Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she does something slightly different, using Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin to prompt her protagonist Eliza Cargill into action when women start disappearing from Monterrey.
No one cares enough about the missing women – who, like Eliza, are prostitutes – to investigate. Monterrey has no constables, only vigilantes, who are more interested in money and feuds. This lack of law enforcement had suited Eliza, who was 21 when her husband Peter died, shot in a bar fight after barely two years of marriage.
‘Eliza was more relieved than upset,’ Smiley writes at the outset, explaining how Eliza’s father had handed his daughter over to Peter, who was 38, back in Kalamazoo, Michigan. ‘Part of the reason Eliza didn’t mourn him, and part of the reason she was earning her living (and a good living) in Monterrey, was that he had made it clear that he intended to put it to her, whether she liked it or not, once or twice a day.’ After her backstreet abortion in Kalamazoo, Peter finds a Monterrey doctor to give Eliza a pessary, which inadvertently gives her financial freedom when she is widowed.
Rudimentary birth control aside, Eliza knows there is nothing safe about her life. Mrs Parks, who runs the establishment where she works, even warns her: ‘Everyone knows that 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.
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