Cholwell's Chickens

Parlier is an orphan who has been told that her parents abandoned her as an infant. She was raised by an abusive saloon owner named Joe Parlier. At about age 10, after Joe and several other men threaten her with rape, she kills them and flees, leading to her being wanted on murder charges. She then lives in a number of foster homes on different planets.

The events in Ambercrombie Station start when the 16-year-old Parlier finds herself needing a job. Without a family, a profession or training, she needs a way to earn money. She responds to an advertisement seeking attractive young women for what sounds like modelling or escort work. She meets a man named Fotheringjay, who asks her to take off her clothes and then inquires about her level of comfort spending time with men with unusual interests. When she passes this test, he offers her $1,000,000 if she can seduce and marry Earl Abercrombie, the wealthy 18-year-old heir to a family fortune. Earl is the owner of a satellite station and resort called Abercrombie Station, where obese people vacation in opulent zero-gravity quarters.

When Jean arrives at the space station, she finds she cannot tolerate a relationship with Earl, due to his unhealthy interests: a secret collection of bizarre monsters from around the galaxy, some of which he keeps in cages and some which are dead. As well, she finds out that several of Earl's brothers have met with foul play. In the end, she manipulates the various players (Earl and Fotheringjay) into getting the money, but it does not satisfy her. What she truly wants is to discover the mystery of her missing parents and see her home planet of Codrion again.

Parlier is described as "...a very pretty girl with heavy black hair cut short, a skin like a pane of ivory with golden light behind it, a wide pale rose mouth in a delicate jaw structure, black eyes that might be wide with excitement or long and narrow and veiled with heavy lashes" (Cholwell's Chickens, p. 219).

In Cholwell's Chickens , Jean Parlier is wealthy from her reward from the previous venture on the space station, but as she is still a minor, she has to give a legal guardian, a fifty-year-old accountant named Mycroft. He warns her to be wary for grifters and con men who may feign romantic interest in her to get her money. She tells him she wants to go back to her home planet of Codrion to try to find her parents.

At Mycroft's office, she meets a strange 50-year-old scientist-entrepreneur named Cholwell. When Cholwell sees her he is shocked almost to the point of fainting, and asks what she is doing on Earth. Parlier finds this to be a puzzling remark, as she has never met him. Cholwell recovers and says he is seeking investors for a genetically-modified chicken cloning operation he is setting up on Codrion. Parlier dislikes the well-dressed, grey-haired Cholwell at this first meeting. When Colwell leaves, Parlier asks Mycroft to get her a ticket to Codrion.

Once at her home planet, Jean looks for clues to her past and her family. She starts by going to the bar formerly owned by her foster parent, a mean, harsh man with criminal connections. She remembers his abusive behaviour, which led to her killing him when she was a girl. She meets young bartender Gem Morales, and goes on a date with him. Gem is abrasive, arrogant and forceful, which reminds her of her dead foster father. People on her home planet keep mistaking her for another woman of the same age who looks like her and who has a similar personality, a hint that she may have one or more twin sisters on the planet.

In the attic above her foster father's old bar, she finds more clues in an old photo album, which lead her to Cholwell's laboratory facilities. She goes to see Cholwell's estate, only to discover that his claim of raising "chickens" was a front for his human cloning experiments. Jean then learns the truth about her parentage: Cholwell created her and seven sisters in the laboratory 17 years ago. This explains Cholwell's surprise at meeting her on Earth and the mystery of her doppelgangers on Codrion. When Jean learns that one of her sisters has been convicted of her abusive foster father's murder, Jean reveals herself to the authorities. Fortunately, under Codrion law, the uncertainty over the murderers' identity leads to an acquittal.

The Jean Parlier character was unusual for the 1950s, as she was a strong, independent female protagonist, and the story focuses on her (she is not the wife, girlfriend, or assistant of a male protagonist). While amoral, beautiful, and willing to use her looks and sex appeal to advance her goals, she did not fit the cliche femme fatale template popular in noir and hardboiled fiction of the era (note that in Cholwell's Chickens, the first half of the story has a noirish mystery-type feel). As well, even though she is the lead character, she was not simply a female version of a standard male hero archetype.