The Women Behind Miranda Corbie by Kelli Stanley
I’m thrilled to welcome author Kelli Stanley for a guest post, in which she discusses the women who helped shape Miranda Corbie’s identity. The newest book in the Miranda Corbie series, City of Secrets, is out today.
I’m sometimes asked if Miranda Corbie—my hardboiled, fearless, angry, feminine and supremely moral PI—is anachronistic.
After all, Miranda swears (profusely); drinks whiskey (often) and smokes (constantly). She became an escort in San Francisco after the loss of her lover in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict in which she fought as a volunteer nurse. Such sexual freedom and frankness—and the way in which Miranda uses her beauty and physical allure—makes her a femme fatale in the role of a gumshoe, and to some people her strength, resilience and attitudes about social justice have raised the question of whether or not she is a woman of her time.
The short answer is: of course. Iconic characters represent their own time and place and setting as well as universal human experiences and feelings that transcend any era. Like her brothers in gumshoes Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, I hope Miranda proves to be a long-lasting icon, one that speaks to 1940, 2011, and the future.
The long answer is that Miranda is a woman of her time and all time … but because of American attitudes toward history—particularly the romanticized golden years of the Greatest Generation—and because of the way we generally form our opinion of that era—classic film—the image of a strong, independent woman with a social conscience may seem more modern than it is. Especially if you believe that people never had sex before marriage, that profanity was an invention of the 1960s, and that married couples always slept in two separate beds.
Such was the inheritance of the Hays Code, the Hollywood censorship bureau responsible for the sanitized and wholly unreal depiction of the world from 1934 to the late 1950s.This is the past with which we are arguably most familiar—a past that never really existed. (more…)
