The Big Book of Female Detectives
Page 1
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.