In writing mysteries, women for many years created primarily male heroes: Sayers with Wimsey, Tey with Grant, Marsh with Alleyn. When the detectives were women, they were women who did not upset male stereotypes. Jane Mar-pie is everybody’s elderly spinster aunt, essentially asexual. While sharp and perceptive, she uses her insights to shore up the patriarchal society in which she lives and operates on its fringes rather than as a professional crime investigator. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard was a bit more daring, but Baroness Orczy assures us repeatedly that Lady Molly never lost her feminine daintiness. Dorothy Sayers created a complex character in Harriet Vane, but could not allow her-or the female dons of Shrewsbury-to solve their own problems. They fester in an environment of fear and mutual suspicion for almost a year before Peter Wimsey arrives. He is able to see through the situation at a glance and in a matter of days resolves the problem for them.
Since Sayers created Harriet Vane sixty years ago women have developed active careers in many spheres. In 1878 the U.S. Supreme Court barred women lawyers because of their “natural timidity and delicacy.” Now we have a woman Justice. When I started my first book twelve years ago, Chicago women were fighting for the right to be homicide detectives and patrol officers instead of matrons at the women’s jails. Today ten percent of the force is female. We don’t think twice about seeing women on the beat, in the courtroom, the operating room, or other exciting arenas.
It’s because we see women doing so much that the horizons of our fiction have expanded. We can create heroines who act independently without guilt-not Jane Marples, or even Harriet Vanes-but Kate Fansler, Sharon McCone, or Kinsey Millhone, who are all present in this anthology. And our unmarried women can have affairs without needing to kill themselves afterward, or turning out to be villains like Brigid O’Shaughnessy or Chandler’s Dolores Gonzalez.
Does that make this group of writers better than Sayers? By no means. Nor in terms of craft and talent does she have many equals today. But what we do have is the freedom to present an independent woman hero without fear of excoriation.
Kate Chopin, the Brontes, and other pioneers made it passible for us to believe in the female artist. They turned publishing into a routine, accessible, acceptable business-they obviated the need to publish under the cloak of an anonymous lady, as Austen had to, or under a man’s name, as Sand and Eliot felt compelled to. Sayers, Woolf, and others, taking advantage of this ease of publication, made us start thinking about what a genuine woman’s voice might be.
Twenty-five years ago Amanda Cross delighted readers with Kate Fansler in In the Final Analysis. Kate, professional, witty, feminine, took over where Dorothy Sayers left Harriet Vane: she could solve her own problems. She could investigate and resolve a murder. She could have a warm and wonderful lover but stand apart from him. Cross presented the hero we’d been waiting for all our lives.
What began as a trickle of strong women a quarter of a century ago-with Christy Oper working a New York Transit Authority beat, followed by Cordelia Gray doing an Unsuitable Job for a Woman-has grown into a great outpouring of women’s stories. Marcia Muller gave us Sharon McCone in Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977. Five years later Sue Grafton and I flung Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski on an unsuspecting world; English PI Anna Lee joined us at the same time. Since then the number of interesting women heroes has grown past counting. They range from the private eyes to Julie Hayes in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s books, whose efforts to find her own strength mirror the struggles many American women have gone through in the last twenty years.
This book gathers together a sample of what women have to say about women in the final decade of our century. The collection begins with Liza Cody’s story “Lucky Dip.” Being homeless and on the street are issues that we all worry about. Cody goes beyond worry to show us through Crystal’s eyes what that life is really like. A street girl, Crystal is presented without gloss or sentimentality. The horrors she witnesses, and how she copes with them, may chill you, but will also give you food for serious thought.
The collection ends with another young girl in a different situation. Emma, in Dorothy B. Hughes’s “That Summer at Quichiquois,” is trying to sort out the passions of the adults around her. This haunting story shows us many different ways to view people, passion, and even forensic evidence.
Between Cody and Hughes we see women struggling with a range of problems. Nancy Pickard takes a new look at jealousy and possessiveness in “The Scar.” The New Zealand setting is unusual and arresting, but the feelings, brought to life with delicate realism, have been with us for thousands of years. Private eyes Kinsey Millhone, Sharon McCone, Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, and Lònia Guiu solve cases that are far from conventional. Famous amateurs like Jemima Shore, Julie Hayes, and Kate Fansler are here. Along with these professional crime solvers are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, social workers, and Barbara Wilson’s startling story about one of the world’s most revered dead poets. We have the debut of Carolyn Wheat’s new hero, New York Transit cop Maureen Gallagher, whose struggles with sobriety and authority are as important as the torched subway bums she fights for.
Mary Wings’s “Kill the Man for Me” is guaranteed to provoke late-night discussions: how far is it permissible to go in seeking justice or revenge? And if her solution shocks you, ask yourself if you were also offended by Charles Bronson in Death Wish.
The one thing these stories have in common is the message that there is no one way to view women. Nor is there one way women see themselves. What we have all learned in the last three hundred and fifty years is that the reading and writing of books are “such things as belong to women.”
LUCKY DIP by Liza Cody
LIZA CODY is the winner of a Creasey Award for her very popular Anna Lee series of mysteries and has also been nominated for the Edgar. Her rich novels featuring private eye Anna include Under Contract Sad Company, Dupe, Head Case, and Stalker, while Rift is a stunning novel of suspense set in East Africa, She makes her home in England.
He was sitting against a bit of broken wall, looking almost normal. I could see him because of the full moon. It was a lovely moon with wispy clouds like old lady’s hair across its face.
I watched the man for a couple of minutes, but he didn’t move. Well, he wouldn’t, would he? I could see he didn’t belong-he was far too well dressed-and I wondered how he got there. This is not a part of the city men dressed like him go.
He had not been dead long. You could tell that at a glance because he still had his shoes on. If you die here you won’t keep your shoes for ten minutes. You won’t keep your wallet for ten seconds, dead or alive.
With this in mind I had a quick look, right and left, for anyone lurking in the shadows. If I’d seen anyone bigger than me, I’d have stayed where I was. Moon shadows are blacker than hearses, and I knew I wasn’t the only one out that night. But in the Trenches only the big are bold, and someone big would have been rummaging in the remains already. So I hopped out from behind my pile of rubble and made a run for it.
I reached him in no time at all and grabbed his left lapel. Seven out of ten men are right-handed, and the chances are seven to three anything valuable will be in a left-hand inside pocket. I took a swift dip and came up with the winnings.
By now I could hear stirrings-a snap of rotten wood, a slide of brick dust. I flicked his watch off his wrist and almost in the same motion made a dive into his jacket pocket. Then I got on my toes and legged it.
I legged it out of the Trenches completely, because, although there are plenty of places to hide, the people I wanted to hide from know them as well as I do. The Trenches are useful as long as it’s only the law you want to avoid. Robbing a corpse isn’t nice, and I didn’t want to take all that trouble only to be robbed myself.