When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I read a lot of detective novels.
Noir focuses on the criminal mind, not a whodunit: more why they did it and will they get away with it. The abnormal psychology is what fascinates me rather than the puzzle-solving aspect.
With any project I work on - not just 'True Detective' - I don't feel the need just to play a strong woman. I don't want the audience to say, 'Oh, she was so strong.' I want to play characters that are flawed and interesting.
I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!
Women in mystery fiction were largely confined to little old lady snoops - amateur sleuths - who are nurses, teachers, whatever.
You don't read many scripts, especially for crime dramas, that feature a strong woman as the central character.
Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.
Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it's not just in crime, is it? Women's fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There's no male equivalent.
I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.