Investigating Women: The Female Sleuth after Feminism

Abstract

Since Dorothy L. Sayers, in 1929, noted the paucity and relative lack of success of women detectives in fiction, there have been several sea changes in both the number and nature of female sleuths. Just as the increasing independence of American women in the early decades of this century produced a spate of ‘career girls against crime’,² the post-1960s women’s movement has produced a new breed of female detective and interesting modifications of the form of detective fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, changing perceptions of society, and of women’s place in it, have led to a questioning of the conventions employed by such ‘Queens of Crime’ as Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth and Josephine Tey. Inquisitive, genteel spinsters of a certain age, like Christie’s Miss Marple and Wentworth’s Miss Silver, have been replaced by self-assured, sexually experienced, independent women such as Antonia Fraser’s Jemima Shore, P. D. James’s Cordelia Gray and Jessica Mann’s Tamara Hoyland. In addition, the pastoral settings and conservative social values of Christie and Wentworth have been updated, parodied and interrogated by these new ‘Queens of Crime’, and latterly abandoned by a radically new kind of British feminist crime novel the in 1980s.

There have also been a number of women detectives, but on the whole, they have not been very successful. In order to justify their choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to destroy that quiet enjoyment of the logical which we look for in our detective reading. Or else they are active and courageous, and insist on walking into physical danger and hampering the men engaged on the job. Marriage also looms too large in their view of life; which is not surprising since they are all young and beautiful.¹