The Whistler

Action-oriented commercial fiction genres often neglect friendships between women. When a woman appears as an action protagonist, the males in the story are impressed by how she is like them. Rarely, a female action hero also has close female friendships, as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Xena: Warrior Princess. After this book’s publication, Grisham remarked in an interview that his wife had once told him he didn’t know how to write women. In this book, he seems to have made a particular effort to depict the nature of women’s friendships with each other.

In A Passion for Friends (see the Further Reading section of this study guide), Janice Raymond describes friendship between women as originating from a distinct culture that women create for themselves and that women absorb as an aspect of their identity, or self-concept. (Raymond, 880) Lacy has many female friends; she is happy without a man in her life, although she likes men socially and professionally. Her relationships with women are more intimate and focus on mutual care and support. For example, her friendship with Verna Hatch is separate from her professional relationship with Hugo. The two women are shopping buddies and talk about feelings and relationships. This kind of gossip itself plays a part in defining and enforcing the rules of women’s culture. If the same topics arise at all with Lacy’s male coworkers, the banter never reaches a personal level.

When Lacy’s boss, Michael, implies that Verna may turn on her, Lacy feels deeply hurt and betrayed. Along with Verna’s male relatives, Michael assumes that Verna’s and Lacy’s relationship is of secondary importance. What none of these men understand is that the relationship between the two women is as critical to Verna’s survival as money. Verna can work to support herself, but she depends on her friendship with Lacy.

That supportive, woman-to-woman relationship emerges in a different context when Myers abandons his girlfriend, Carlita, in Key Largo and again when a hitman threatens JoHelen Hooper, the Whistler. In both cases, Lacy adamantly pushes for the BJC to provide protection, and when they don’t, she follows through on her own. Once Lacy has successfully affected each rescue, she uses a combination of physical closeness and communication to calm and reassure the other women. Conversation and closeness are a particularly female approach to stress management.

Judge McDover and her girlfriend, Phyllis, are another example of woman-to-woman friendship. Their relationship is romantic, but the element of friendship and partnership resembles that of Lacy and Verna. They enjoy shopping together for expensive shoes. They purchase pretty, glittering things together. They provide each other with mutual support in stereotypically feminine ways.

The judge illustrates another side of the culture of women in her reaction to the abusive mother in her courtroom. Laws against theft, embezzlement, and money laundering are external and not incorporated into the judge’s self-concept. However, the abusive and neglectful mother violates the rules of women’s society, which center mutual caretaking and especially the care and protection of children. The judge takes that violation far more personally than other cases that come before her.

For a male author, especially in a commercial genre, to recognize that women’s loyalty to other women is a primary value—one that supersedes both work and relationships with men—is unusual. Whatever Grisham learned from his wife on the subject, he appears to have applied that knowledge effectively.