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Reading the New Feminist
Mystery:
Dorie Klein DCrim
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Western Consortium for Public Health/School
of Public Health, University of California,
Berkeley
Published online: 18 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Dorie Klein DCrim (1993) Reading the New Feminist Mystery:,
Women & Criminal Justice, 4:1, 37-62, DOI: 10.1300/J012v04n01_03
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Reading the New Feminist Mystery:
The Female Detective,
Crime and Violence
Dorie Klein
ABSTRACT. A popular new feminist genre of American mystery
fiction has emerged in the last decade, raising questions about its
relationship to real crime, especially against women. While the
detective genre has certain inherently conservative tendencies, the
feminist subgenre selectively draws on traditions, including the
womanly British "cozy" and the American male "hard-boiled," to
create something new. The women sleuths are neither victims nor
villains, but independent agents. They struggle with personal chal-
lenges and mostly succeed. The crimes themselves portray disrup-
tions in the social landscape, and the pursuit of whodunit suggests
more a quest for truth than a celebration of law enforcement. Vio-
lence, often used defensively by the heroine, is portrayed as ines-
capable, but it is seen through the eyes of a detectivelobserver
rather than those of the criminal or the victim.
INTRODUCTION
P.D. James, the eminent English writer of mystery fiction, was
challenged at a public reading in Berkeley, California by a woman
in the audience. Although she had never read any P.D. James, she
admitted, she wondered why the writer had chosen in her latest
work (James, 1990) to kill off several women and describe their
- - - - -
Dorie Klein, DCrim from the University of California, is at the Western
Consortium for Public HealthISchool of Public Health, University of California,
Berkeley. She has been involved with critical feminist criminology for a number
of years and has been reading women's mysteries for even longer.
Women & Criminal Justice, Vol. 4(1) 1992
O 1992 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 37
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38 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
killings in detail (the author had chosen these sections to read
aloud). Was this not contributing to violence against women?
P.D. James answered, not inaccurately, but, I felt, somewhat
inadequately, that ,she did not feel guilty, that her readers were on
the whole not the sort who were going to go out and murder wom-
en, and that her work did not fall into what might be characterized
as violent pornography. The audience applauded. The majority
were female, white, ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-six-
ties, and, given the geographic site, many could be presumed to be
feminist. Yet their emotional reaction to the question, indeed, my
own first reaction, was hostility.
Shortly thereafter I attended a panel of more "women of mys-
tery," this time Americans younger than James and not (yet) of
international renown. There was discussion of how the new nation-
al network of female crime writers is attempting, aside from its
chief task of promoting members' books, to wrestle with the issue
of literary depiction of violence against women.' Among the panel-
ists the views ranged from deploring such depictions to opposing
any self-censorship, although all agreed that women writers were
less likely to wallow in violence than many male writers. What
interested me was that this question, this connection, was once
again raised.
These exchanges set off a train of thought that I want to explore
here. What is the relationship between the increasingly popular
female crime fiction genre, feminism, and real-life crime involving
women?
In the past five years, United States and British female mystery
authors have achieved success to the point that they are literally
selling in supermarkets and having their stories filmed or tele-
vised.z There is precedent for this success; many of the classic
British mystery writers, and some of the Americans, were female.
With traditional whodunits (as distinct from espionage thrillers,
horror stories, and romantic suspense) recently reemerging as a
popular genre, it is not unexpected that women should form a
significant authorship and readerships3
But something is new. As an editor of a crime-book-of-the-month
club, addressing a gathering of mystery writers which I attended,
remarked, the stories that are selling best to her readership, a mdori-
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Done KIein 39
ty of whom are women, are those with strong, independent female
sleuth^.^ This new subgenre of female detective mystery is proto-
typically American and of the generation born after World War 11,
in this sense closer to their American colleagues Robert Parker and
Tony Hillerman than to P.D. James.' The subgenre has spawned
sub-subgenres, of which the most important is that of the female
private investigator or P.I. (see the books of Linda Barnes, Sue
Grafton, Linda Grant, Sara Paretsky) and secondarily that of the
policewoman (e.g., Susan Dunlap and T.J. MacGregor writing as
Alison Drake). There are also books focusing on lesbians (Shelley
Singer, Vicki McConnell, Barbara Wilson), academics (Carol
Clemeau, Carolyn Heilbrun writing as Amanda Cross, Susan
Kenney, Amanda MacKay), lawyers (LiaMatera, Julie Smith, Caro-
lyn Wheat), and writers and booksellers (Carolyn Hart, Joan Hess,
Lucille Kallen). There are recent anthologies with titles like Crime
On Her Mind, (Slung, 1975), Sisters in Crime (Wallace, 1988,
1989a, 1989b), and The Woman Sleurh Anthologies (1988, 1989,
1990), and commentaries both light-hearted and serious, such as
Murderess Ink (Winn, 1979), The Lady Investigares (Craig and
Cadogan, 1981), and Silk Sralkings (Nichols and Thompson, 1988).
Courses have been taught on the female ~l e ut h. ~ One limitation so
far, regrettably, is that there are few female writers or female sleuths
of color (for exceptions see Marcia Muller's Chicana sleuth [1983],
Ralph Warner and Toni Ihara's Japanese-American sleuth [1984]),
and Susan Moody's African-American "Penny" series.
Juxtaposing women's increasing involvement in crime fiction
with the controversy over the prevalence of crimes against women,
we must wonder: what happens at the intersections of murder
mysteries featuring female protagonists, women writing and reading
such stories, and real-life crime, including violence against women?
Do the works contribute to societal victimization, simply represent
it, or do something else entirely?
A LAW AND ORDER GENRE?
There has long been an assumption that mysteries are popular
because of their ritualistic formalism, their lack of connection to
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40 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
real life, and their essential conservatism. This particular escapist
genre appears on first glance to be not only irrelevant, but a white-
washing of social problems, including those of violence and domi-
nation.
There is truth to the charges of conservatism, certainly on the
surface. There is a lack of verisimilitude: mysteries are usually
about murder, an uncommon crime. Unlike spy stories, they are
not even about state-sanctioned killing, nor do they generally ad-
dress organized or environmental killings, but they traditionally
revolve around individual murder. And the fictional murders are
ridiculously complex. The killer's modus operandi and motive must
be deconstructed through detection, whereas actual personal killings
are mostly unplanned and transparent (the spouse, with the gun, in
the bedroom). The complexity, which is necessary if one is to have
a plot, acts unconsciously to reassure us that murder is limited to
those few who are clever enough to scheme and cover up. As P.D.
James has observed, "Real-life murder is arbitrary, sordid, pathetic
and ugly. Fictional murder is not" (New York Times, 1990).'Fur-
thermore, and equally reassuringly, fictional victims often bring it
on themselves; one can more often predict the victim, by provoca-
tive behavior or sheer unpleasantness, than the offender. Even the
imagined murderous settings reassure us in their stylized unlikeli-
ness. Since becoming a mystery aficionado years ago, I am unable
to visit a deserted field or a high cliff without contemplating its
Hitchcockian possibilities, and people flock to weekend murder
-
mystery parties in Victorian bed-and-breakfasts and on trains. Real-
life killing, as we all know, can be found more readily in kitchens,
on city streets, or near toxic dumps.
2
Another conservative element of the genre is that crime never
pays; killers don't get away with it. James has commented that, in
her view, readers of whodunits, as distinct from more violent and
less cerebral thrillers, are yearning for an imagined justice, the
triumph of rationality and knowledge over chaos and confusion:
"These novels are always popular in ages of great anxiety. It's a
very reassuring form. It affirms the hope that we live in a rational
and beneficent universe" (New York Times. 1990). This implies
conservativism, not because justice is conservative, but because this
kind of justice is: the authorities restoring the status quo, typified
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Done KIeln 41
by Agatha Christie's English village, before the killer so rudely
disrupted it. In a deeper sense, the alleged conservatism of the
genre is an apparently unquestioning stance on what is right and
what is wrong: the sleuth is society's hero and the killer is the
villain."
Another reason for detective fiction's suspect reputation is the
social hierarchies and gender stereotypes it has traditionally cele-
brated. The classic British writers of the between-the-wars "cozy"
subgenre, led by women such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy
Sayers, pretended to inhabit a world of continuous upper-class
house parties, and their readers learned to suspect untrustworthy
foreigners, opportunistic butlers, grasping Jews, and inscrutable
Orientals. The classic American "hard-boiled" male writers, such
as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, rejected class snob-
bery, if not racial and ethnic prejudice. But they gushed forth with
a violently misogynist world where the most memorable women are
deadly; i.e., the dreaded "black widows" ofjUm noir personified
by Brigid O'Shaughnessy of Hammett's Z2e Maltese Falcon
(1930). In both subgenres, the heroic detective, usually a lone,
white, knowledgeable man, speaks with authority and interprets the
narrative's moral implications for us.
Finally, there is conservatism in the rigidity of the genre's con-
ventions of character and plot, ones so time-honored that the occa-
sional breaking of one creates a sensation. We feel no affection for
the victims; there is little explicit gore and less sex; we never enter
the mind of the murderer; and everything is wrapped up in the end.
Thus we have a safe haven in which to indulge in the violence of
the murder itself.
Given this apparent superticiality and formalism, it wouldn't be
surprising if even we feminists were reluctant to examine our bed-
time stories in the same clear light in which we bathe our sociolog-
ical pursuits, and might resent anyone who wants to do so, espe-
cially at a lighthearted public reading. If the books are escapist and
conservative, it is tempting to conclude that there is no relationship
between them and violence against women, or real crime, or real
life of any kind.
But if the genre is so conservative and irrelevant, why are self-
consciously feminist women writing in it, breaking into the best-
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42 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
seller lists, and forming associations? Is the new detective simply
a female Dirty Harry? Is there no subversive potential in this phe-
nomenon? Let me explore further by tracing the new female mys-
tery's origin and analyzing its content.
THE ROOTS OF THE NEW FEMALE DETECTIVE
Since the beginnings of the mystery in the mid-1800s, women
have comprised a significant authorship and a large readership,
devouring nineteenth-century "gothic" stories. This sort of novel's
successor, the feminine romantic suspense novel featuring an un-
married female narrator in the thick of trouble, has flourished in
the twentieth century, pioneered by American Mary Roberts Rine-
hart. Rinehart published her first book, The Circular Staircase, in
1908 (and her last in 19521). Her work, and its developing sub-
genre, has been denigrated by (mostly male) critics as the "Had-I-
But-Known" school. Women writers also participated in the devel-
opment of the more cerebral whodunit; American Anna Katherine
n
Green wrote one of the first professional-detective dime-novel
mysteries, Zhe Leavenworth Case (1878).
In the Golden Era between the world wars in Britain, the writers
who enjoyed the greatest critical and popular success were female,
particularly Agatha Christie (first book m e Mysterious Affair at
Styles [1920]) and Dorothy Sayers (Whose Body? [1923]). Nonethe-
&e
less, in fiction as in real life, women's sleuthing activities were
limited and outshone by male protagonists. There were female
sleuths in the tradition of Green and Rinehart: inquisitive widows,
nurses, and discreet lady inquiry agents, invented by both female
and male authors, of whom the most famous was Christie's Miss
Marple, created in Murder at the Vicarage (1930). But these char-
acters were marginals of one kind or another: girls in a brief pre-
marital stage, asexual widows, virginal spinsters, celibate career
women. A
A more influential forerunner in the British tradition was Doro-
thy Sayers' alter ego character, Harriet Vane, an independent and
embattled mystery writer struggling with the perils of heterosexual
intimacy, particularly in Gaudy Night (1935). This master work,
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Dorie Klein 43
whose women's college setting allows Sayers a voice to speak on
behalf of women scholars, is a work to which most contemporary
feminist detective writers are indebted.
In the American vein, in the hard-boiled California detective
classics of the twenties, thirties, and forties, there were very few
women protagonists or authors. The pulp magazine-inspired works
of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others, whose gritty
and violent styles contrast to the British cozies, position the detec-
tive as a lone man, and his taken-for-granted self-sufficiency tends
toward the mi~ogynistic.~ One exceptional American character was
Nora Charles of Hammett's The Thin Man (1934), who with her
fictional husband Nick did inspire a subgenre of light-hearted up-
per-class sophisticated sleuthing spouses, none as delightful as the
original.
A postwar development of the female-oriented mystery was the
popular romantic suspense fiction of Phyllis Whitney and Mary
Stewart, among others. But the clever, independent, young adven-
turesses in these books, heiresses to the "Had-I-But-Known"
school, generally tagged along after even more clever, independent,
and adventurous men. Until the seventies, heroines typically mar-
. ried at the end of the book, when adventure would presumably give
way to domesticity, precluding any sequel. What F. Scott Fitzger-
ald said about American lives having no second acts was true for
these women who lived happily and tediously ever after.'' Begin-
ning in the. sixties, a handful of matter-of-fact police procedural
books written by women featured women officers, such as Dorothy
Uhnak's Christie Opara and Lillian O'Donnell's Norah Mul-
cahaney. There was also the superpolicewoman vogue influenced
by James Bond in the late fifties and early sixties, exemplified by
G.G. (Gloria) Fickling's hard-boiled Honey West and Peter
O'Donnell's cartoon-like Modesty Blaise.
Despite these forerunners, one might say that the closest anyone
came to the future female protagonist in her-independence was
Nancy Drew and the other girl detectives written for teenagers, the
first of which dates from the twenties (Carolyn Keene, [Edward
Stratemeyer], n e Secret of the Old Clack, 1929). Despite their
limitations, these books may have sent a subversive message for
generations of American girls growing up: Nancy was autonomous,
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44 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
brave, smart as a whip, lukewarm about settling down with a boy,
in short, all those things girls were not supposed to be." Unfortu-
nately, the message was itself subverted: by Nancy's WASP afflu-
ence which rivalled the Golden Era detectives', and by her dreadful
racism, which has been cleaned up in the reissued versions.
The first real stand-alone female sleuth to appear was, appropri-
ately enough, authored by a feminist scholar. Carolyn Heilbrun
first wrote as Amanda Cross in 1964 (Cross, 1964); her quasi-
autobiographical New York-based literary academiclamateur sleuth ;
Kate Fansler was a vocationally and sexually independent woman,
initially in her mid-thirties. Admittedly an homage, or femage, to
Harriet Vane, Kate was a lone, cosmopolitan, intellectual female
voice in what was then a suburban, domestic, and conventional
postwar world. Over the years, she has aged naturally, progressed
in both her academic and sleuthing careers, married at a relatively
late age an easygoing and sympathetic District Attorney, and shared
A
the sweet and bitter fruits of contemporary feminism:
Kate Fansler gazed across the large conference table at the
men on its other side, and the men on either side of her. The
other woman member of the committee was black, female and
absent today. She had so many demands on her time and
attention that occasionally her committee engagements over-
lapped. . . . Kate would sometimes picture her tombstone
with "The Token Woman" engraved in the marble. (Cross,
1981)
Within the next several years, other women private investigators
would appear, such as those of Californian Marcia Muller (1977),
as well as in England a P.I. created by P.D. James (1972) and the
Jemima Shore persona of Antonia Fraser (1977).
The new independent fictional female detective emerged because
of the changes in women's lives and the feminist movement. Fifty
or even twenty years ago, there were almost no such sleuths be-
cause there was no believable social environment to locate them in,
little for them to properly do without a man, and few ideal qualities
with which to endow them. As we shall see, the new American
woman's mystery inherits both the female feistiness of the British
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Dorie Klein 45
cozy and the crime-ridden mean streets of the native hard-boiled,
but integrates them in a feminism all its own.
THE PROTOTYPE OF THE NEW FEMALE DETECTIVE
There are three elements to a mystery: the detective, the crime,
and the tracking down. Most important to the new feminist mystery
is the detective herself.
Fictional detectives traditionally have moral authority, but be-
cause these detectives are women, their narrations are often differ-
ent, and, most of all, we read them differently. The woman de-
tective's themes that stand out are the contradictory ones of loneli-
ness and connection, bravery and vulnerability, and the struggle
with the masculine world in the post-sixties era.
A detective must be alone. Thus the new heroine is more often
single than not, even as she climbs into and out of her thirties and,
in a few cases, her forties and fifties. As in all mysteries, her
sexual life, while it may be varied, is low-profile.12 The detective
is usually childless and free of dependents, as required by the
peripatetic action. This tradition of the detective's aloneness takes
on a different meaning when a woman is involved. For one thing,
the social possibility of such a satisfactory single life is new. Fur-
thermore, only recently have women police been permitted to be
other than women's wardens or juvenile detail officers, or have
significant numbers of actual private investigators been female.13
Yet the new female detective is connected; people rely on her,
and not just her paid clients. In particular, there are bonds between
women in these books. Even the lonely P.I. usually has a network
of female friends and reconstituted family to whom she is strongly
attached and whom she must help, as does, for example, Marcia
Muller's Sharon McCone, first created in 1977 (Muller, 1977):
Not my piend. He can't kill my fiend. The sidewalks of
Twenty-Fourth Street were empty; the fog and dampness
following the rain had driven people inside. . . . As I ran,
fragments of long-forgotten prayers echoed in my mind: Let
her be all right. Please let her be all right. (Muller, 1982)
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46 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
When she herself needs help, or is hurt or on the run, the new
woman detective calls on one of her female friends or relatives, as
does Sara Paretsky's P.I., V.I. Warshawski, created in 1982:
She was at the door twenty minutes later. "So, Llebchen.
You've been in the wars again." I clung to her for a few
minutes. She stroked my hair and murmured in German and
I finally began to warm up. When she saw that I'd stopped
shivering, she had me take off my layers of swaddling. Her
strong fingers moved very gently along my neck and upper
spine, cleaning off the Vaseline and applying a proper dress-
ing. . . . (Paretsky, 1985)
The female sleuth is a brave, strong person, breaking into tradi-
tionally male pursuits and struggling against obstacles. Typical is
Sue Grafton's matter-of-fact Southern California private eye Kinsey
Milhone, also first introduced in 1982:
I'm female, age thirty-two, single, self-employed. I went
c
through the police academy when I was twenty, joining Santa
Teresa Police Department on graduation. I don't even remem-
ber now how I pictured the job before I took it on. I must
have had vague, idealistic notions of law and order, the good
guys versus the bad. . . .
*
After a while, I realized how naive I was. I was frustrated
at the restrictions and frustrated because back then, police-
women were viewed with a mixture of curiosity and scorn. I
didn't want to spend my days defending myself against
"good-natured" insults, or having to prove how tough I was
again and again. I wasn't getting paid enough to deal with all
that grief, so I got out. (Grafton, 1985)
She finds herself in the same dangers as a man, without a trace of
chivalry or protection. This is certainly true for the no-nonsense
Warshawski, who grittily tangles with Chicago mobsters and hit-
men in case after case:
Someone tried to kill you, Ms. Warshawski. They broke the
lock on the front door to get into the building. They poured
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Doric Klein 47
kerosene on your apartment door and set fire to it. You want
my opinion, you're lucky to be alive. (Paretsky, 1985)
She must handle herself physically in one tough spot after another,
taking risks to get the job done. Linda Grant, creator of a woman
P.I., has commented on the pleasure she takes in placing in danger
a fantasy woman who, unlike most real-life women, is not psycho-
logically damaged by traditional fears.
Yet, although she may face down danger, the female sleuth is
emotionally vulnerable, because, while cynical, she is never cal-
lous, as Paretsky explains:
I thought I'd seen every horrible thing people could do to
each other in this town. Men killing each other for a bottle of
wine. Women pouring lye on their lovers. Why this should
upset me so much, I don't know. (Paretsky, 1988)
The ambition, resourcefulness, and commitment of the feminist
detective are rooted in the experiences of a generation growing up
in the sixties, which is the reference point for many a heroine, such
as Lia Matera's left-wing San Francisco lawyer-heroine:
I had maybe five seconds to avoid his pinning me and taking
the pipe away, and I looked wildly around the room for some
way to save myself. If I tried to hit him with the pipe, the
blow would probably glance off his muscular torso. Then he'd
not only kill me, he'd do it with gusto. . . . I repeated a
maneuver I'd tried in 1971, when two military policemen
cornered me in a Presidio parking lot. I climbed: then it had
been a car; now it was my desk. (Matera, 1987)
She also draws on her common-sense methods and finds moral
strength from her female social and psychological experiences. Sue
Grafton has facetiously commented that her first mystery, ' A' i s for
Alibi (1982), was "partly based on a little scheme I came up with
to kill an ex-husband of mine" after he had put her "through three
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48 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
custody battles" (Armchair Detective, 1989). Although there is
plenty of action as the American genre demands, author Linda
Grant has observed, a woman is likelier to talk than to shoot her
way out of a tight spot. Female-identified traits of nurturing often
war with male-associated aspirations of interrogating, as they do
for Susan Dunlap's policewoman protagonist:
"You were right," I said. "There was someone out there
tonight. But there were no marks on the windows. So either
they decided not to break in or they never intended to. Now,
Mrs. Palmerstan, who would have reason to be out there
under your windows?". . .
"I don't know. I don't know." Her voice had the same
pale, ethereal quality as her face. I couldn't decide if she
really didn't know, or if she just couldn't summon the energy
to put her suspicions into words. She stabbed out her cigarette
in the ashtray. A quick glance showed me that every ashtray
in the room was overflowing. She'd been chain-smoking since
I had left her last night. If she was going to be at all lucid,
she needed food.
"We're going to the kitchen," I said. "I'll fix you some-
thing to eat." . . .
Thankful that Inspector Doyle couldn't see this, I scrambled
eggs, toasted bread, and found some cocoa in a cabinet. I
made enough for two. (Dunlap, 1985)
Thus the new fictional feminist detective has the potential to be
a full and multifaceted character engaged in a conflict-ridden
world. In short, she is both a fabulous fantasy figure and a reason-
able role model. The appeal of the feminist detective is growing
because, as Grafton puts it, the detective is "the person I would
have been had 1 not married young and had children . . . thinner
and younger and braver, the lucky so-and-so" (Armchair Detective,
1989). In a more serious political vein, many women encountering
the female detective are finding, in the words of Paretsky, "The
things I want to say about law, society, women seem to come
naturally in her voice" (Newsweek, 1990).
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Done Klein 49
MURDER AS DISRUPTIVE IMPULSE
The second indispensable pan of a mystery is the crime itself.
Let me suggest that, in contrast to the conservative tradition, there
is a subversive and disruptive impulse in crime fiction that is being
developed by the new women writers.
In spite of the mystery genre's careful conventions and controls
(or because of them), at the heart of things there is a murder, a
wild and bloody act. No one writes detective books about shoplift-
ing. By posing the question of murder, the texts express our fasci-
nation with what we see as the ultimate evil, imposing on another
what we ourselves most fear, death. At this level, the genre is not
conservative at all, since imposed death and disorder are radical
events, exposing social or psychological faultlines in what may
appear to be the smoothest landscape. For that reason, the genre
can directly address injustice and immorality.
There is also the potential for ambivalence toward killing and the
killer. As I have mentioned earlier, killing is often provoked. To
keep the reader guessing, the culprit should not be the least likeable
person. This means that the writer must create situations among
people that plausibly could lead to murder, the more the better,
because the plot requires many suspects and red herrings to camou-
flage the real culprit. Underneath the coziest facade of British
villages is an underworld of strife in which everyone is capable of
killing, everyone is a potential victim, and all relationships can be
poisonous. That there is a potential killer in all of us and a possi-
bility of murder in any situation is one ironic hidden message of
the genre. Another is that things are not always what they appear.
As one critic has pointed out, one can "read the signs" (interpret
the clues) in many ways; reality is deceptive, culpability slippery,
and anyone, even the detective, can be mistaken (Reddy, 1988).
But there can be only one actual killer per story. The classic
hard-boiled stories of Chandler and Hammett, in their identification
of the guilty parties, in their portrayal of evil in high places and
low, with a sneaking sympathy for those in the low, also contained
the seeds of overt social criticism. Many contemporary mystery
writers, including women, have inherited this hard-boiled tradition.
"To the modern detective, the law appears impotent, its minions
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50 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
often corrupt, and the universe in chaos" (Stasio, 1990). Many
feminist mystery writers have chosen to structure their plots around
social problems. Among the villains are large polluting companies,
crooked politicians and church officials (Paretsky), mercenary and
-
self-righteous doctors, hospitals, and therapists (Cross, Paretsky,
Dunlap).
Greed motivates these kinds of killings, as in this explanation for
murder by landlord:
They'd buy apartments with old ladies living in them.'If the
tenant didn't die of natural causes within the first two years,
they'd use the exterminator. . . . They made at the very least
two hundred thousand per apartment. That's a million dollars
minimum. (Piesman, 1989)
-
Maintenance of privilege and comfort is another motive for mur-
der, as played out in stories about aristocratic grande dames and
agribusiness tycoons (Mullei), and as revealed in this confession by
a pompous senior professor:
Cecily and I quarreled. . . . Cecily turned out, when I went
up there, to have transformed herself into one of those wide
eyed liberals, the sort who thinks students should be allowed
to rampage on campuses and interfere with the workings of
government and business. It emerged that we no longer saw
eye to eye on anything. (Cross, 1976)
In the more domestic and low-life cases featured, for example,
in the world of Grafton, we encounter people caught in tangled
webs of human discontent, webs far too wide to have been spun by
a lone rotten apple killer. The mean streets are full of misery. The
guilty party lives surrounded by the cruelties and indifference of
others, compounding his own fears and failures, his petty ambitions
so like our own:
He was probably in his early fifties, but he moved like an old
man. He was not bad-looking, but his face was pallid, cheeks
sunken as though he'd recently lost some weight. His manner
was vacant and he held his hands in front of him when he
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walked as though he were blindfolded. He had all the airs of
a man who has stumbled painfully over something in the dark
and wants to be certain he doesn't get caught by surprise
again. (Grafton, 1985)
Murder fiction is disruptive not just because it expresses evil and
injustice, but because it can stir up ambivalence. The reader often
experiences surges of identification with the killer, and her empa-
thy may ricochet from the detective-pursuer to the perpetrator-prey
to the dead victim and back. For example, Crafton's Milhone
agonizingly confronts a teenage murderer of two:
I was looking at the blonde who'd killed Daggett.
For a moment, we stared at each other, saying nothing. He
had the cocky look of a ten-year-old defying his mom, but
under the bravado I sensed a kid who was hoping someone
would step in and save him from himself. (Grafton, 1987)
Perhaps this ambivalent empathy for a murderer is especially sa-
lient for readers in the United States, with its past and present
violence and obsessions with outlaws and cops.
A woman reader may experience the full range of identification
in the new women's mysteries, for in many cases the killer turns
out to be a woman. This killer is not the femme fatale of the old
school, however, but simply one strong female character in a full
gallery, including the detective and many a victim. Violence is a
potential for women as it is for men, and killers run the gamut
from pathetic victims to monsters.
Thus the crime novel, especially in its new feminist incarnation,
appears in this reading as anything but conservative, as an exposure
of the hatreds and inequities just below the surface, of corruption
in high places and despair in low ones, and of ubiquitous and
unstoppable violence.
THE QUESTION OF JUSTICE
The third issue is the tracking down, the quest for truth and
justice.
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52 WOMEN & CRI MNL JUSTICE
Although the genre appears to deliver justice, in the first in-
stance, that is not the same thing as law and order as represented
by the police. In the British mystery tradition, as every Sherlock
Holmes reader knows, the police have often been portrayed as
idiots, a device necessary to the plot in which the amateur sleuth
will shine. These fictional police, by turns bumbling, grumbling,
or humbly content to stand by and play a support role, unintention-
ally symbolize the inability of criminal justice to solve the problem.
In the American hard-boiled tradition, the police are taken more
seriously: they are corrupt and brutal. The P.I. may be as up
against the law as is the killer, as evidenced in Paretsky:
I pulled out my billfold and took out my P.1. license and my
permit for the gun. The stout cop looked them over. "Oh, a
private eye. What are you doing here in Skokie, girlie?"
I shook my head. I hate suburban police. "The bagels in
Chicago aren't as good as the ones they make out here."
Fat cop rolled his eyes. "We picked up Joan Rivers,
Stu. . . . Listen, Joan. This ain't Chicago. We want to put
you away, we can, won't worry us none. Now just tell us
what you were doing here."
z
"Waiting for you guys. Clearly a mistake."
The lean cop slapped my face. (Paretsky, 1985)
The new women writers belong to the generation shaped by the
oppositional politics of the sixties; hence their books fall into what
has been categorized as "Big Chill" mysteries, pioneered by Roger
Simon's work. Many of the books, especially those with P.l.s,
.
adopt a cynical attitude toward authority, as do Linda Grant's:
Somewhere in San Francisco a kid of sixteen was mugging a
woman old enough to be his grandmother, a junkie was wav-
ing a gun at a clerk in a tiny neighborhood grocery, and a
rising young executive who hadn't risen fast enough was
quietly making his company several hundred thousand dollars
poorer. The mugger and the junkie would end up on the
police blotter. . . . The young executive would never see the
police. He would wind up across a desk from me discussing
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a payment schedule for full restitution, having discreetly
terminated his employment. (Grant, 1988)
The tension between the official and often corrupt forces of law
and the elusive quest for real justice suit the feminist paradigm
very nicely. The heroine is caught between distrust of the estab-
lished masculine order and the need for female autonomy, on the
one hand, and the structural dependence on authority and even
force, on the other. Her dilemma reflects the real-life lack of
choices for women facing violence, and the feminist political am-
bivalence about relying on law or policing for protection or legiti-
macy.
Frequently, the police work at cross-purposes with the protago-
nist who may be falsely suspected, a plot device that gives a non-
P.I. protagonist in particular a plausible motive to seek the actual
killer. Some sleuths, like Julie Smith's light-hearted lawyer, find
themselves in trouble merely for bending the law in the search for
clues:
They said, "You have the right to remain silent . . . any-
thing you say can be used against you in court . . . you
have the right to talk to a lawyer. . . ." Stuff like that.
That is no way to talk to a nice, Jewish girl from Marin
County, and so I informed the officers. Which, I guess, is
why I was booked for resisting arrest as well as for assault.
(Smith, 1984)
The amateur protagonist, as opposed to the professional P.I.,
may experience vulnerability and surprise at the experience of
confronting the law:
It was an effort to keep from shouting. Yet as angry as I was,
I was scared too. Scared for the first time. He was not ruling
me out as a suspect. 1 could hardly believe it. Until this very
moment I had always believed that the police, and the sheriff,
were there to protect me. I was a white, middle-class, thirty-
ish woman: exactly the type of person the police look after.
(Dunlap, 1984)
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WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
I.
Even in those books in which a woman cop is protagonist, the
police as a whole are rarely heroes, The policewoman must cope
with the legendary prejudices of the male cop, as does Warner and
Ihara's Officer Tamura:
The fact that she and Lt. Rivers interacted so badly had been
upsetting her for months. , , . It galled her to know that
basically it was her gender and her race, not her inexperience,
that fatally prejudiced her case. Sure she was new both to
plainclothes and to Violent Crimes, but she wasn't stupid; she
could learn. Why the hell couldn't he just suspend his disbe-
lief and treat her like any other rookie detective? (Warner and
Ihara, 1984)
Beyond the potice and the identification of the guilty, there is the
question of realizing a just outcome for the accused. In most mys-
teries, the end is when the murderer is uncovered or, at most,
dragged away. There is no trial, no prison.I4 The writer makes no
comment on the criminal justice system at all. The casual reader
may assume this is because the writer smugly feels that the system
works, and that all one need do is deliver up the guilty party to it.
But there is no reason to assume this.
Equal justice for all is not expected, The subtext of many a well-
written mystery is that the sleuth can do more harm than good.
Even the socially sanguine Sayers revealed a deep skepticism about
good and evil, with her amateur sleuth Wimsey often surveying the
tragedies arising from his Nosey-Parkering, half-sorry he'd ever
wondered whodunit instead of leaving well enough alone. Barbara
Wilson's lesbian feminist sleuth in The Dog Collar Murders (1989)
anguishes over a complex political world of anti-pornography
a
activists battling lesbian sado-masochists, all of whom have valid
arguments, but one side or another of which she must betray in her
investigation. The guilty parties are often suffering or pathetic
human beings for whom the strong arm of the law is an irrelevancy.
I'
Playing against the surface righteousness of the genre are the possi-
bilities of irony and ultimate injustice.
In fact, the mystery writer rarely expects or delivers justice;
rather, what she promises is truth, often of the painful variety:
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Done Klein 55
I hurt just about every place there is. I look in the mirror and
I see someone else's face: puffy mouth, bruised cheeks, the
bridge of my nose looking flat. I'm feeling some other kind
of pain as well, and I don't know quite what that's made of.
I'm closing the file, but the story's not over yet. We'll have
to wait and see what the courts do now, and I've learned to
be cautious about that. (Grafton, 1985)
It is this focus on the search for truth, rather than the realization
of justice, that brings us to the last question: that of violence.
Because if the new female mystery is not a conventional morality
play at all, in what context do we place the violence?
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN?
Women are certainly killed in these books. They comprise vic-
tims, witnesses, threatened friends of the sleuth. But so do men.
First, in this genre women are less often killed as women, that
is, prototypically as battered wives or rape victims, than for other,
more obscure, and less gendered reasons. That female victims in
this genre are usually killed because they know too much or stand
in the way of someone's fortune, rather than because they have a
possessive ex-lover or angry date, may be due less to authors'
political commitments than to their instincts as escape-genre writers
to avoid certain grim realities or plots that fizzle.15
Indeed, if we scrutinize the violent actors in these works, specif-
ically those with private investigators, we are likelier to find prob-
lematic violence by the P.I. than sexual or gender-related violence
against women. Grafton's Milhone and Paretsky's Warshawski
attack as many people, albeit always in self-defense, as Hammett's
Sam Spade, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, or Robert Parker's
Spenser:
As he rose to his feet, I fired through the bottom of the hand-
bag-at a range of ten feet without any visible effect. He did
jump as if I'd tossed hot gravy on his pants, but I didn't see
any blood and he didn't topple to the floor as I'd sincerely
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56 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
prayed he would. Instead, he roared to life, coming at me like
a mad dog . . . 1 snatched up my handbag and swung it. I
caught him in the head. The momentum knocked him side-
ways. (Grafton, 1988)
For the P.I., the violence is not only necessary for self-defense, but
is a metaphor for the ability to avenge a wrong. The confident self-
defense is an empowering role model for the female reader who
perforce lives in a world of continuing vulnerability:
I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my jeans belt. "If I shoot
your left kneecap, you'll never be able to prove it didn't
happen when you attacked me at the door."
"You wouldn't," he gasped.
He was probably right; my stomach was churning as it was.
What kind of person kneels in the snow threatening to destroy
the leg of an injured man? Not anyone I wanted to know. I
pulled the hammer back with a loud click and pointed the gun
at his left leg.
"No," he cried. "No, don't. I'll do it. Whatever you
say ." (Paretsky, 1985)
Despite the P.I.'s violence, there is always an undercurrent of
awareness of the down side of the violence in the female sleuth's
voice, no matter how aggressive or successful. Violence may be
ubiquitous and useful, but it is rarely glorified:
I was hating every second of it. 1 hate the sick-stomach feel-
ing I get when I'm breaking into someone's house or falling
downstairs or getting caught by someone's spouse or lover.
It's times like this when I wonder why I do this kind of work.
I don't like that feeling that I'm sure is like a drug to people
who walk between skyscrapers on tight wires. I didn't want
to get caught. We had no right to be there. We had a lot of
pieces that fit, that's all. No real proof. And this was not
exactly a legal way to catch a criminal. (Singer, 1987)
Furthermore, the sleuth is always as vulnerable to violence as she
is likely to incite it. This physical vulnerability, like aloneness, has
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special meaning for a woman who is more likely to be aware of
her personal security even under ordinary circumstances. Dunlap
has commented that she thinks a great deal about the spatial limits
on a woman's freedom, and her writing demonstrates it:
The engine was a mess. It looked like someone had taken an
axe to it. . . . Logically, there was no reason to be afraid.
The truck was a warning. Whoever did it wasn't going to
come back now. That's why there are warnings. But no
amount of reason helped. What I wanted was to go to a mo-
tel, some place safe, and sign in under a false name. But, of
course, I couldn't drive anywhere. I couldn't call one of my
friends to come and get me, because one of my friends might
not be a friend at all. I couldn't even bring myself to strip off
my clothes and take the bath I'd yearned for all day. Instead,
I turned on every light in the house, hauled in the logs, spent
an hour getting them to catch fire, and then sat there, still
dressed, huddled in my quilt on the sofa all night. (Dunlap,
1984)
Even the professional, the woman cop, is not immune to night-
mares about violence, as experienced by Alison Drake's on-the-
edge Key West officer:
Aline screamed as the saw slammed into the back of her neck,
and when she screamed again, her head was bouncing across
the floor of the loft, through pools of blood, so much blood,
her own blood: The smell of it spilled out of the dream with
her and poured over her as she tumbled out of the hammock
and landed on the floor on her knees. She scrambled up and
lunged for the lamp. Light puddled on the pillows and bled
'
down the center of the mattress, which was, of course, empty.
. . . What ' 11 it be this time, Al? The Nightmare Chaser? Lobe-
lia? A shot of bourbon? A joint? Did she have any joints in
the house? Did she have any bourbon? Did she really want to
spend twenty minutes steeping herbs for tea? It would start to
get light in an hour. She would walk down to the beach and
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58 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
watch the sun rise. . . . She took her service revolver with
her, tucked into the pocket of a denim vest and hidden inside
:- -
a windbreaker. (Drake, 1988)
Thus in the last analysis, violence, both inflicted and received, is
an ever-present possibility; pacifism is not a choice.
In conclusion, let me suggest that there is a final, perhaps most
important, reason why this genre should not be read as contributing
to violence against women, or as advocaring violence in general.
In the whodunit tradition, there is an inherent element that makes
it an unlikely vehicle to inspire assault, although neither P.D.
James nor the American network of female authors have yet identi-
fied it. The detective story does not assume the voice of the mur-
derer. Unlike the camera's eye in the recent slew of slasher mov-
ies, the reader does not see the world as the killer does. Even the
male whodunit, its other misogynies aside, is not essentially a
violence-minded genre.16
On the other hand, the genre does not adopt the gaze of the
victim, either. Unlike the pious nightly news, glib made-for-televi-
sion movie, and the more feminine romantic suspense novels, this
is not a victim-oriented genre. Rather, the emotional tone is de-
tached, neither celebrating nor censuring. The point of view is the
matter-of-fact one of the investigator, who must accept the fact of
murder even if she deplores its occurrence. Perhaps it is this de-
tachment, which appears more akin to the appreciative impulse than
to the correctional one, that makes it possible for us to escape and
enjoy the murder, and yet also arouses our political unease at our
own enjoyment?
But is not our social scientific analysis of crime similarly de-
tached? Despite our sympathies for victims (and offender-victims),
crime becomes a social matter of fact like any other. We want to
know what the puzzle means; the social scientist has rightly been
called a detective. There is a strong bond of empathy between the
real-life criminologist and the fictional sleuth in the single-minded
quest for knowledge:
He fell toward Roz headlong, his momentum pitching him
face first into her. She braced herself, lifted her knee, and
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Done Klein 59
caught his shoulder as he fell, simultaneously pushing with all
her strength, deflecting him, and sending him rolling over the
edge, spinning down until he crashed heavily into the barbed
wire thicket .of brambles. , . . "Listen to me," Roz said
firmly. "You're already bleeding. I don't know how long it
will take me to get help. If you struggle anymore you may hit
an artery, and bleed to death in five minutes, whether I go for
help or not. But I'm not going until you tell me everything."
(Kenney, 1983)
I was just curious, that's all. . . . Following a line of investi-
gation was an active response, anyway. You didn't just sit
there, stunned with sorrow, you asked questions, you demand-
ed answers, you looked for motives, causes, a pattern. (Wil-
son, 1989)
Let me close with a further twist on this analogy. For all her de-
tachment and cynicism, the new female sleuth does not display the
adrift burnt-out amorality of some new male detectives, such as
Elmore Leonard's postmodern lost souls. There is right and wrong,
as her keen outrage at female oppression tells her. Similarly, the
feminist criminologist is not motivated by a purely intellectual
whimsy, but also by the conviction that the answers to her ques-
tions matter. The feminist detective, in her difficult but exciting
search to uncover the truth and do the right thing, could certainly
be an allegory for a social scientist/activist, or anyone involved in
deciphering the mysteries of life and bettering the human condition.
While she cannot create justice, she can be a critical commentator
of feminist truths.
NOTES
1. This group, titled with unintentional irony Sisters in Crime, was ap-
proached by researchers from the University of New Hampshire's Center for the
Study of Family Violence to collect data on depictions of violence against women
in crime literature. Sisters in Crime is also facilitating the collection of informa-
tion on women mystery writers for the National Women's History Project. For
information contact Sisters in Crime, c/o 6040A Six Forks Road #163, Raleigh,
NC 27609-8605.
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60 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
2. Sara Paretsky's series, discussed here, debuted as a film, V.I. Wardraw-
ski, in 1991.
3. This success is not to say that there has been no discrimination against
female mystery novelists. On a note familiar to most professional women, 1 was
informed that while women comprise some fiftysdd percent of detective writers,
the New York Emes Book Review had devoted only ten percent of its crime re-
views to female authors in the mid-eighties. Challenging this state of affairs was
the main imoetus for the oraanizine of the above-mentionedsisters in Crime (see
Note 1) association. carolin ~ei l br un hss recently commented (Ms. maga&ne,
April 1991) that discrimination still exists in the conferringof awards for mystery
writing.
4. On R personal note, I was glad to hear this, since I am writing such a
book, and have unfortunately been doing so since 1979.
5. There are also new British feminist mystery writers, such as Liza Cody
and Joan Smith, and an Australian branch of Sisters in Crime.
6. "The Female Sleuth in Fiction" was taught in 1977 at University of Cali-
fornia Extension by Janet Rudolph, president of Mystery Readers International,
P.O.B. 81 16, Berkeley, CA 94707. A one-day session on "Women of Mystery"
organized by Susan Dunlap of Sisters in Crime at the same university in 1991
was attended by 300. Most such courses have been taught in literature depart-
ments; it would be interesting to see such a course done from a criminal justice
viewpoint.
7. James worked for many years at the Home Office and as a lay magistrate
before becoming successful enough with her writing to earn a living from it.
8. Critic Howard HaycraR, commenting in the forties on the Fascists' and
Nazis' banning of imported detective fiction, called the mystery story "essentially
a democraticinstitution," "dramatizing, under the bright cloak of entertainment,
many of the precious rights and privileges" enjoyed i n Western democracies and
relying on a widespread "idea [ofj what constitutes proof' (Haycraft, [I9411
1984). This view of the Anglo-American justice system, understandable in the
context of World War II, strikes us today ns very self-satisfied.
9. By the end of the Oolden Era the disparity between women authors' par-
ticipation in the two countries was striking enough to elicit a comment from
Haycraft, although he seemed oblivious to a fundamental reason for the gap,
namely, the contrasting and gendered genre styles themselves: "One of the unex-
plained mysteries of present-day detective literature is the continuing gulf between
women writers in Britain and America. . . . English women detective story writ-
ers have been found, from the beginning, in the vanguard of the most inventive
and imaginative minds practicing the form. Their American sisters, on the other
hand, with relatively few exceptions, have stuck stubbornly and on the whole
rather dully to the stereotyped formula of romanticized mystery-detection estab-
lished by Mary Roberts Rinehart in the early 1900s." (Haycraft, [I9411 1984)
The classic theme of the hard-boiled text has been stated by Chandler:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is nei-
ther tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.
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Done Klein 61
He is the hero, he is everything. He must be ra complete man and a common man
and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of
honor. . . . He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud
man or be very sorry that you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age
talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham,
and a contempt for pettiness" (Chandler, 1944).
10. The romantic suspense genre, which peaked in popularity in the early
seventies only to spawn the degenerate "Harlequin romance"subgenre, continues
on both sides of the Atlantic, e.g., upheld by American Elizabeth Peters marbara
Mertz] who has stretched its usual limits by introducingthree series with liberated
protagonists: a middle-aged globe-trotting librarian, a free-spirited young histori-
an, and a Victorian-era archaeologist.
11. Feminist mystery writer Nancy Pickard has commented that many women
readers have told her thrt after outgrowing Nancy Drew and finishing Mary
Stewart in the early seventies, they gave up reading mysteries.
12. This removal of sex from the center to the margin conveniently minimizes
the personal limits and conflicts that heterosexuality inevitably generates for
strong women today, in this transitionalperiod. Conveniently, fictional detectives'
love lives are by tradition problematic.
13. In 1986 one quarter of the membership of the California Association of
Licensed Investigators was female (San Francisco Eraminer, 1986).
14. One exception is Sayers' last Wimsey-Vane novel, Bumnun's Honeymoon
(1933, in which Wimsey sees the murderer he's uncovered all the way to the
hanging, and it's beastly, and he has nightmares for weeks.
15. Nancy Pickard does deal with wife beating in one of her interesting Jenny
Cain books, Marriage is Murder (1983, although with a twist.
16. There are some exceptions, such as the unusually violent and misogynist
works by Mickey Spillane.
REFERENCES
Armchair Defective 1989 Interview with Sue GraRon. 22:l.
Chandler, Raymond 1944 "The Simple Art of Murder." Atlantic Monthly. De-
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Cross, Amanda [Carolyn Heilbrun] 1964 In the Lasf Analysis. New York: Avon.
1976,nle Question of Mar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- 1981 Death in a Tenured Position. New York: E.P. Dutton.
Dr.&e, Alison 1T.J. MacGregor] 1988 Tango Key. New York: BallantineBooks.
Dunlap, Susan 1984 An Equal Opyortunify Deafh. New York: St. Martin's Press.
1985 Nor Exactly a Br ahi n. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Fraser, Antonia 1977 Quiet as n Nun. New York: Viking Press.
arafton, Sue 1982 ' A' is for Alibi. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
1985 'B' is for Burglar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
1987 'D' is for Deadbeat. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
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62 WOMEN & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
- 1988 'E' is for Evidence. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Grant, Linda 1988 Random Access Murder. New York: Avon.
Haycraft, Howard 1984 Murder for Pleasure [1941]. New York: Caroll & Oraf.
James, P.D. 1962 Cover Her Face. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
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1990 Devices and Desires. New York: Knopf.
Kenney, Susan 1983 Garden of Malice. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Matera, Lia 1987 Where Lawyers Fear to Tread. New York: Bantam.
Muller, Marcia 1977 Edwin of the Iron Shoes. New York: David McKay.
1982 Ask rite Cards a Question. New York: Mysterious Press.
- 1983 77te Tree of Dearlr. New York: Walker and Company.
New York Times 1990 "Crime Writers Examine the Mystery of Popularity."
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Newweek 1990 "Murder Most Foul and Fair." May 14.
Nichols, Victoria and Susan Thompson, eds. 1988 Silk Stalkings: Me n Women
Wrire of Murder. San Francisco: Black Lizard Books.
Paretsky, Sara 1982 Indemnity Only. Boston: O.K. Hall.
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1988 Blood Slror. New York: Delacorte Press.
Pickard, Nancy 1987 Marriage is Murder. New York: Charles Scribner's Sona.
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Reddy, Maureen 1988 Sisters in Crinie: Feminism and rite Cn'nie Novel. New
York: Continuum.
San Francisco Ernminer 1986 "Female Sleuths in a Good-01'-Boy Profession."
October 8.
Singer, Shelley 1987 Spit in rite Ocean. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Slung, Michelle, ed. 1975 Crime On Her Mind: FFifeen Stories of Women Sleurhs
from the Victorian Era ro rhe Forties. New York: Pantheon.
Smith, Julie 1984 Tile Sourdough Wars. New York: Walker and Company.
Stasio, Marilyn 1990 "What's Happened to Heroes Is a Crime." New York
Times Book Review, October 14.
Wallace, Marilyn, ed. 1989 Sisrers in Crime. New York: Berkley.
1990a Sisters in Crime 2. New York: Berkley.
1990b Sisrers in Crinw 3. New York: Berkley.
Warner, Ralph and Toni Ulara 1984 Murder on the Air. Berkeley. CA: Nolo
Press.
Wilson, Barbara 1989 rite Dog Collar Murders. Seattle: Seal Press.
Winn. Dilys 1979 Murderess Ink. New York: Workman Publishing.
Zahara, Irene, ed. 1988 nre Woman Sleurlr Anrhology. Freedom, CA: Crossing
Press.
1989 n e Second Woman Sleurlr Anrhology. Freedom, CA: Crossing
Press.
1990 The Third Woman Sleurlr Anrhology. Freedom. CA: Crossing Press.
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