendence’ (Slaughter,
2003, p44) sets off a chain of events which have repercussions reaching far
beyond her own life.
Whilst the series is, as already
mentioned, primarily a police procedural, the contents of the novels are
intrinsically linked with the characters, particularly Lena Adams. The crimes being investigated in each of the
six novels mirror the events in her life, which the titles of the novels infer,
dually referencing both the crime focus of the novel and the personal problems
Lena is facing. Furthermore, the
character of Lena Adams can be read as both a hard-boiled detective in the
literary noir genre, and as a victim, thereby allowing Slaughter to explore a
wide range of issues that might not be readily available through the more
traditional police procedural medium, such as domestic abuse and the
psychological repercussions of crime both on its victims and on the police
officers that investigate these crimes.
In The Lead?
At the beginning of the series, Sara and
Jeffrey are a divorced couple, working together despite the breakdown of their
marriage. As the series progresses, they become friends, rekindle their
relationship and eventually remarry. The relationship between Jeffrey and Lena is
a professional one, with Jeffery acting as a mentor to Lena. Jeffrey recruited Lena from the Police Academy
eight years prior to the events in the first novel, and is grooming her as his
successor as the police chief of Grant County.
Whilst the relationship between the two is strictly platonic, something
Jeffrey makes clear Skin Privilege, relating
that ‘He’d never had a sister, but he imagined the feelings he had for Lena
were about the same’ (Slaughter, 2007, p352/353) Jeffrey cares deeply for Lena, and this is
something that causes friction between the women, Sara especially, who understands
that for ‘their entire relationship, Jeffrey had been in some state of concern
for Lena Adams’ (Slaughter, 2006, p408) an oft repeated sentiment throughout
the novels, and one that provides the central narrative thread of Skin Privilege. Lena is not romantically interested in
Jeffrey; instead ‘she had worked her ass off to get his respect’ (Slaughter, 2004,
p155). Slaughter places the three
characters in a love/hate triangle, crossing personal and professional lines,
with Jeffrey at the apex of this three-way relationship and ensuring that the
three characters remain closely linked throughout the series. This triad also highlights the differences and
similarities between Lena and Sara, their relationship with Jeffrey
notwithstanding. Both are strong women
who have had to work hard to become successful in the highly conservative town
they live in and have both been viciously attacked by a sexual predator: Sara
is attacked a number of years prior to the first novel, and Lena in the first
novel; Sara’s support network allows her to come to terms with her attack,
whilst Lena cannot, through her isolation and somewhat self-imposed alienation
from her only family member, an uncle.
Sara, whilst presented as a strong character, is also given a feminine
and maternal set of characteristics, something Lena is denied; her abortion
when she discovers she is pregnant refuting this traditional maternal and
feminine aspect of the female in favour of the hard-boiled detective that is
presented to the reader.
Although the series focuses on the three
characters throughout, with the lead female protagonist ostensibly being Sara
Linton, (Slaughter admits that ‘Grant County began with Sara Linton’ (Slaughter,
2006, p534) and that Lena was ‘almost an afterthought’), there is evidence to
support the supposition that it is Lena who is the focus of the novels. The most apparent way this is indicated is in
the titling of the novels; whilst they signal the contents of the police
procedural aspect of the plot, each of these titles also inherently linked to
Lena Adams. The first novel, Blindsighted, can be read as a referral
to Lena and her twin Sibyl, who is blind and also the first victim of the
series. At the same time, the medical definition of the
word as ‘a condition in which the sufferer responds to visual stimuli without
consciously perceiving them’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2007) also indicates
the crime; Sara fails to recognise the killer and his connection to her, (he
staged the murder of Sybil Adams to resemble the attack on Sara and
deliberately leaves Sybil for Sara to find).
The title of the second novel, Kisscut, a word as specialised as Blindsighted, is referenced within the
text once, when Lena remembers that
‘using
a razor blade she had made a kisscut over the image, scoring just the surface
of the photograph but not cutting all the way through to the back, and excised
Hank from the scene’ (Slaughter, 2003, p199)
whilst
looking at old photographs. However, the
definition of the word as a mechanical engineering term, which involves cutting
away ‘waste’ to leave a clean surface (as Lena felt she was doing) is also
indicative of the first victim in the novel, Jenny, who mutilates her own
genitalia to make herself ‘pure’ (Slaughter, 2003, p418) by cutting away her
pudenda.
For the third novel, A Faint, Cold Fear, the author uses a
quote from Act 4, scene 3 of Romeo and
Juliet
I
have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life. (Shakespeare, 2005, 4.3:15-16)
to
indicate the way that the events Lena suffered in the first novel[2]
continues to affect her everyday life, the post traumatic effects of her imprisonment
leading to fear dominating her; this quote also intimates the suspicious
suicides which are the focus of the police investigation in this novel. The next novel, Indelible, refers to both the marks that Lena wears on her body as
a result of the abusive relationship she is in with her current boyfriend, Ethan,
and also to the psychological scars she has as a result of the events in the
first book, whilst at the same time referring to an investigation into the
childhood friends of Jeffrey, and the faith he has in them being eroded by the
investigation. Faithless, the fifth book in the series, has a dictionary
definition of ‘disolyal[ty], especially to a spouse or wife’ (Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary, 2007) and corresponds to the way that Lena manages to
escape her relationship with Ethan by planting a gun on him and getting him returned
to prison for parole violation, and the investigation into a cultlike religious
group. Finally, Skin Privilege, a novel about white supremacy in Grant County,
again makes reference to Lena’s abusive partner, Ethan, a threat to her despite
being in prison; alongside the antagonist characters in the novel, he calls his
race his ‘skin privilege…his white birthright’ (Slaughter, 2007, p257) and as
with Kisscut, the only actual
reference to the word within the text, is in relation to Lena, whilst
remembering him saying this to her. There
is then, a definite relationship between Lena and the titles of the novels, this
ambiguity allowing the reader to infer a central importance to Lena’s character
that rivals the investigative focus of the novel.
One of the Boys
Slaughter
distances Lena from feminism through her representation in the series; but more
than that she distances her from femaleness; she is literally one of the boys,
with, as Jeffrey Tolliver says, ‘brass balls hanging between her legs’
(Slaughter, 2006, p281) In a traditional and conservative part of
America, she is portrayed as a character who does not reveal her emotions; according
to Tolliver, ‘there [is] not a soft side to Lena… [she is] harder than that’
(Slaughter, 2006ed, p43/44). She is as
uncomfortable with homosexuality as any of the men around her, (even when it
concerns her own sister) some of who are able to say ‘Back when the Klan was
doing some good’ and mean it. Her
clothing, is essentially masculine; she wears ‘slacks and a jacket’ (Slaughter,
2006ed, p93) to work every day and is ‘strictly a jeans and T-shirt girl, so
putting on a dress was a big deal.’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p162) Even her attitude towards rape victims is considered
masculine; when discussing a rape case with Tolliver, her overly masculine words
‘bl[ow] him out of the water. He would
expect this kind of talk from someone like Matt Hogan, but never from a
woman. Not even Lena.’ (Slaughter,
2006ed, p201) There is distinct lack of
instances where Lena is placed in a domestic situation; she is not seen
carrying out tasks which are considered female, unlike Tolliver, who is shown carrying
out domestic duties throughout the series. The exception to this highlights
Lena’s masculine outlook; when asked to get coffee for a superior officer, she
‘feels a flicker of anger’ (Slaughter, 2005, p125) at being asked to carry out
such a menial (and female) task. Slaughter is explicitly creating a strong,
masculine character in Lena, and one of the reasons for this is to allow her to
encapsulate a number of the characteristics of the traditional hard-boiled
detective.
Lena is presented as having a lot in
common with the traditional hard-boiled detective. Firstly, and possibly very obviously, she is a
detective, not just a police officer;
more than this, though, she is the first female detective on the Grant County
police force and the ‘first non-secretarial woman hire in the town’s history.’ (Slaughter,
2007, p53) The reader’s attention is brought back to this point repeatedly
throughout the series, so Slaughter is clearly making this explicit for the
reader for a reason. However, there is
more to it than just her being a detective; like many earlier hard-boiled
detectives, Lena is an isolated character.
Lena is very much as John Scaggs describes the private eye in Crime Ficiton ‘a loner, an alienated
individual who exists outside or beyond the socioeconomic order of family,
friends, work and home’ (Scaggs, 2005, p59).
She is an orphan whose parents died when she was young[3] and
her twin sister is murdered at the beginning of the first novel, leaving her
with only her uncle Hank, whom she ‘had never liked’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p61),
blaming him for her sister’s blindness.
Lena perceives a level of discrimination, some of which is founded in her
background; the twins ‘were considered [white] trash without the benefit of
being particularly poor or, courtesy of their half Spanish mother, all that
white’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p27) while they were growing up. Her gender also sets her apart from her
contemporaries; as a police detective in the Grant County force, she constantly
has to fight to overcome the prejudices of the other police detectives; her
partner, Frank is not ‘thrilled to have women on the force, let alone one as a
partner.’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p27) While this in itself is not enough to qualify
Lena as a hard-boiled detective, it is ‘a turn on the trope of the detective as
(alien) outsider’ (Walton & Jones 1999, 102). Lena is, furthermore, a headstrong detective,
rejecting the authority of Tolliver on a number of occasions, choosing instead
to follow her own instincts. Throughout
the series, she is reprimanded for going against orders; she has a ‘yearning to
be the best on the squad no matter what shortcuts she felt she had to take’ (Slaughter,
2005, p408) the end literally justifies the means; this rejection of rules is,
according to Sandrine Berges in The
Hardboiled Detective as Moralist: Ethics in Crime Fiction another of the
tropes of the hard-boiled detective (Berges, nd, p2).
It is clear then, that Lena is
functioning in the same way as the hard-boiled detective in at least the first
novel in the series; Scaggs sums up Lena’s character perfectly when he says
‘The hard-boiled legacy is clear to see in the marginal and alienated
detectives of the procedural.’ (Scaggs, 2005, p96) However, Slaughter, having created this
character, then goes on to explore the way her characteristics are altered as a
result of being kidnapped and raped in the first novel, and follows her as she is
changed from this hard-boiled detective to being a victim through the
subsequent novels.
Noir in the Novels
As
well as showing Lena as a hard-boiled detective, there are a number of tropes
of literary noir which run through the entire series, both through Lena and
through the construction of the novels.
One of the defining features of Noir fiction is a sense of hopelessness
and despair, and this is something that is evident for Lena as the series
progresses. In Blindsighted, despite her sister being murdered, she has a good
life and career ahead of her; she is being groomed by Tolliver to take over his
job and her ability as a police officer is something that ‘both alarm[s] and
impresse[s] Jeffrey’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p135).
However, this changes after the events at the end of the first novel
when Lena is held prisoner; she becomes ‘damaged’ both physically and
psychologically and the repercussions of this are a major factor in the next
five novels as Lena struggles to come to terms with her ordeal. In doing this,
Slaughter makes use of another known trope of literary noir, psychology; that
is ‘rather than exploring the murky underside of the urban world… [exploring]
the disturbing depths of the human mind.’ (Horsley, 2006, p93) Whilst the
novels are concerned with crimes and the resolution of them, there is also room
for Slaughter to explore the way that these crimes affect the people involved; investigating
the way that, Lena as the victim, and the people around her deal with the
aftermath of the horrific experience.
Another of the major tropes of noir
fiction is the pervading sense of corruption that runs through society and this
is an issue that is explored through the novels in the way that the crimes are
constructed. Each of the themes in the series
are issues which pervade society and although are ‘solved’ within the context
of the series, they are indicative of the viciousness of the wider world of
which Grant County is a microcosm; this includes genital mutilation, sexual abuse, religious cultism
and white supremacy. Slaughter’s use of these themes allows her to focus on their
presence within contemporary society; in the case of white supremacy, this is
especially foregrounded, as the neighbouring police force is deeply involved
with the white supremacy movement and instigates a number of murders to cover
up their activities. Like the private
eye of hard-boiled fiction, all that can be hoped for in Grant County are
‘small, local and temporary victories’ (Scaggs, 2005, p63) Slaughter is
explicit throughout the novels that the themes she is highlighting are
indicative of a larger problem in society, having antagonists escaping justice
for example, or creating a backstory for the crime that reaches far beyond
Grant County.
According to Lee Horsley in Twentieth Century Crime Fiction (2006,
p115)
‘Literary…noir
is characterised by…the shifting roles of the protagonist and by the ill-fated
relationship between the protagonist and society, generating the themes of
alienation and entrapment.’
If
the character of Lena Adams is taken as Slaughter’s protagonist, then this is
certainly the case in the Grant County series; she changes from being a
hard-boiled confident character with a chip on her shoulder, to victim and
psychologically damaged person whose mental state creates feelings of
alienation from the rest of society. She
believes that, once she has been held prisoner, everyone thinks of her as a
victim and that they were ‘trying to look at her scars’ (Slaughter, 2003, p54)
and that they ‘cast sad, pathetic look[s] her way’ every time she walks past. It is this that creates the alienation that
is indicative of literary noir and, whilst she does not have a good
relationship with society, her experience in the first novel causes it to break
down even further.
The Hard-boiled Victim
Gender
obviously plays a large part in the construction of the series, featuring as it
does female taking a traditionally male role, and Slaughter, as with other
authors, uses Lena as a conduit to
‘explore
issues of female intergration into law enforcement agencies – ingrained sexism,
the assumptions about gender underlying institutional politics, the essential
maleness of police departments,’ (Horsley, 2006, p105)
something
which is pertinent to the fictional setting of Grant County. Despite its contemporary timeframe, Grant
County is a very conservative setting, where men are ‘not thrilled to have
women on the force.’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p27) Slaughter creates in Lena a
character whose mental strength and determination allows her to overcome such
gender inequality and even to some extent to understand and embrace aspects of
her colleagues masculinity, creating an ambiguous answer to Alison Littler’s
‘unresolved question, is she a man in woman’s clothing or a woman in man’s
clothing?’ (Walton & Jones 1999, 99).
Lena is a mixture of both, at
least up to the point she is attacked by the sexual predator in the first
novel.
At the beginning of the series, Lena
is ‘a strong woman, muscular from working out in the gym’ (Slaughter, 2003,
p108), able to hold her own in a workplace filled with men who believe that a
woman’s place is in the home. As
discussed already, she is ‘one of the boys’ – essentially a man without the
genitalia; this makes her transition to being a victim of domestic abuse all
the more shocking, as she is perceived as being such a strong character,
endowed with all the strength and masculinity that her colleagues within the
police force have. Horsley says that
‘late twentieth Century crime fiction has increasingly shown its reader the
…psychological exposure of damaged minds and the inscription of personal
traumas on the bodies of victims’ (Horsley, 2006, p112) and this is indeed true
of Slaughter’s fiction. The reader is
shown the physical and mental scars Lena has, as well as the repercussions of
the events which caused them; as Scaggs comments, ‘The lives of the characters
are shown continuing after the crime’ (Scaggs, 2005, p108) This is a deliberate
decision on the part of Slaughter; she ‘want[s] to show violence for what it
is’ (Slaughter, 2010)—something that continues have an effect on its victims,
their families and their friends long after the story ends and the police have
arrested the bad guy, something Slaughter highlights throughout the novels
subsequent to Blindsighted through
Lena.
In Blindsighted, Lena is taken prisoner by a sadistic sexual predator
and killer, Jeb McGuire the local pharmacist, who is also responsible for the
rape and murder of her twin sister amongst other victims. Whilst being held prisoner, Jeb drugs Lena
with painkillers, crucifies her to the floor in a spread-eagled position,
knocks her front teeth out so he can penetrate he mouth with his penis without
fear of her biting him and repeatedly rapes her. However, in addition to this, he drugs her
with Belladonna, which gives her hallucinations, then is gentle as he rapes
her, behaving like a lover; he also spends a lot of time talking to her,
explaining things about his life, so that she knows him as intimately as he
knows her. Physically, Lena recovers
from the attack within a few months, after having her teeth replaced and
physiotherapy for the scars on her hands and feet; but it is the psychological
scars which she struggles to recover from as a result of the gentle treatment
of her during her ordeal, and this forms the basis of Lena’s character for the
next five novels (and beyond) charting the changes from being a self-confident
detective to a victim.
The Changing Role of the Protagonist
Whilst the novels each have a
specific storyline which forms the police procedural aspect of the fiction, the
character’s lives take up a significant portion of the narrative, and this
progresses through the series, with the characters evolving and changing as a
result of events throughout each of the stories, building on the events of
previous novels. Here, the shifting role
of the protagonist is foregrounded, an established facet of literary noir. However, unlike a lot of other crime fiction,
this transition from hard-boiled to victim is not resolved at the close of the
novel, with the characteristics of the hard-boiled detective reinstated in Lena;
instead, the change are ongoing throughout the series, the juxtaposition of the
hard-boiled detective and the victim vying for supremacy throughout. Slaughter signals her intention to do this at
the point where Lena is rescued from the room where she has been held captive with
the words ‘Jeb (her captor) was part of Lena now. He would be hurting her every day for the
rest of her life’ (Slaughter, 2006ed, p382).
This ending is in keeping with Lena’s function as a noir character; the
reader is left with an ambiguous resolution; although Jeb is dead and cannot
physically hurt anyone again, there is no happy ending for her.
After the events in the first novel, all the
characters are changed, but none more so than Lena; she is the character who
has suffered the most at the hands of Jeb McGuire, although Sara Linton was a
major focus for him. Lena, however, is
adamant that her character has not changed as a result of her experience – at
least in public. In keeping with her
hard-boiled persona, Lena refuses to consider that she needs help from anyone,
even though the truth is that she is terrified of being on her own; this
stubbornness means that given the choice of seeking help or being dismissed,
she ends up losing the most important thing in her life; her work. Lena then takes the (demeaning) job of
security guard at the local university.
This job, featured throughout the third novel, is clearly marked as
being wrong for Lena; her uniform is ill-fitting, she knows that the
‘clothes…make her feel like she [does] not belong’ (Slaughter, 2004, p341) and
she ‘want[s] to be a cop again. (Slaughter, 2004, p344). It is also at this point in the series that
Lena becomes changed the most; she goes from being ‘a cop…Crossing the line
into murder, even as an accomplice, was not something she would do, no matter
what,’ (Slaughter, 2004, p278) to the intimation that she is, in fact, capable
of such a thing; her boss, Chuck, is killed by a knife like hers after he tries
to attack her and details of the crime and Lena’s viewpoint makes it implicit
that she killed him.
Vulnerabilities Attract Predators
It is during the events of A Faint, Cold Fear, the third novel in
the series, that Lena becomes involved with Ethan White, a white supremacist
who pursues her romantically, whilst at the same time physically abusing her;
at their first meeting, he grabs her arm so hard he almost fractures it,
leaving Lena in pain for days. Prior to
the events in Blindsighted, Lena was
a strong character, who would not let a man beat her, even at sports (Slaughter,
2006ed, p316); but Slaughter uses Lena’s character to reflect the way that domestic
abuse can, and does, affect wide range of women, allowing the reader to see the
change in Lena’s role as the novels progress; her masculine qualities decline and
the respect of her contemporaries becomes shattered as her colleagues
repeatedly witness the way that she is physically beaten by Ethan; more than
this however, Lena’s very personality is changed, almost beyond
recognition. Throughout the novel Faithless Lena is shown struggling with
her domestic situation, on one hand clinging to her own understanding that
‘every woman who’d ever been slapped around said she had asked for it [and]
justif[ied] having the shit beaten out of them,’ (Slaughter, 2006, p45) does
not make it right, but does the same thing herself, saying that ‘she was the one who kept pulling him
back in, she was the one who kept baiting him (emphasis
added)’. Slaughter uses this to explore
the psychological reasoning behind Lena becoming a victim of this abuse; after
the attack on her. ‘Lena felt like the
person she really was had been erased’ (Slaughter, 2003, p127) and she is
afraid of people being tender toward her, as it reminds her of the way she was
treated by her captor during her ordeal: ‘the tenderness had been the worst
part; the soft strokes, the delicate way he used his tongue and fingers to
soothe and stimulate her’ (Slaughter, 2003, p52). Therefore, the pain Ethan
inflicts on her is something she can cope with, something that means ‘she felt
alive. She felt reborn.’ (Slaughter,
2006, p45) However, when investigating a
crime which involves domestic abuse, she is forced to face up to the fact that
she will end up being killed by Ethan and so engineers his rearrest and
incarceration for a parole violation by planting a loaded gun on him and
telephoning Jeffrey with the information.
Here, Slaughter highlights the changes that Lena has undergone and the
dramatic reversal of her strength and masculinity when she has to get Jeffrey,
a man, to help her get Ethan out of her life, rather than doing it herself.
In addition to showing the way Lena’s
character changes, Slaughter is also commenting on aspects of society; the
hopelessness felt by a substantial group of women, of which she makes Lena
representative. Having Lena, who is
initially shown as being strong and able to take care of herself, reduced to
being nothing more than a shadow of herself and more of a victim than a role
model for women, Slaughter is fulfilling her aim to ‘use violence as a way to
open up a dialogue about this sort of violence and why it's happening. Perhaps
if we understand it, we can help prevent it.’ (Slaughter, 2010)
Conclusion
Whilst the novels are indeed primarily
police procedural fiction and involve a collaborative effort in solving crimes,
there are a number of plot lines and aspects of the series which can be
classified as noir; ranging from having a hard-boiled type detective to
creating a feeling of hopelessness that can be found in noir fiction. Slaughters inclusion of a third character in
the series allows her to explore some of the tropes of noir fiction; having a
major character with a changing role.
Allowing Lena to be both a victim and part of the procedural team,
whilst maintaining the sense of ‘social, structural and thematic realism,’ (Scaggs,
2005, p96) through the solved crime that the police procedural novel offers the
reader, gives Slaughter the freedom to explore some very uncomfortable themes
within the series, such as domestic violence and to highlight the way that
anyone could be the victims of these crimes, even a tough hard-boiled
detective. Furthermore, the exploration
of these themes allows the author to signal the continuing presence of noir
fiction, in that even when the crimes are solved, re-establishing the social
order of good triumphing over evil, it is merely a temporary reprieve in a
world of darkness.
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[1] All
of the references to the novels use the UK titles, rather than the sometimes
different US titles.
[2] She
was crucified and held prisoner, at the same time being drugged and raped by
her captor; the drugs making her physically responsive to the attacks, thereby leading
her to believe she was a willing participant in the rapes.
[3] This
is revealed to be erroneous as the series progresses, but is the information
Lena believes to be true.
