Women Private Eyes

This section is strictly about professional private detectives, not for your Miss Marples

• Sharon McCone (Marcia Muller)
• V.I.Warshawski (Sara Paretsky)
• Kinsey Millhone (Sue Grafton)
• Carlotta Carlyle (Linda Barnes)

• Private Detectives -- These are tough broads (and they would just as soon kill you if you called them broads or babes or chicks or anything like that). They are just as tough as Sam Spade or Marlow or Archer, and the plots are just as rigorous -- maybe sometimes more so, but there is a tendency to stress 'relationships' overmuch in their books -- this has also corrupted male writers such as Parker and Pronzini. When it comes to straight private investigator books you want your heros to be loners and basically antisocial Knights Templar types. These tecs spend a lot of time in their books jogging, melding with their neighbors, eating healthful foods, and dealing with domestic problems. Bah humbug!

  [In fairness, I have to say that this sometimes works very well. Muller's recent The Broken Promise Land is a really good job along these lines and is a major improvement after some doldrum novels.]

• Professionals -- This is another category of women detectives, the professional lawyer, cop, medical examiner, etc. These include Maron's Deborah Knott, who is a Marcia Clark that will never turn into an incompetent wimp like that. Maron also has a pretty interesting NYPD detective, Sigrid Harald. Patricia Cornwell has had great success with her Kay Scarpetta series about a coroner's office examiner.

  Jane Tennyson, as played by Helen Mirren in the Prime Suspect British TV series (there are books too but I haven't read them) -- absolutely marvellous, just as good if not better than Hill Street or NYPD Blues. (This latest one, #5, which is being shown currently--Feb 1997--is really devastating; the villain 'Street', not necessarily the actual murderer, is the most repulsive crook since Moriarty. But, dammit, Jane will nail this guy, I'm sure.) She always has to deal with the Macho attitudes of her police colleagues, which makes up all the sub-plots of these series, but she is an indominitable person who always gets the perp, even if she ends up screwed by her superiors, maligned by her inferiors, at first, and put down in some way or other. Mirren is incredibly good in this role, and for both toughness and compassion beats the PI's listed above hands down. Best woman detective (well, police Superintendant) going these days.

• Various -- You also have a miscellaneous category of women detectives (and again, I am leaving out Miss Marple and her ilk from the 'Golden Age', mainly because everybody who is likely to be reading this web page knows all about them to begin with, and there is nothing wrong with those books at all except for some old-fashionedness and PC incorrectness!). They tend to get caught up in mysteries the way Gracie Allen used to get caught up in predicaments. McCrumb's Elizabeth McPherson, who is feisty enough, but basically uninteresting, is one (If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him is an example of one of McCrumb's great titles). Likewise, Hardwick's Doran Fairweather. Sharyn McCrumb wrote Bimbos of the Death Sun as a take-off of Science Fiction Conventions (which if you've been to one as I have, is right on the money). That was a fine debut, but not a very good mystery, and there are a bunch of McPherson books that are good but minor reads, but then came some astounding books such as The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, and She Walks These Hills. These are real novels (with great titles) and classics in the mystery/crime genre -- mind-blowing. The Rosewood Casket and The Ballad of Frankie Silver are recent ones -- wow! they just keep getting better and better.