Dame with a Case

More dame colorful here but hey whatever works, we suppose.

A Hardboiled Detective is loafing around behind his desk, waiting for something to happen. The impetus for getting the story going arrives in the form of a dame. Richly dressed and possibly something of a vamp, she cuts an impressive figure. She states to the private eye that she has a case for him. After the lady has explained the matter, the detective will probably be quick to get on the case. The two of them may end up working together on solving it and romance might well ensue. But don't expect this dame to become the detective's Girl Friday. There will be exceptions, but she will typically be a Femme Fatale and may well know more about the case than she is letting on...

This trope is likely to appear in parodies of Film Noir detective stories. The Dame with a Case is a modern heir of the Damsel Errant from Chivalric Romance.

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Examples:

Audio Plays

• In Big Finish Doctor Who Specials The Maltese Penguin Frobisher (a shapeshifter who prefers to appear as a penguin) has returned to his job as a private eye. The story starts when Femme Fatale Alicia walks into his office and hires him to spy on her husband.

Comic Books

• In the Garfield: His 9 Lives story "Babes and Bullets" (and the television special based on it), the plot is kickstarted when a woman named Tanya O'Tabby hires Sam Spayed to investigate her husband's murder. She's so beautiful that his Private Eye Monologue is initially distracted with flowery descriptions, and when on the case, he posits that she's probably the Femme Fatale type who murdered her husband.
• X-Factor (2006): In #207, Hela disguises herself as a lovely, alluring woman to hire X-Factor's services. Longshot is shown to be very taken with her.

Comic Strips

• There is a "dame" in each of the three story arcs featuring "Tracer Bullet", Calvin's imagined private eye alter ego. In one, she turns out to be an Imagine Spot stand-in for Susie Derkins, who won't give him the answers to a test in Real Life; in the two others, she is described as a "brunette" and is a stand-in for Calvin's mother.

Films — Live-Action

• Brick: Played with. Femme fatale Emily calls her high school ex, Brendan, panicking about the "brick" that was "bad". When she's found dead in a storm drain, Brendan is on the case to find out what happened to her.
• Reconstructed in Chinatown. Evelyn Mulwray turns up at Jake's private eye agency believing that her husband, Hollis, is cheating on her. Jack follows Hollis and finds out that he appears to be cheating on Evelyn. Then it gets deconstructed when the real Evelyn arrives and tells him that she had no idea. Then Hollis is murdered, so Evelyn hires Jake for real to find out what is going on.
• Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid: This is how Steve Martin's detective character gets involved with a Nazi spy ring. She also learns that his Berserk Button is the words "cleaning woman", since his father abandoned him and their mother to run off with a cleaning woman...
• The Drowning Pool: PI Lew Harper is brought from Los Angeles all the way to New Orleans by his old lover Iris, who wants him to find and neutralize her blackmailing chauffeur. Naturally the real mystery is way more complicated.
• The Maltese Falcon: Probably the Trope Codifier. In the opening scene, private detective Sam Spade is sitting at his desk, rolling a cigarette. He is shortly told by his secretary Effie that a girl wishes to see him - and that she is worth seeing just for the sake of her looks. In walks the well-dressed Ruth Wonderly, who claims that her sister is missing and is involved with a certain man. He and his partner, Miles Archer, agree to take her case. The next morning, though, Spade learns that Archer has been killed. Moreover, when Spade next sees Ruth, she is calling herself Brigid O'Shaughnessy and is breeding distrust. The story develops from there. She is eventually revealed to be one of the antagonists and the murderer of Sam's partner.
• Like the TV series before it, Veronica Mars begins with this trope gender-flipped: when Veronica's back in town for her high school reunion, her old flame Logan (a gender flip of the Femme Fatale) is arrested for the murder of his fiance, Carrie Bishop, and asks Veronica for her help in finding the real murderer.

Literature

• The plot of The Sign of the Four starts when a young lady comes to consult Holmes. Once she leaves, Watson remarks about her being a very attractive girl, to which Holmes remarks he didn't notice that, and gives a speech about how Beauty Equals Goodness isn't always true. The lady ends up married to Watson, while Holmes remains the Celibate Hero.
• The Dresden Files: Summer Knight: Invoked, the story starts with Harry Dresden being met in his office by an attractive, authoritative, and sophisticated woman in expensive clothes who desires his assistance but is increasing vague about the detail. Pegging that she is not human, Harry proves she is one of the Fae leading her to reveal herself as none other than Queen Mab herself who reveals she has taken Harry's favours of his Fairy Godmother and thus Harry has no choice but to honour the debt.
• The Ur-Example is Dashiell Hammett's pioneering hardboiled-PI novel The Maltese Falcon, whose film version has already been discussed in detail above. Sam Spade is hired by the novel's Femme Fatale, supposedly to find her sister, although she turns out to have been lying.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In the episode "The Big Goodbye," where Captain Picard's Dixon Hill holodeck adventures make their first appearance, the simulated character Jessica Bradley fills this role.
  • In the episode "Clues," Guinan appears (visually, at least) to be filling this role in the Dixon Hill program, but she and Picard are interrupted before the role she was to play becomes clear.
• Veronica Mars:
  • The show has this trope played straight in the role of Veronica's dad Keith, who is a PI and often gets hit with difficult cases at the behest of beautiful women; a clear example is Kendall hiring him to help her with the Fitzpatricks in Season 2, and trying to clear Mindy O'Dell's name after she's suspected of her husband Dean O'Dell's murder in Season 3.
  • It also gets gender-flipped on both ends and gender-flipped (in a female private eye and female client) in Veronica's cases, which frequently feature mysterious both male and female students turning up to ask Veronica for her help to clear their names:
    • Male: For example, the Dashing Hispanic Weevil asks Veronica to come to his aid after being set up for murder in Season 2, Logan comes to Veronica to ask her for help in Season 1 after his mother's apparent suicide, and mysterious (then) newcomer Cassidy comes to hire her to unravel the mysterious past of his new stepmother Kendall in Season 2.
    • She has just as many female clients as male, although they tend to be one-shot characters. But, for example, the bus driver's daughter gets her fully ensnared in the bus mystery in Season 2 for trying to prove he didn't commit suicide, Playful Hacker Mac hires her to find out the truth about her parentage (and uncovers a Switched at Birth situation at the same time), and played with by Meg, who is extremely sweet and wholesome but hires Veronica because she's being wrongly labeled as "the school slut".

Puppet Shows

• Between the Lions: Spoofed in this "Sam Spud: Par-Boiled Potato Detective" segment.
• The Muppet Show: The episode with Liza Minnelli is a Noir Episode with Kermit as a detective and Minnelli as the dame asking him to investigate a series of murders in the theater where she works.

Video Games

• Bioshock Infinite: "Burial at Sea: Chapter 1" begins with Booker, now a hard-boiled private eye, being paid a visit by Anna, who speaks and walks like a Femme Fatale, to hire him to find a missing girl in Rapture.
• Carlotta von Uberwald in Discworld Noir, who opens the game by hiring Lewton to find a man named Mundy, and turns out to be a pastiche of at least three classic Femme Fatales.
• L.A. Noire: Not with a private detective, but an insurance investigator. Jack Kelso came back from the war and got a job with California Fire and Life. Elsa Lichtmann, a recent German immigrant and nightclub singer, shows up at his office, urging him to investigate a construction accident that killed a good friend of hers. Being based on Film Noir tropes, that investigation goes much further than just a simple roof collapse.
• Happens to Tex Murphy a lot, which is to be expected, since Tex is a deliberate send-up of noir detective tropes. The women almost always turn out to be more than they appear.
• In Yakuza 4, the trope happens to a moneylender rather than a detective. Beautiful, anxious Lily walks into Sky Finance's office and asks for three million yen, prompting Akiyama's investigation to see whether she can be trusted with it. In genre tradition, "Lily" (her real name is Yasuko Saejima) is a Femme Fatale who has assassinated several yakuza and is being hunted by others. Akiyama decides to help her anyway.

Web Animation

• RWBY Chibi: Played for laughs in the episode "Neptune Noir", where Neptune Vasilias, a junior detective, pretends he's in a Film Noir. Seductive villainess Cinder Fall arrives, looking to hire the detective to help her find the Fall Maiden. However, she can hear Neptune's inner monologue/narration, leading her to be turned off by his unprofessionalism and desire for "smooches", so she goes to the dog Zwei as an alternative.

Web Comics

• Parodied (like many other noir tropes) by Problem Sleuth. The titular character gets a call from a woman about something that could be an actual case, but is too distracted by all the "weird puzzle shit" to properly do his own job.
• Rusty and Co.: Chapter 10 shifts the story genre into Noir, with Mimic playing the role of the hardboiled detective. His client is a woman who identifies herself as Tarta Moon-Shiner. Being genre-savvy, Mimic expects things to go badly and refuses to help. Eventually she manages to guilt him into going along.
• El Goonish Shive parodies this with the Detective Block "storyline" in EGS:NP, which starts this way.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs: In their Film Noir spoof episode "This Pun For Hire", the role of the client naturally goes to the resident Ms. Fanservice, Hello Nurse.
• Happens twice in Archer
  • In Season 7, the group's spy agency has folded and they've moved out to Los Angeles and opened up a Private Detective agency. In walks famous movie star Veronica Dean (first an impostor, then the real thing) hiring the group to do various morally questionable things for her. By the end of the Season, the real Dean will have gotten the agency involved in more cases and eventually been revealed as the season's main villain after she kills several people and shoots main character Sterling Archer and leaves him for dead.
  • The following season, which starts Archer's Adventures in Comaland, plays with this trope slightly. In this coma dream scenario, Archer is a hard-boiled 1940s Private Detective when a lovely and rich heiress walks into his office and hires him to help her fake her death to escape her creepy, incest-obsessed brother. The trope is played with because Archer is actually already in the middle of a case, the lovely heiress in question is the coma version of Cheryl, the group's bizarre Cloudcuckoolander, and her story winds up being very much a B-plot compared to everything else Archer has going at the moment.
• Classic Disney Shorts: The Goofy cartoon "How to Be a Detective" begins with Goofy as private eye Johnny Eyeball being visited by a woman wearing a veil asking him to find a man named Al. Who turns out to be her runaway groom.
• C.O.P.S.: In "The Case of Big Boss' Bye Bye", the C.O.P.S. leader Bulletproof Vess briefly becomes a private eye after Mayor Davis disbands the C.O.P.S. team following Big Boss and the C.R.O.O.K.S.' feigned retirement. He is shown on his first day, dozing off at his desk; another of the fired C.O.P.S., Mainframe, walks into his office. The scene, provided with Bulletproof's voice-over narration, is clearly a spoof on the trope: as Mainframe walks in, the camera shows her from the legs up. She wakes Bulletproof up and tells him that she has a tip about an upcoming heist by the C.R.O.O.K.S. (By a Contrived Coincidence, Buttons McBoomBoom had popped into the dating agency where she is now working and indicated that he was about to get very rich). Then, several former C.O.P.S. foil a train robbery that the C.R.O.O.K.S. had attempted on a train carrying federal funds to Empire City, resulting in their team being re-formed as necessary after all.
• The Great Mouse Detective concludes with a pretty young mouse coming to see Basil of Baker Street. A quick Sherlock Scan leads Basil to deduce that the pretty visitor has come seeking help in finding a brass ring that's gone missing from her left hand. Zoom out, fade out.
• Parodied in the Phineas and Ferb episode "Finding Mary McGuffin". After watching some of their dad's old detective movies, Phineas and Ferb decorate their room to look like a detective's office and their sister Candace barges in demanding they figure out who her doll got sold to.
• Potato Head Kids: In "Sam Spud, Private Eye", Puff comes crying to Sam Spud, who has just turned detective, and tells him that two men have stolen her purse. There is a narrated voice-over where Sam describes the meeting in Genre Savvy fashion: "If I live to be 13, I'll never forget the day she walked into my office. Adorable. A sweet potato. The kid was in tears." At the end of the episode, after the case has been solved, Sam refers to Puff as "sweetheart".
• Muppet Babies: An Imagine Spot in one episode involved Kermit as a private eye with a dressed-up Piggy coming in and getting him onto a case.
• Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero: In "Plantywood: City of Flora" upon arriving in a film noir-inspired world populated by Plant People Penn (who is inhabiting a detective) is immediately met by a mysterious attractive rose woman who has a case for him, which he insists on following despite Sashi suggesting they simply go investigate the area Rippen was last spotted as stopping him is their real priority, with Penn repeatedly insisting that the seemingly minor investigation in these stories always links to the bigger crime. Only for it to turn out this one actually doesn't, and whilst he does eventually stumble on Rippen by chance, it would have all been resolved a lot faster if he just did what Sashi suggested.
• Pixar Shorts: The Mater's Tall Tales short "Mater Private Eye" begins when Tia approaches Mater with case about counterfeit tyres and her missing sister, Mia.
• In the Centurions episode "Zone Dancer", this is how futuristic private eye Gabe Knight meets the "beam clone" of Crystal Kane.
• Ready Jet Go!: In "Sean's Robotic Arm", Sean drops his Neil Armstrong figure down a hole and needs help getting it out. Mindy approaches local Kid Detective Mitchell (who has a crush on her) to ask him to help. He says that it doesn't sound like a detective problem, but lets her borrow Cody to help dig the hole.

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