Hardboiled Feminism: Laura as an Interrogation of the Detective Genre

Laura holds a privileged place in detective fiction and film noir, yet Vera Caspary’s novel has received little critical attention. This paper asserts that Caspary’s novel, written within a context of a hypermasculine culture, constitutes a significant feminist revision of the genre that disrupts the hardboiled/scientific binary. By self-reflexively reworking the tropes of the hardboiled detective and using a casebook format associated with scientific detectives, the author crafts a narrative free from the strictures of a male-centered genre, creating a noir novel that boldly breaks from its hardboiled contemporaries