Murder Mystery Trope Getting the Stink Eye
It’s that blankety-blank scheming femme fatale. I sort of hate her.
The Pattern
I just finished a mystery series where two out of ten villains were the scheming femme fatale.
You know her: She’s beautiful. She has men eating out of the palm of her hand. She is also mean as a hungry snake you just woke up.
Her big crime though is that she has plans to marry a rich man, and part of her plan involves murder.
The Context
It is weirdly common in books set in the past. Historical romances have a version of this (generally omitting murder, but same character,) but historical mysteries are chock-a-block with them. Ruth Myers had two of them. Susanna Gregory had at least three variants (scheming to get ahead via murder, often by manipulating men, though not necessarily plotting to marry for advancement.) Maureen Ash’s first book, “The Alehouse Murder,” is exactly this.
CJ Samson pulled an interesting twist with a lady who could have fallen under this heading but is innocent. She tells the hero directly in the end that she is marrying for prestige, but she didn’t commit any dastardly crimes or even do anything underhanded.
And here is the thing: the lady was just being honest and true to her time period, which was Elizabethan England. It was as though Sansome understood my main complaint with this trope.
The Complaint
If you set your mystery in Regency England or some such, your woman antagonist is justified in wanting to marry up. It might be the only way she can keep a roof over her head and provide a reasonable life for her kids.
Writers tend to miss this. The femme fatale is, for some reason, not in a precarious financial situation, and she is presented as being just too greedy and arrogant. Her big final speech is all about how everyone around her is too stupid to figure out anything, and there is no sign that she will suffer without a quick marriage.
It’s such a dumb take on the situation. It is ahistorical and misses the chance to make a truly sympathetic villain. I suspect writers want to make the point that femme fatale could have been great at something else if she had better options, but mostly she just comes off as cartoon Lucifer in a fancy ball-gown.
And that leads to the second part of my complaint.
The Complaint, part II
I hear that there are people who think that wishing to have nice things is morally equivalent to sticking a knife in someone’s back, but that is the stupidest idea in the history of stupidity.
There is a big difference. The results are radically different.
Wanting an advantageous marriage doesn’t hurt anyone. There are many things you might be willing to do to marry well that don’t hurt anyone. How about the femme fatale just laments to the bored duke that she isn’t finding anyone, and he says, “Well, I’m not doing anything, and I need to get married to avoid people gossiping about me?” Or she travels across the country trying to meet people?
Having ambition and understanding how miserable a poverty-stricken marriage can be is not a crime. Being pragmatic and not particularly romantic is not the same as being hateful and vicious. Neither of those things necessarily lead to murder.
It is just a strange leap to make from ‘this woman wants to marry a rich guy’ to ‘this woman is capable of strangling a baby with her bare hands.’
Nuance in the Complaint
It’s not that I absolutely cannot read a book with this trope in it. It just always causes me to roll my eyes a bit when it becomes a pattern. One villain in a series makes sense, but three in 10 raises eyebrows.
It is especially eye-rolling when it seems as though the female villain’s real crime is wanting something more than what she has been handed. She never thinks highly of the particular man she killed to marry. She doesn’t care about other people at all. She just thinks she deserves whatever material comfort marriage to a high-ranking man would afford. And everyone in the book is horrified that the woman wants comfort.
Isn’t it just as horrifying if you have a stalker who thinks the object of her affection is somehow going to start caring for her if she murders his wife? Is she any less terrifying if it is crystal-clear that she will have nothing else to live for if she fails to marry soon and so will do whatever it takes to get rid of our intrepid detective? Can we at least have some huge advantage come with the man, like a crown or a massive treasure? Maybe a chance at revenge on someone, no matter how petty? Can she be really desperate because of a debt she has, and that is why she must resort to desperate measures? She has to at least get something out of the deal if she is some sort of criminal mastermind.
Even more worrisome is when the femme fatale is a servant or some such scheming to marry above her station. Then there is a veneer of ‘oh no, the lower classes are getting uppity,’ and you start to wonder if the real issue all along was that stinky peasants can sleep their way into halls of power. Again, can there be a touch of a second motive, or a reason why this servant thinks she can squeeze her way into the nobility? Or really needs to? Especially since the church in many places that the stories are set would have advocated for everyone staying in their original position and made crossing class barriers legally tricky.
Greed is a fine motive for murder, and your villain can be cartoon Lucifer in a ball gown. Just try to understand your villain sometimes.