Lady Macbeth - The First Femme Fatale

The Cambridge dictionary defines femme fatale as  a woman who is very attractive in a mysterious way, usually leading men into danger or causing their destruction.

My interest in film noir has allowed me to view some of the most infamous femme fatales in American cinema specifically films from the 1940s.

Phyllis Dietrichson, portrayed by Barbara Stanwick in Double Indemnity (1944) entices insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to kill her husband for the insurance money.

Double Indemnity is similar to The Postman Always Rings Twice (both are stories written by James M. Cain), but Barbara Stanwick's character comes off more conniving and dangerous than Cora Smith portrayed by Lana Turner.

Other notable femme fatales are Jane Greer as Kathie in Out of the Past (1947), Jane Palmer portrayed by Lizabeth Scott in Too Late For Tears (1949), and Kitty March played by Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945).

Some of these notorious woman make me think of one of the most famous femme fatale from fiction, Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare's great play Macbeth.

For those of you who do not know, Lady Macbeth was the woman who urged her husband to kill the King of Scotland so Macbeth could become king.

After reading a letter from her husband in which he states that his kingship was prophesied, Lady Macbeth invokes the spirits to remove her feminine humanity.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!
                                   Act I, scene V

On her husband's return Macbeth informs his wife that King Duncan will stay with them this night but the king plans to take his leave tomorrow, to which Lady Macbeth says:

O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!

She then tells her husband to disguise all his evil intent.

bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,But be the serpent under't. 

Later, when Macbeth appears to waver over killing Duncan, Lady Macbeth chides her husband's weakness and questions his manhood.

Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,

But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.
                                 Act I, scene VII



My detective novel, Give Me The Daggers is based on Shakespeare's play. In it Lady Macbeth is the dangerously alluring femme fatale who seduces my protagonist the Thane of Lennox when she believes the thane is getting to close to the truth regarding Duncan's murder.

Lady Macbeth smiled readily during dinner. She smiled when she was not complimenting Drummond or telling him how lonely she was since the king left on his pilgrimage. It was a smooth, seamless seduction. Drummond never saw it coming but it struck him squarely between the eyes. He fell smitten, totally captivated by her beauty and grace. Despite being older than Drummond, the queen was quite lovely and the Thane of Lennox was physically attracted to her. She was also charming and elegant, and possessed a regalness born not of her high station but of something within herself.

After dinner she suggested they take a walk upon the castle walls. It was a calm, moonlit night. A myriad of stars pocked the purple canopy overhead. A gentle night breeze brought the scent of henbane and the odor reminded Gowan of death. He did not think long on this, however. Gowan stared at Gruoch and thought she looked even more enchanting in the moonlight. She stood close, facing him. Her palms pressed against his chest. He looked down at her face. It was tilted up to his, her lips open and inviting. Some impulse beyond himself made him bend down and kiss those lips. Gruoch kissed him back and soon they were a tangle in each other’s arms. Drummond did even remember how they got from atop the castle to the queen’s room.

Lady Macbeth is the ultimate femme fatale who induces her husband on a road not only to his destruction, but to her's as well.


Stephen Gaspar's books can be found on Amazon 

Raymond Chandler - The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler's novel The Lady in the Lake (1943) was pieced together from three of Chandler's earlier short stories; Bay City Blues (1938), The Lady in the Lake (1939), and No Crime in the Mountains (1941). The short stories feature Chandler's Philip Marlowe prototype John Dalmas and John Evans.

I liked all three short stories, but particularly enjoyed Bay City Blues. There is a scene in Bay City Blues that does not appear in the Lady in the Lake novel (but Chandler would rework some of it for his novel The High Window). Dalmas walks into a club.

The lobby -they called it a foyer- looked like an MGM set for a night club in the Broadway Melody of 1980.... 
The ceiling had stars in it and they twinkled. Beside the bar entrance, which was dark and vaguely purple, like a half-remembered nightmare, there was a huge round mirror set back in a white tunnel with an Egyptian headdress over the top of it. In front of this a lady in green was preening her metallic blond hair. Her evening gown was cut so low at the back that she was wearing a black beauty patch on her lumbar muscle, about an inch below where her pants would have been, if she had been wearing any pants.
A cigarette girl with a tray the size of a five-pound candy box came down the gangway. She wore feathers in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a three-cent stamp, and one of her long, beautiful, naked legs was gilded and the other was silvered. She had the cold, disdainful expression of a dame who is dated so far ahead that she would have to think twice before accepting a knockdown to a maharajab with a basket of rubies under his arm. 

In The High Window, Chandler changed this last line to read, She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.



 Bay City Blues has plenty of hardboiled characters and women with wicked mouths. In the nightclub, Dalmas spots the woman he is looking for.

The girl at the table next to me had red hair too. It was parted in the middle and strained back as if she hated it. She had large, dark, hungry eyes, awkward features and no make-up except a mouth that glared like a neon sign. Her street suit had too-wide shoulders, too-flaring lapels. An orange under sweater snuggled her neck and there was a black and-orange quill in her Robin Hood hat, crooked on the back of her head. She smiled at me and her teeth were as thin and sharp as a pauper's Christmas. I didn't smile back.

She emptied her glass and rattled it on the tabletop. A waiter in a neat mess jacket slipped out of nowhere and stood in front of me.

"Scotch and soda," the girl snapped. She had a hard, angular voice with a liquor slur in it.

The waiter looked at her, barely moved his chin and looked back at me. I said: "Bacardi and grenadine."

He went away. The girl said: "That'll make you sicky, big boy."

I didn't look at her. "So you don't want to play," she said loosely. I lit a cigarette and blew a ring in the soft purplish air. "Go chase yourself," the girl said. "I could pick up a dozen gorillas like you on every block on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard, my foot. A lot of bit players out of work and fish-faced blondes trying to shake a hangover out of their teeth."

"Who said anything about Hollywood Boulevard?" I asked.

"You did. Nobody but a guy from Hollywood Boulevard wouldn't talk back to a girl that insulted him civilly."

A man and a girl at a nearby table turned their heads and stared. The man gave me a short, sympathetic grin. "That goes for you, too," the girl said to him.

"You didn't insult me yet," he said.

"Nature beat me to it, handsome."

The waiter came back with the drinks. He gave me mine first. The girl said loudly: "I guess you're not used to waiting on ladies."

The waiter gave her her Scotch and soda. "I beg your pardon, madam," he said in an icy tone.

"Sure. Come around sometime and I'll give you a manicure, if I can borrow a hoe. Boy friend's paying the ticket on this."

None of this makes it into the novel Lady in the Lake, so you have to read the short story to get it. 

One character that makes it into two of the short stories and the novel is the smalltown sheriff. His description and dialogue are almost word for word. This shows that Chandler was sometimes  either lazy in his writing or when he liked something he stayed with it.

One thing you can be sure of when you read Raymond Chandler is that his detective will get knocked out. They must have suffered multiple concussions. One of my favorite knock-out lines is from Farewell My Lovely (1940). Marlowe narrates; A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night. I dived into it. It had no bottom.

In Bay City Blues, Dalmas gets sapped. Then a naval gun went of in my ear and my head was a large pink firework exploding into the vault of the sky and scattering and falling slow and pale, and then dark into the waves. Blackness ate me up. 

In No Crime in the Mountains, detective John Evans describes his experience. My head came off and went half-way across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.
A short time later Evans gets cold-cocked again. I spun off into the distance, trailing flashes of lightning, and did a nose dive out into space. A couple of thousand years passed. Then I stopped a planet with my back ... .

I like the following exchange between Dalmas and a tough cop in Bay City Blues. It dispels the image of the tough-guy private eye.  

De Spain said: "If this guy you call Big Chin is Moss Lorenz, I'll know him. We might get in. Or maybe we walk ourselves into some hot lead."

"Just like the coppers do on the radio," I said.

"You scared?"

"Me?" I said. "Sure I'm scared." 

The Lady in the Lake short story is very much like the novel. though the solution is not the same. 

The novel has some great quotes: The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.

 But my favorite from the novel is: "I'm all done with hating you," I said. "It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long."

There is film version of The Lady in the Lake in 1947 starring and directed by Robert Montgomery. The movie is not exceptional save for the fact that is was filmed from the viewpoint of the central character.  

Raymond Chandler - Farewell My Lovely

Raymond Chandler's second book Farewell, My Lovely (1940)  featured the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe. For me the story rivals Chandler's first book The Big Sleep. My first contact with Farewell, My Lovely was as a teenager when I saw the Dick Powell movie version, Murder, My Sweet. I still enjoy that movie.

Some know that Chandler created Farewell, My Lovely, by piecing together three of his short stories: Try The Girl (1937), Mandarin's Jade (1937), and The Man Who Liked Dogs (1936). I have read these short stories and enjoy them very much. Mandarin's Jade is my favorite of the three because it is a good story with interesting characters: the psychic, his exotic secretary and the Indian, not to mention the femme fatale.

Not all the great lines from the novel are in the short story, but some of them are:

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

Her smile was older than Egypt now

Comparing Mandarin's Jade and Farewell, My Lovely is something like comparing a second draft to a finished draft. In Mandarin's Jade Chandler describes the psychic's eyes:

    His black eyes were as shallow as a cafeteria tray or as deep as a hole to China - whichever you like.

It's good, I like it. This is how Chandler describes his eyes in Farewell, My Lovely.

    His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of a somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone in it and wait. You could listen and wait and give up waiting and laugh and then just when you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come up back to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote you could hardly believe a well like that was possible.
    His eyes were deep like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch a lion tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.

WOW!

Some might think; read the novel, it's better than the short stories. On one hand they would be right, but on the other hand there are some scenes in the short stories that did not make it into the novel. It would be a shame to miss them.

Here is a description of a bar the detective Dalmas is about to enter moments before a shootout.

    I could see the Hotel Tremaine's sign over the narrow door between two storefronts, both empty -- an old two-storey walkup. Its woodwork would smell of kerosene, its shades would be cracked, its curtains would be of sleazy cotton lace and its bed-springs would stick into your back. I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine, I slept in them, staked out in them, fought with bitter, scrawny landladies in them, got shot at in them, and might get carried out of one of them to the morgue wagon. They are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and pin-jabbers, the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello.

The great thing about short stories is they only have so much space to tell a story. The writing is nice and tight. One thing I did notice in Farewell, My Lovely, (and in The Big Sleep) is that some scenes appear to be fillers, and repeat information.

Even if you are not a big Chandler fan, the short stories are worth reading as well as the novel. The short stories do not end exactly the same as the novel. So whether you read the novel or short story, if it's Raymond Chandler, you can't lose.

Stephen Gaspar's books can be found on Amazon! Click here!

The Three Weird Sisters

In last week's blog I posted an old article about the three witches from Macbeth. In my new historical detective novel, Give Me The Daggers, the three weird sisters also play an integral role, and as in Shakespeare's play, the witches appear first. Here is prologue from Give Me The Daggers.

Prologue

THE WIND BLEW with monstrous might and main out of the north and across the moor. An unstoppable primitive force, it seemed to derive its power from neither heaven nor hell, but some deep, dark recess not kin to this world. No mountain range or forest stood in its path, so unabated it rolled on. The wind increased in speed and ferocity, as was the awful noise it made, as if the suffering world had found a voice and screamed out in agony. Had there been a human being in this remote and desolate land to hear it, they would have been driven mad by the hideous sound.

     A flash of blue lightning was followed by a sharp crack of thunder. The sound reverberated across the Moorland drowning out the wind. The thunder had a solidity that tossed tree branches about and even seemed to move small rocks. The angry heavens flashed again. A lightning bolt fell to earth as if thrown by some ancient god, and struck a tree. It was not a large tree, but rather sick and feeble-looking one. A branch dropped to the ground and the spot where the lightning hit caught fire. The wind soon put out the flame, and rain started to fall.

    A female creature stood amidst the storm and laughed to see such things. She did not fear the elements as other mortals. She welcomed them. Standing in the middle of the moor, her arms outstretched, she beckoned to the wind and rain, the thunder and lightning. She felt akin to the elemental forces as they raged about her. Her body tingled as she felt a mingling with powers not understood or suspected by most human beings.

    Her features were androgynous and some may have even assumed she was a man. Her face was anything but feminine; indeed, she was quite repulsive. Bad teeth and a

tuft of hair on her chin made her even more abhorrent. She

carried a coarse-cloth sack. From inside the sack a small creature squirmed, making pathetic whimpering sounds.

    Another woman joined the first. Though she appeared younger, the second female looked similar to the first, dressed in rags and cast-off clothes. Her face was dirty and her thin lips chapped and cracked. The fingers on her hands, not the usual ten, were long and bony.

    A third woman joined the other two. This one was older. Her right eye contained no color, making her unique appearance even more pronounced.

    An aberrant bond existed between the three. It was a bond rooted in more than their history, or their background or blood. These three were tied to one another beyond any human ties. The powers of any one of them were enhanced by the other two. The number three was a special number in holy mysticism; the Holy Trinity, the three magi, and Peter‘s three denials. The number three held power in the unholy black arts as well.

    Though female in nature, they were not exactly women. They had transcended their sex and their humanity, if they were ever human. Their human features were not exactly their own. They did possess female qualities, as much as nature could create gender, but their spirits, their essence  was beyond the scope of human understanding, even beyond the scope of nature, for they were not of nature. There was something very unnatural about them.     

    The women stood close and faced one another. The first woman opened her sack and withdrew a rather small but remarkable-looking creature. It was a sickly-white and completely hairless. Unnatural oils allowed the rain to roll off its slimy skin. The creature was small like a child. Indeed it did have a head and limbs, but the digits that grew from its limbs were more like claws. Anyone would have difficulty guessing the nature of this grotesque. It may  have  been  part  human, part animal, part snake, and

perhaps part demon. The coupling required to produce such a creature was both revolting and mind-boggling.

    The first woman held out the creature in front of her and began the incantation.

    “Fair is foul and foul is fair: hover though the fog and filthy air.”

    The young woman put her hand around the throat of the small creature. She began to strangle it as she joined in the incantation.

    “Fair is foul and foul is fair: hover through the fog and filthy air.”

    The oldest woman brought out a knife and sliced the creature open as she said, “Fair is foul and foul is fair: hover through the fog and filthy air.”

    As the blood ran freely from the gaping wound, the woman holding the creature moved it back and forth and around and around creating an archaic symbol with its blood upon the ground.

    When she finished, the first woman tossed the lifeless carcass behind her.

    The three took turns spitting, urinating and defecating upon the blood-stained ground.

    “When shall we three meet again?” the first woman said. “In thunder, lightning or in rain?”

    “When the hurly-burly’s done,” the second woman said. “When the battle’s lost and won.”

    “That will be ere the set of sun,” the third said.

    The first asked, “Where’s the place?”

    Answered the other two, “Upon the heath.”

    “There to meet with…”

    “MACBETH!” they cried out in unison

    “Aggghhhhh!”

    Gruoch, wife of Macbeth mac Finlay, looked up at her husband  as  the  cry  escaped his lips. His face went ashen

and  the  look  of  terror  dawned  on  his  face.  She  felt his

member inside her shrink up and lose its hardness.

    “What is it?” she demanded.

    His limbs stiffened and sweat broke out all over his body. Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, rolled off his wife and lay on his back in his bed.

    “What is it?” Gruoch repeated, sitting up and placing her palm against his bearded cheek. “What is wrong?”

    He stared up at the ceiling of their bedchamber and rubbed his chest. He was trembling.

    Gruoch got out of bed and poured a cup of wine that was on a nearby table. She brought it over to husband, who continued to breathe deeply.

    “Drink this,” she ordered.

    He sat up and drank the wine.

    She took the cup from him and had him lay back down. She sat next to him stroking his brow and speaking soothingly.

    “There, there, now,” she said. “Just relax. More wine? No? Do you feel better? Good. What was it that startled you so?”

    Macbeth lay there, still staring up at the ceiling. He shook his head, as if not knowing how to describe it.

    “I feel as if… it felt like… someone had… I felt an icy grip… upon my soul, by Saint Columba, I did,” he said. “I thought I had… witnessed my own death… saw my own grave, and... glimpsed hell itself.”

    She looked at him concerned. In the years she had known him, Macbeth had never experienced a nightmare in his sleep, let alone having one while they were making love.

    Gruoch bent over and kissed his lips gently.

    Macbeth, Lord of Moray, tried to slow his heart rate and breathe normal. He raised his right hand in front of his eyes and it shook noticeably. He looked up into her eyes.

They were beautiful. Never had he seen such eyes. Never had he been so completely in love with a woman.

    The unexplainable episode was troubling to him. Never

had   he   experienced    anything    such    as   that   before.   It more than troubled Macbeth… it frightened him. He would have to find the courage to go on. But where would he find such courage? Macbeth knew. He would find the courage in her eyes. She had more than her share of strength, he thought. He had always known it. She would kill for him. And he would kill for her.

Give Me The Daggers by Stephen Gaspar 
                is available on Amazon!

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