In the mainstream thriller the investigative structure presupposes a male hero in search of the truth about an event that either has already happened or is about to come to completion. This premiss has two consequences. The plots of the thriller/detective story offer a world of action defined in male terms; the locales, situations, iconography, violence are conventions connoting the male sphere. {Women in this world tend to split into two categories: there are those who work on the fringes of the underworld and are defined by the male criminal ambience of the thriller — barflies, nightclub singers, expensive mistresses, femmes fatales, and ruthless gold-diggers who marry and murder rich old men for their money; | and then there are on the outer margins of this world, wives, long-suffering girlfriends, would-be fiancées who are victims of male crime, sometimes the objects of the hero’s protection, and often points of vulnerability in his masculine armour,}T he second consequence is an epistemological one in so far as the investi- gation assumes truth to be a goal attainable by tracing a logical process of cause and effect, and that to every puzzle there is a key through which a complex but coherent pattern will emerge within seemingly anarchic events.