So, guess what. I’m being “allowed” to write lots of DD stories now.

Mike Davidson, the magazine’s near-illiterate yet ultracocky head staff writer, isn’t too happy about that. And neither is Mario Caruso, the touchy-feely art director who thinks he has a right to touch and feel me whenever (and wherever) he likes. Mike and Mario are both married and in their early thirties, and they each have two little kids. That explains, I suppose, why they’re so grudging and possessive of the Daring Detective payroll. They have families to feed, and they don’t want some “flighty female upstart” (their words, not mine) laying claim to any portion of the magazine’s extra assets-even when she’s generating those assets herself!

But Mike and Mario don’t know me very well. I’m not the least bit flighty (except when I’m swooping around the city, flapping my investigative wings), and I don’t have an upstart bone in my body. I’ve been working for the magazine for almost four years now, and I’m still making just seventy-five dollars a week. (The guys all make a hundred or more-and in the case of Crockett and Pomeroy it’s much more.) And though I do try a lot harder, and take many more risks, and work many more hours than any of my male coworkers do, that doesn’t mean I’m an upstart. What it means is that I’m a single working woman- a struggling Korean War widow, if you want to get specific- striving to pay my bills and cough up the fifty-dollar-a-month rent on my tiny, rundown, cockroach-infested Greenwich Village apartment.