“I duck into the parking garage, hoping to escape. But my boots echo on the slick cement, broadcasting my location to anyone listening. And I know they are listening.” So run the opening sentences of Lisa Lutz’s wry novel, The Spellman Files, and the people listening and forcing the main character into a dangerous car chase are HER PARENTS.
We recognize Isabel Spellman’s voice immediately. With her staccato rhythms and deliberate vernacularisms, her street-wise pose and her penchant for grungy “denim and leather,” Isabel’s persona lies somewhere between “Dirty Harry and Nancy Drew.” But Isabel’s true antecedents lie deeper in the past, in that genre known as “hardboiled” or “noir.” Like her precursors, Isabel is a private investigator. And like the characters who populate The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, Isabel lives on the margins, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to assimilate into the mainstream. Readers will recognize elements of their favorite gumshoes (from Lew Archer to Sam Spade) in Isabel.
Although readers can draw ready parallels between Lutz and Raymond Chandler, or Lutz and Dashiell Hammett (especially since Lutz and Hammett both engage San Francisco’s social and physical geography), The Spellman Files lies closer, in spirit and intent, to Ross McDonald’s psycho-thrillers. The book bears a strong resemblance to McDonald’s Black Money, one of the first to feature the detective Lew Archer. McDonald, writing in the 1960s, was more interested in writing sociology. He remains exterior to his characters, weaving a dense socio-economic tapestry around a handful of archetypes. Lutz, however, turns towards the interior, and she gives us action and emotion in equal measure. In contrast to her hard-edge forebears, one might call Lutz’s particular approach to the thriller “soft-boiled.”
The Spellman Files borrows its structure from the hard-boiled thriller, but family constitutes Lutz’s greatest, most insistent theme. Isabel works for the family business, Spellman Investigations. The Spellman family has 5 members (Albert, Olivia, David, Isabel, and Rae), plus one (Uncle Ray). The Spellmans are a lovable but dysfunctional family, working out their family issues with old fashioned tools of the gumshoe trade. One family member’s sugar habit might trigger an all night stake out, a teenage infraction could turn into an interrogation session in the basement of the Spellman family home. Then there is Isabel, whose problematic notions of femininity are a constant source of humor (and humiliation) for the narrator.
As a twenty-first century thriller, taking place in twenty-first century San Francisco, The Spellman Files addresses both gender and family issues with directness and empathy. Gender (and trouble with conventional gender models) figures from the very beginning of The Spellman Files, the moment we first encounter Isabel Spellman. Her gender confusion, illustrated by her commitment to clunky boots and her aversion to commitments of a more romantic nature, prefigures the book’s larger themes.
