The femme fatale in literature is as old as sex, power and money In my golden age she’s liable to be that stop-the-traffic redhead Newman is contemplating, who can finger a handgun just as well as a hemline. And of course, there are the magisterial performances of the women themselves, placed right at the heart of the story. Their male leads weren’t so bad to bounce off either: a Fred MacMurray, a Bogart or a Mitchum are first-rate foils for a broad who can find her way around the block. Likewise the photography - silvery to let a criminal woman shimmer, shadowed to let her menace - was in the hands of visionaries ready to experiment. Billy Wilder (no slouch himself) could still bring in Raymond Chandler, to lift his dialog for Double Indemnity into the stratosphere.

How so? Well, the screenwriting is a help, and the studios attracted the very best. In my golden age, they’re hands down better drawn, more complete and more convincing on film than their contemporaries on the page. Women tough enough to get places even in that crowd, and then hold on as if her life depended on it – as it often did. Women at home with the slickest of grifters and seen-it-all survivors, racketeers, the opulent and the corrupt. A sea change was afoot in crime writing too, I knowīut our subject is criminal women, and no question, the most striking and the smartest, the down-lowest and certainly the best dressed were the cast of choice female transgressors that Hollywood put on film in those years.

And for audiences that had lost the temperament for Happy-Ever-After endings, they were the movies that nailed their dark, disillusioned times.

They gripped a generation that had come through the pit of Depression and years of World War. They were a phenomenon that grew almost magically in a Hollywood short on resources but long on talent. In other words, we’re in the period of classic films noirs. I’ve long been fascinated by a decade and more that starts, more or less, when Billy Wilder writes and directs his stunning version of James M. Which, of course, may not be everybody’s golden age. And the story is set squarely in my personal golden age of transgressive women. The woman, of course, is the story’s femme fatale. So s ays Newman, the shamus in Shamus Dust, reflecting on a woman who’s been way ahead of him since they first set eyes on each other, and wondering if he’ll catch up before all this is over. And for one wild, dark glance a policeman will make her allowances he makes for nobody else, because she brings out the Walter Raleigh in him. She will never need to light a cigarette or dine alone or carry folding money.

'Darwin says somewhere that the fittest to survive will always be a recently widowed redhead with brains and looks and style.

Shamus Dust by Janet Roger