The Big Book of Female Detectives

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by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)




  ALSO EDITED BY OTTO PENZLER

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  A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Otto Penzler

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Due to limitations of space, permission to reprint previously published material can be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Penzler, Otto, editor.

  Title: The big book of female detectives : / edited by Otto Penzler.

  Description: New York : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018026857 (print) | LCCN 2018034802 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780525434757 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525434740 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories, American. | Detective and mystery

  stories, English. | Women detectives—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Anthologies

  (multiple authors). | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Short Stories. |

  FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths.

  Classification: LCC PS648.D4 (ebook) | LCC PS648.D4 B49 2018 (print) |

  DDC 813/.087208—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018026857

  Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525434740

  Ebook ISBN 9780525434757

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover image courtesy of Heritage Auctions: www.HA.com

  www.blacklizardcrime.com

  v5.3.2

  ep

  To my dear friend and colleague

  Luisa Smith,

  the best bookseller I’ve ever known

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Edited by Otto Penzler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Victorians and Edwardians (British)

  THE MYSTERIOUS COUNTESS

  Anonymous

  THE UNRAVELED MYSTERY

  Andrew Forrester, Jr.

  THE REDHILL SISTERHOOD

  C. L. Pirkis

  THE DIAMOND LIZARD

  George R. Sims

  THE STIR OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ ROYAL

  Clarence Rook

  THE MANDARIN

  Fergus Hume

  THE OUTSIDE LEDGE: A CABLEGRAM MYSTERY

  L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace

  THE FREWIN MINIATURES

  Emmuska Orczy

  CONSCIENCE

  Richard Marsh

  THE HIDDEN VIOLIN

  M. McDonnell Bodkin

  Before World War I (American)

  CHRISTABEL’S CRYSTAL

  Carolyn Wells

  THE BULLET FROM NOWHERE

  Hugh C. Weir

  AN INTANGIBLE CLEW

  Anna Katharine Green

  PLANTED

  James Oppenheim

  The Pulp Era

  THE WIZARD’S SAFE

  Valentine

  RED HOT

  Frederick Nebel

  THE DOMINO LADY COLLECTS

  Lars Anderson

  THE LETTERS AND THE LAW

  T. T. Flynn

  THE OLD MAIDS DIE

  Whitman Chambers

  TOO MANY CLIENTS

  D. B. McCandless

  RAT RUNAROUND

  Roger Torrey

  MURDER WITH MUSIC AND COKE FOR CO-EDS

  Adolphe Barreaux

  CHILLER-DILLER

  Richard Sale

  THE PASSING OF ANNE MARSH

  Arthur Leo Zagat

  The Golden Age

  THE SECRET ADVERSARY

  Agatha Christie

  DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND

  Frederic Arnold Kummer

  LOCKED DOORS

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  THE TEA-LEAF

  Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace

  THE ALMOST PERFECT MURDER

  Hulbert Footner

  THE LOVER OF ST. LYS

  F. Tennyson Jesse

  MISOGYNY AT MOUGINS

  Gilbert Frankau

  INTRODUCING SUSAN DARE

  Mignon G. Eberhart

  THE BLOODY CRESCENDO

  Vincent Starrett

  BURGLARS MUST DINE

  E. Phillips Oppenheim

  THE MISSING CHARACTER

  Phyllis Bentley

  MURDER IN THE MOVIES

  Karl Detzer

  THE GILDED PUPIL

  Ethel Lina White

  THE CASE OF THE HUNDRED CATS

  Gladys Mitchell

  Mid-Century

  MURDER WITH FLOWERS

  Q. Patrick

  VACANCY WITH CORPSE

  H. H. Holmes

  THE RIDDLE OF THE BLACK MUSEUM

  Stuart Palmer

  MEREDITH’S MURDER

  Charlotte Armstrong

  FLOWERS FOR AN ANGEL

  Nigel Morland

  THERE’S DEATH FOR REMEMBRANCE

  Frances & Richard Lockridge

  MOM SINGS AN ARIA

  James Yaffe

  The Modern Era

  ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE

  Marcia Muller

  BLOOD TYPES

  Julie Smith

  A POISON THAT LEAVES NO TRACE

  Sue Grafton

  DISCARDS

  Faye Kellerman

  SPOOKED

  Carolyn G. Hart

  MAKING LEMONADE

  Barbara Paul

  LOUISE

  Max Allan Collins

  STRUNG OUT

  Sara Paretsky

 
BENEATH THE LILACS

  Nevada Barr

  MISS GIBSON

  Linda Barnes

  HEADACHES AND BAD DREAMS

  Lawrence Block

  AN AFFAIR OF INCONVENIENCE

  Anne Perry

  BEAUBIEN

  Deborah Morgan

  DOUBLE-CROSSING DELANCEY

  S. J. Rozan

  THE SHOESHINE MAN’S REGRETS

  Laura Lippman

  DUST UP

  Wendy Hornsby

  THE CASE OF THE PARR CHILDREN

  Antonia Fraser

  FAST

  Jeffery Deaver

  Bad Girls

  THE WINGED ASSASSIN

  L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace

  THE BLOOD-RED CROSS

  L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE CARNEGIE LIBRARY

  John Kendrick Bangs

  THE WOMAN FROM THE EAST

  Edgar Wallace

  SHE KNEW WHAT TO DO

  Joseph Shearing

  THE FORGERS

  Arthur B. Reeve

  THE MEANEST MAN IN EUROPE

  David Durham

  FOUR SQUARE JANE UNMASKED

  Edgar Wallace

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE HEADLESS STATUE

  Eugene Thomas

  THE MADAME GOES DRAMATIC

  Perry Paul

  EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  MANY ELEMENTS of the detective story as we know it today have appeared in literature through the centuries, beginning with Cain murdering his brother in the Bible to the bloodletting in several of Shakespeare’s plays and advancing to the gothic novels of the eighteenth century. Credit for the invention of the classic detective story is generally given to Edgar Allan Poe for his lurid tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, in which he provided the template for all writers who followed. Brilliant detective? Check. Sidekick who served as the reader’s surrogate, asking the questions that we couldn’t? Check. Seemingly impossible crime? Check. Baffled police force that relied on an amateur to solve the puzzle? Check.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the history of women detectives in literature accurately mirrored society; how could it not? Much of that history paralleled detective fiction in general, just some years behind the roles of male authors and characters.

  A little more than twenty years after the debut of Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the first female detective character appeared, either Mrs. Paschal in the anonymously published Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) or the eponymous protagonist of Andrew Forrester, Jr.’s The Female Detective, published the same year; exact publication dates are disputed.

  While the first authors of detective fiction were men, female authors began to be published about a quarter of a century later. Generally credited with being the first woman to tell mystery stories, Anna Katharine Green was actually preceded by Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, who wrote the groundbreaking novel The Dead Letter, published in 1867, more than a decade before Green’s first novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878). Variously regarded as the “mother,” “grandmother,” or “godmother” of the detective story, Green went on to be a hugely successful author whose career spanned six different decades, her last book, The Step on the Stair, finally being published in 1923.

  The appearance of both female characters and writers following their male counterpoints was not surprising due to contemporary ideas of femininity in nineteenth-century England and America (apart from some French detective fiction in the nineteenth century, there were virtually no mystery novels published in the rest of the world). Scotland Yard (a metonym for the Metropolitan Police Service) was created in 1829, but the first woman officer wasn’t appointed until 1915, a year after the creation of the Women’s Police Service. In the United States, the first police force was created in Boston in 1838, but the first woman to be hired as a “policeman” (her official title with the Chicago Police Department) did not occur until 1891.

  Credit must be given to the fecund creativity of the author of Revelations of a Lady Detective, who invented an imaginary special division of female detectives, preceding the reality of the situation by more than a half century, and to Baroness Orczy, whose Lady Molly was placed in the “Female Department” of Scotland Yard—which didn’t exist.

  For a woman to take a job as a policewoman or as a private detective was an act of great courage—or desperation. It was regarded as lowly work, almost as damning of a woman’s character as if she were an actress. Nonetheless, the Victorian era found quite a few women engaged in the profession in fictional form. Without exception, they were strong, independent women who didn’t fret about their reputations as they had a job to do and went about their business with dependable dedication and intelligence. While it is common for these literary figures to rely on their intuition (and occasionally their charm), they display a doggedness and a surprising degree of courage that enables them to solve mysteries.

  Charging into the twentieth century, it became more common for female characters, both detectives and criminals, to engage in their respective activities more for sport and entertainment than out of necessity, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in the pulp magazines. America tried to deny alcohol to its people, but it gave women the vote, which changed a wide spectrum of attitudes and practical elements of daily life. Women’s hemlines and haircuts became shorter, they wanted to drink and smoke, just as men did, and women took as much freedom and license in the Roaring Twenties as their male counterparts. Sure, a few women in the pages of the popular magazines who were working as private detectives or reporters had positions intended to make them assistants or “girl Fridays,” but there they were, in front of the situation, usually smarter than their bosses, frequently bailing them out of difficult situations and, while often proclaiming their fear, equally as feisty and fearless as their sidekicks.

  Just as that social revolution of the 1920s changed women’s roles in real life as well as in fiction, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, specifically the feminist movement, also had a profound and inevitable effect on women in the world of detective fiction, both as authors and as characters.

  Marcia Muller had her first book published by McKay-Washburn, a modest little company that took a chance in 1977 on Edwin of the Iron Shoes, which introduced Sharon McCone. It was the first novel that was written by a woman to feature a tough female private eye. That publishing breakthrough opened the gate, and a few others stepped through before a positive crush poured forth. The first and, in many ways, most notable authors to walk in those shoes were Sue Grafton, who brought Kinsey Millhone to readers in 1982 with the first of her worldwide bestselling alphabet series, “A” Is for Alibi, and Sara Paretsky, who, in the same year, published the first V. I. Warshawski novel, Indemnity Only, the beginning of another series that went on to become an international success.

  Paretsky also was the driving force behind the creation of Sisters in Crime, an organization officially formed in 1987 with the intention of attracting more attention to women mystery writers, both in terms of reviews and sales. A look at the mystery section in bookstores and the bestseller lists is undeniable evidence that the organization has achieved its goals.

  The stories in this collection span a century and a half and range from the cozy (which is not a pejorative, as some of its most popular practitioners have accused it of being) to the hard-boiled (which is difficult to define precisely but, like porn, you know it when you read it). They are the distillation of a lifetime of reading (as well as publishing, editing, and retailing) and were selected for a
variety of reasons, not the least of which was historical significance. Admittedly, some of the milestones of distaff detection will require a touch more patience than more contemporary female ferrets, but they have their own charm and are worth the reader’s attention.

  Seeing the evolution of the female detective’s style as it gathers strength and credibility through the decades is educational, but that is not the purpose of this book, or not the primary one, anyway. The writers whose work fills these pages are the best of their time, and their stories are among the high points of detective fiction that may be read with no greater agenda than the pure joy that derives from distinguished fiction.

  —Otto Penzler

  THE VICTORIANS AND EDWARDIANS

  (BRITISH)

  DETECTIVE: MRS. PASCHAL

  THE MYSTERIOUS COUNTESS

  Anonymous

  STORIES OF HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE are often barely readable. Just because they are the first of some type of story does not always mean they also are among the best examples of that subgenre. This caveat does not apply to the stories in the anonymously published Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864), which turn out to be extremely old-fashioned but nonetheless quite charming. They do not have the narrative drive of such of the author’s contemporaries as Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins, and characterization is sparse, not to mention that dialogue is stilted and overly formal, but it is all intrinsically pleasing.

 

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