Plum’s the Girl! Janet Evanovich and the Empowerment of Common America. Theo D’haen The present text appeared as “Plum’s the Girl! Janet Evanovich and the Empowerment of Common America,” in Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate M. Quinn, ed., Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 145-58. When citing please refer to the published version. In this essay, I will discuss Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series – seven instalments to date, from One for the Money in 1994 tot Seven Up in 2001, and undoubtedly many more to follow - in the light of some recent theorising on American crime writing, and particularly on the various forms of empowerment involved. For a long time, crime writing in general and detective fiction in particular were regarded as merely escapist forms of popular literature – cheap entertainment for the masses, unworthy of serious consideration, or, worse, distractions on the road to the cultured appreciation of “true” or “good” Literature. In recent years, though, the insight has dawned that, just like its more glamorous “high” literary counterpart, popular literature too can do what Jane Tompkins has memorably termed “cultural work” (1985). Tompkins coined the term primarily with regard to a nineteenth-century American popular genre – sentimental domestic fiction – written by and for women. Specifically, she argued that this kind of writing, rather than the mere drivel it was branded as by contemporary male writers, actually constituted a form of female empowerment. Sean McCann, in Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000), makes a convincing case for classical American hard-boiled crime fiction as doing the same thing for working class white male Americans between the two World Wars and beyond. For McCann, New Deal Liberalism posits “America,” or the United States, as a society where all men, each in his own right, are equal, and where it is the state’s business to make sure that this is so. Realities, however, often being different, it is the hard-boiled detective’s task to correct reality where deficient, so as to make sure that the “common” American gets a “fair (New) Deal.” At the same time, the hard-boiled detective acts as “representative man” of “common” America. That is why he is a professional, and not like so often with his British counterpart a gifted amateur, in other words: a working stiff, not a member of the leisured class. In fact, more often than not it is precisely the idle rich that the hard-boiled detective has to contend with – most markedly, of course, in Raymond Chandler’s early novels. Physically, the detective’s toughness and his ability to “take it,” coupled with his rugged good looks, constitute the working man’s idealised rejoinder to the leisure man’s supposed “softness.” Verbally, the hard-boiled detective’s famous wit deflates all uses of language as an instrument of power, whether it be that of the arrogant rich who think they own him because they employ him, of the official representatives of power such as the police professionals he usually is at odds with and who support the powers that be, or of the criminals that threaten him with physical violence. The