The Persistence of Gender: the Private Investigators of S.J. Rozan

Abstract

Female protagonists have become common in all forms of crime writing and female crime writers now routinely work with female protagonists. This does not mean that women writers have completely given up on male investigators, witness the work of Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George. However, Grimes and George work in a subgenre in which the female-created male investigator has a long and impressive tradition, and on which they consciously draw. One can see why they might want to continue a formula that has served so well Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James, and other prominent predecessors. Outside the specific subgenre of the English mystery, the female-created male investigator has a hard time surviving. A number of them, like Chris Wiltz’s Neal Rafferty, who debuted in 1981, are still around, but there are few recent additions. For my purposes in this concluding chapter, the most interesting of these newcomers is S.J. Rozan’s prosaically named Bill Smith.