Everyone knows this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Oh, those men would talk about how they fight Indians and wrestle cattle and climb the masts and look for justice, and indeed they do, but they do it for themselves, if you ask me. And what they want of women, they want for themselves, too.
The best part of A Dangerous Business is the historical setting — 1851 Monterey — and Jane Smiley masterfully captures the landscape and the buildings and the weather; peopling the town with all sorts of interesting carpetbaggers and fortune-seekers. The weaker (and more dominant) part of the book is a rather uncompelling murder mystery, from the perspective of a naive (absolutely uneducated and unworldly) young woman who stumbles into sex work (which she finds acceptable and liberating) after the death of her awful husband. The tone — for a detective story set in the lawless West of saloons, ranchos, and brothels — is weirdly sedate, and the mystery itself didn’t satisfy me, but I can appreciate that Smiley was going for something beyond genre fiction here; it just didn’t add up to much for me. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When the first of “the girls” disappeared, no one thought a thing of it. Folks disappeared from Monterey all the time, mostly because there was more going on in San Francisco, or even San Jose. Or people took their families and moved down the coast because they thought they would find better hunting there, or some land with more rain. If they were lucky, they came back, gave up on the idea of owning their own farms or ranches, and went to work the way everyone else worked. In fact, Eliza knew that her mother would say that she had disappeared, and that thought was a bit of a prickle to her conscience, but not enough to get her to answer those letters her mother had sent. She thought there was a lot to be said for disappearing, and so she didn’t think much of the disappearance of that girl, except to note the day, May 14, her very own birthday. Twenty-one now, and wasn’t that strange?
At 18, Eliza Ripple was married off to an older man by her Congregationalist parents (if only to prevent her from running off with the handsome Irish labourer she was making eyes at), and after carrying her off to California in search of his fortune (and spending the brief months of their marriage demanding much of her in both the kitchen and the bedroom), this Peter was shot in a barroom brawl and Eliza spent no time mourning his death. When a local Madam offered her employment, Eliza shrugged and set to work, and as she describes it here, it was not unpleasant to spent time with one or two men each evening, knowing that the customers were vetted in advance by Mrs Parks and that Carlos the bouncer sat on a chair outside her ajar door; these men were certainly nicer, cleaner, and less demanding than Peter had been and the money that Eliza earned afforded her perfect independence. In her free time, Eliza liked to stroll the streets of Monterey, and eventually, she made the acquaintance of another free-spirited sex worker, Jean: a cross-dressing lesbian who worked at an establishment that catered only to women (and that did kind of blow my mind: did such a place really exist in 1851 Monterey? At any rate, I appreciated the way that Eliza wasn’t shocked to learn of it; why wouldn’t an overworked housewife want a place to go for gentle comfort and release?) What started with Jean sharing and discussing books with Eliza (and in particular, the writings of Edgar Allen Poe) led to the two friends employing the detective skills described in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" when fellow sex workers start to go missing and the local Sheriff doesn’t seem to care.
That’s pretty much the set up, which was fine, but the execution didn’t do much for me. On the one hand, I essentially liked that the characters talked about books (if one doesn’t mind them giving away the endings to Poe’s stories), but on the other, it irked me that once Jean corrected Eliza’s French pronunciation of the detective’s name (Dupin is pronounced DuPANN not DuPINN), every time Eliza wonders what the detective would make of something the name she says or thinks is written “DuPANN”. Like, beyond irked every time I saw it. And so many threads just went nowhere: Jean can see ghosts, but they don’t affect anything; Eliza is obsessed by horses (always asking to see someone’s horse or peeking through a fence at horses or wondering whatever happened to a dead woman’s horses), but that doesn’t have any relevance to the plot; Eliza sometimes feels bad about losing contact with her parents, but it doesn’t ultimately matter; Eliza notes this man’s unusual appearance, had an unsettling experience at that man’s house, holds a suspicion that Mrs Parks knows more than she's letting on, and none of it matters or even rises to the level of a red herring — there are simply skeins of loose threads that don’t get tied up. And Eliza’s unworldliness (but eagerness to learn) was more annoying than charming to me: She has one of her seafaring customers explain to her what the equator is (and later makes a connection when another client is talking about degrees of latitude); she asks a gentleman if he believes there really will be a (Civil) war, and his answer (most certainly) isn’t very edifying (to her or to me); she agrees with her employer that women agitating for the vote are probably wasting their time — historical details felt tacked on instead of enriching. And when the climax to the mystery came, it was neither surprising or exciting.
Brutes! As soon as a man sees a rule, he strives to flout it, whether he sees it in the Bible or a constitution. That prohibition runs around in his head, and he can’t stop it. Then there he is, transgressing, and you ask him why, and he says that something was unfair or he was provoked, but what he really means is that he kept having thoughts, and then those had to turn into action, and he could not stop them.
The idea of a serial killer targeting sex workers in nineteenth century Monterey, while other sex workers try to find and stop the murderer, is an intriguing concept, and this last passage about men’s justification for brutality — whether a husband abusing his wife, a killer presumably “cleansing” the streets of immorality, or plantation owners enslaving others — captures the underlying philosophy of the book: life at the time was a dangerous business, and especially for women, but women working together could mitigate some of that danger. There’s an interesting morsel to chew over at the heart of that, so while I did find this an often quiet, sometimes irksome, read in the details, the overall experience wasn’t entirely without merit. Three noncommittal stars.
