Well, in the character of Lisbeth Salander, Larsson created a protagonist who was socially ostracised in a manner not unlike Beebo Brinker and Bannon’s other characters. So how does this connect to Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who novels? After all, Larsson’s series fully embraces all manner of crime fiction elements such as locked room mysteries, private detectives, corporate intrigue, espionage, international conspiracies and serial killers to name just a few. But for the most part, the Beebo Brinker chronicles have a literary feel which some critics would argue transcends crime fiction. Occasionally in the novels, the turbulent emotions of the characters does manifest itself in physical and sexual violence, such as rape. Indeed, the sexuality of the characters is the crime to their society. Instead, Bannon explores the emotional violence that entails from relationships complicated by feelings of misogyny and sexual jealously. Unlike others novels belonging to the lesbian pulp fiction genre, such as Theodora Keogh’s The Other Girl (1962), the Beebo Brinker series contains little in the way of actual crimes.

Beebo does not even appear in the first novel, Odd Girl Out, which is set in a fictional midwestern university where Laura and Beth first meet and begin a friendship which develops into a romance. Beebo is sometimes considered the archetype of the stereotypical butch lesbian, but this is a somewhat unfair assessment as Bannon is highly skilled at subtle and plausible characterisations. Bannon’s only other novel, The Marriage (1960) is generally not considered part of the series, although it does feature several series characters. The series centres around the characters Beebo, Laura, Beth and Jack as they come to terms with their sexuality in late 1950s and early 1960s America. On the surface the two series appear to be very different Ann Bannon is the pseudonym of Ann Weldy who wrote five novels, Odd Girl Out (1957), I Am A Woman (1959), Women in the Shadows (1959), Journey to a Woman (1960) and Beebo Brinker (1962), which are now considered groundbreaking works of lesbian pulp fiction and form the Beebo Brinker Chronicles. I’ve been reading several novels in Ann Bannon’s excellent ‘Beebo Brinker Chronicles’ series, and I was struck by how much the stories reminded me of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Girl Who’ novels.

Beebo brinker series