Chapter 2. The name's Dixon. Trixie Dixon Girl Detective.

That's what it said on my business cards. That's how I answered the telephone, and that's what the neatly printed card on the office door read.

When you're something of an oddity, you have three choices. You can pretend you really aren't different from the norm at all. In this case, I suppose, becoming oddly androgynous, like the two or three other

lady private eyes of my acquaintance. This was plainly not for me. I'm not vain by nature,

but the amount of labor that would be required each and every morning to make Miss

Dixon seem mannish would be entirely unreasonable, and for

too little return. Option two, of course, would be to do what Ma and Paa Dixon had always

expected. Realize that you hadn't a hope of carving out a share of hard-boiled human misery

for yourself, poor female that you were, after all, and meet a nice man, or perhaps go to secretarial school and

then meet a nice man. I met lots of nice men. I just didn't keep them around after they stopped

being entertaining. And so I had quickly settled upon option three, the porridge that Goldilocks chose.

Since the first thing any prospective client said when they saw me was,

You're a girl, I took all of the suspense right out of it from the get-go,

and I never had much cause to regret it.

It was true I didn't get a lot of danger and daring do knocking on my little door.

Folks who wanted a thug for hire generally went to somebody else.

But there was a lot less of that in a private detective's life than the moving pictures would

make out, and I did pretty well all things considered.

See, an awful lot of what a real detective does falls in the category of sneaking around,

and what better disguise could a private eye have than be a tall blonde with a little too much

leg?

The first thought through any man's head was not that

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