Today, the fictional women who fight
crime and solve mysteries are PIs, attorneys, cooks, members of every branch of law enforcement and every imaginable occupation. They are old, young, married, and single, from every race and every corner of the globe. The list
is long and satisfying, but this month, I present some of the earlier
fictional females sleuths created by women writers when neither act was warmly
welcomed.
In 1894, author Catherine Louisa Pirkis introduced the
Victorian lady sleuth, Loveday Brooke
in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke,
Lady Detective. Loveday, in her thirties, had been a member of the upper
class until circumstances forced her to earn a living. She was unmarried, bright,
and too easily bored to settle for traditional 'women's work' and became an
agent at a London Detective Agency. Her boss, Ebenezer Dyer had the greatest
respect for her sharp mind and deductive reasoning. At a time when Sherlock
Holmes brought mysteries to the forefront, Loveday Brooke became the most
popular fictional female detective of her day. Pirkis described her "in a
series of negations. She was not tall, she was not short; she was not dark, she
was not fair; she was neither handsome nor ugly. Her features were altogether
nondescript; her one noticeable trait was a habit she had, when absorbed in
thought, of dropping her eyelids over her eyes till only a line of eyeball
showed, and she appeared to be looking out at the world through a slit, instead
of through a window."
Free HTML copy of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.
It would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own. —Miss Amelia Butterworth
In 1897, Anna Katharine Green introduced Amelia Butterworth in That Affair Next Door. Butterworth was
the first notable spinster sleuth in fiction. She offered her not completely
welcomed assistance to Green's main character, Detective Ebenezer Gryce of the
New York Police. Unlike Brooke, Butterworth was financially comfortable and had
little to occupy her time other than observing the comings and goings of her
neighbors. It was one of those observations that involved her in a
murder investigation. "I am not an inquisitive
woman, but when, in the middle of a certain warm night in September, I heard a
carriage draw up at the adjoining house and stop, I could not resist the
temptation of leaving my bed and taking a peep through the curtains of my
window."
Although the elderly spinster was seen by most as
nosy, Gryce recognized her ability to spot and evaluate important
details that many missed. Amelia Butterworth appeared again in Lost Man’s Lane, 1898, and The Circular Study, 1900. Some believe that Butterworth inspired Patricia
Wentworth's Maud Silver, Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, Mary Roberts Rinehart's
Rachel Innes, and others.
In 1915, Green created the first girl detective in
The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for
Violet Strange. The character, Violet
Strange, was a wealthy young woman who took the occasional case to earn
money that didn't come from her father. He was quite unaware of her investigations and she was selective about the ones she accepted. "If you have a case of subtlety without crime, one to engage
my powers without depressing my spirits, I beg you to let me have it."
 | |
| It's well enough for you, Tish Carberry, to talk about gripping a horse with your knees |
In 1908, Mary Roberts Rinehart, sometimes called 'The
American Agatha Christie,' introduced Rachel
Innes, a fifty something spinster heiress in The Circular Staircase. In the novel, Innes, along with her niece
and nephew rent a house for a summer vacation that turns into a complex web of
murder and intrigue that is eventually solved by the heroine. The book became a successful stage play called The Bat.
In 1910, Rinehart created a character to voice her
feminist beliefs. Letitia (Tish) Carberry was a
middle aged spinster who along with her friends Aggie and Lizzie behaved in
ways unbecoming and unacceptable in women at the beginning of the 20th
century. They raced cars, hunted, drove
ambulances, and flew airships. Rinehart introduces Tish by explaining an unfavorable newspaper story. "So many unkind things have been said of the affair at Morris Valley that I think it best to publish a straightforward account of everything. The ill nature of the cartoon, for instance, which showed Tish in a pair of khaki trousers on her back under a racing-car was quite uncalled for. Tish did not wear the khaki trousers; she merely took them along in case of emergency. Nor was it true that Tish took Aggie along as a mechanician and brutally pushed her off the car because she was not pumping enough oil. The fact was that Aggie sneezed on a curve and fell out of the car, and would no doubt have been killed had she not been thrown into a pile of sand."
In 1914, we meet Hilda
Adams, known as Miss Pinkerton,
a nurse who does her fair share of sleuthing. Her detecting career begins in
the story The Buckled Bag, when a
patient she attends, a detective, suggests she might work for
the police.
All of Rinehart's female detectives are intelligent and
possess the one absolutely necessary tool for people who live and work outside
the box—a sense of humor.
Millicent Newberry,
created by Jeanette Lee, appeared in three novels beginning in 1917 with The Green Jacket. Unlike many of the
female detectives of the era who worked for other agencies or police
departments, Millicent began working at Tom Corbin's firm, but left to start
her own detective agency. She was single, older, and from a middle class background, and lived with her ailing mother and a caretaker. Along with a great interest in psychiatry, Newberry had a unique approach to taking notes. She would knit while conversing with clients and encode
her notes into the stitches. In 1922 she appeared in The Mysterious Office, and in 1925 in Dead Right. The other unconventional aspect of her practice was that she
decided that if the criminal deserved a second chance, she did not report her findings
to the police.
Patricia Wentworth introduced Miss Maud Silver in the 1928 mystery Grey Mask as a secondary character. She was, according to
Wentworth, a person with "small, neat features and the sort of
old-fashioned clothes that were not so much dowdy as characteristic." She
was also known for quoting the Bible and Tennyson. It wasn't until 1937 in The Case is Closed when the retired
governess came into her own as 'a private enquiry agent' often assisting
Scotland Yard, Inspector Abbott.
In Death at the Deep
End, book 20 of the 32 books in the series, Abbot described the comfort he
derived from the woman. "Miss Silver, smiling at him from the other side
of the hearth, her hands busy with her knitting, remained a stable point in an
unsettled world. Love God, honour the Queen, keep the law, be kind, be good,
think of others before you think of yourself, serve Justice, speak the truth—by
this simple creed she lived. Si sic
omnes!..."
Like so many of the heroines of these early stories, Silver
was effective because she wasn't taken seriously. She was a professional
who relied on deductive reasoning and paid little attention to smug
smiles and subtle or oblique criticism of her looks or skills.
Dorothy L. Sayers introduced Miss Alexandra Katherine "Kitty" Climpson in Unnatural
Death (1927). She owned a secretarial agency nicknamed the Cattery, which Lord
Peter Wimsey helped to establish with an ulterior motive—to use her services in ways that often involved more investigating than filing or stenography. Kitty developed into an intelligent and resourceful member of his investigative
team. It was Miss Climpson's determination and clever planning that solved the
mystery in Strong Poison (1930) and saved
the life of another Sayers' female character of note, Harriet Vane.
Harriet Deborah Vane was a crime fiction writer who Peter met and fell in love with after she was
arrested for the murder of her boyfriend. That fact that she lived with a man
out of wedlock made her a criminal in the eyes of much of society, and her
career as a writer of police fiction sullied her reputation further. Wimsey
proposed to Vane while she was still in prison, but she refused his offer,
before and after he proved her innocent. She worked with Peter on a case in the
1932 book, Have His Carcase, but it
wasn't until the next Wimsey book, Gaudy
Night (1935) that she accepted his proposal. The couple married in Busman's Honeymoon (1937). Sayers claimed to have introduced
Harriet Vane to marry off Lord Wimsey and end the series, but the couple became
such a hit that she continued their relationship and their characters with even
more passion. Gaudy Night is considered
by some as the first feminist mystery novel, and Sayers did indeed comment on
the growing restrictions on women in Nazi Germany.
In 1938, Zelda Popkin introduced Mary Carner, considered the first modern female detective, in Death Wears a White Gardenia. Carner was
a member of the security staff of a department store in New York City. According to Popkin, "Mary looked like year before last's debutante,
last June's bride, this year's young matron. Prospective shoplifters,
hesitating before a haul, never guessed that the pretty, well-groomed young
woman in the oxford gray suit and kolinsky scarf, standing beside them at the
counter, was far more interested in the behavior of their nimble fingers than
in the quality of the step-ins, marked down from five-ninety-eight to three and
a half."
“You
do not conceive a novel as easily as you conceive a child, nor even half as
easily as you create nonfiction work. A journalist amasses facts, anecdotes and
interviews with top brass. Enough of these add up to a book. A novelist demands
quite different things. He has to find himself in his materials, to know for
sure how he would feel and act and the events he writes about. In addition, he
requires a catalyst—a person, idea, or emotion which coalesces his ingredients
and makes them jell into a solid purpose.” ―Zelda Popkin
And last, but not least, the most familiar member of our
female sleuth club, Miss Jane Marple.
Agatha Christie introduced the well meaning meddler in 1926 in a magazine
piece called The Tuesday Night Club. The
story eventually became the first chapter of the 1932 book The Thirteen Problems, but it was in 1930, in The Murder at the Vicarage, where we first visited Jane in her home
town of St. Mary Mead. Dame Christie revealed in her autobiography that the
inspiration for Marple: "the sort of old lady who would have been
rather like some of my grandmother's Ealing cronies—old ladies whom I have met
in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl"
We spend our lives solving puzzles, problems, and mysteries of various
kinds. It is no surprise that the intuitive abilities to which women
readily turn, offer some of the best solutions.
As you may have guessed, this post was a pleasure to research and share. Because of these women, (and others there wasn't room to list) the very popular category of 'female sleuth' continues to entertain and delight readers around the world. That is great inspiration for someone who has only been writing mysteries since 2004. I am humbled, inspired, and anxious to continue learning from these remarkable voices.
As you may have guessed, this post was a pleasure to research and share. Because of these women, (and others there wasn't room to list) the very popular category of 'female sleuth' continues to entertain and delight readers around the world. That is great inspiration for someone who has only been writing mysteries since 2004. I am humbled, inspired, and anxious to continue learning from these remarkable voices.
