Mini Review: ‘In Search of the Blonde Tigress’

Chicago is the setting for Silvia Pettem’s excellent “In Search of the Blonde Tigress.” It is 1933 and the city has declared a war on crime…

Two men and a woman walk into a men’s clothing store on August 4. Shots ring out. The trio flees in a blue Chevrolet, leaving 71-year-old owner Gustav Hoeh bleeding out on the sidewalk.

One reporter notes the woman is a blonde “with the savagery of a tigress.” Another calls her “the most dangerous woman alive.”

It takes detectives less than a week to capture the three. The woman is Eleanor Jarman. Hardly the Blonde Tigress of the headlines, she is a rather ordinary 32-year-old waitress and mother of two. The man who wielded the gun during the robbery is her boyfriend.

Within four weeks, they are tried and convicted. The boyfriend gets death; Eleanor and the other man are sentenced to 199 years.

Author Pettem makes quick work of the killing and the trial and gets down to the incident that separates this tale from run-of-the-mill crime stories. In 1940, you see, Eleanor Jarman scales a prison fence and disappears – for good.

This is where Pettem puts her research skills to use. She digs up evidence showing where Jarman likely lived and worked during her years as (probably) America’s longest-running woman fugitive.

My criticisms are mild. Pettem is careful to provide today’s dollar values for 1933 prices but tends to overdo it.

The author also hypothesizes unnecessarily when she doesn’t possess all the facts, leading to awkward sentences such as these describing Jarman’s early days in prison: “Eleanor probably was unaware that Chicago’s ‘crime war,’ and her part in it, still made the news.”

and

“She had begun to adjust to her new routine and probably enjoyed having her own room.”

“In Search of the Blonde Tigress” paints a sympathetic portrait of a woman who falls for a crook, pays a high price, but then makes an audacious run for freedom. Readers will find themselves rooting for Eleanor Jarman.