Women In Crime

Sisters in crime

Introduction

Women have persistently played a central role in writing that deals with crime. Since the Victorian era, female authors have produced some of the most celebrated works in the crime canon: Mary Elizabeth Braddon s Lady Audley s Secret and Aurora Floyd and Mrs Henry Wood s East Lynne, for example, vied for popularity with the novels of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Mike Ashley has also edited a fascinating collection of early crime writing by and involving women called Sisters in Crime. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries many of the most successful crime writers have been women: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James, Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Wentworth, Linda la Plante, Laurie King, Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill, Val MacDiarmid and others.

Women are not only writers about crime, however. Female characters play a central role in crime writing, and it is important to consider both their place and their representation. Frequently within this form women are portrayed as victims, but it is rarer even where the author is a woman to find females occupying the role of investigator. We can all easily reel off the names of countless male detectives but with a few notable exceptions there is a distinct lack of well-known female detectives. Beyond Agatha Christie s timeless creation Miss Marple, most people are probably struggling. Even in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries where female detectives have become more common, male detective figures still dominate the public imagination.

Victorian female investigators

Although they are not as well-known as their male counterparts, female investigators have been central in the world of crime writing and its development almost since the genesis of the genre. The first work of detective fiction to feature a female detective was James Redding Ware s The Female Detective of 1864, published under the pseudonym of Andrew Forrester. This was followed a mere six months later by William Stephens Hawyard s Revelations of a Lady Detective. Both authors realised the particular social frisson that came with casting a female in such a risqu role, especially as in doing so they were far in advance of developments in the real world. Ware s Miss Gladden (whose deductive reasoning fascinatingly prefigures the methods of Sherlock Holmes) and Hayward s Mrs Paschal would not find their real-world equivalents in England for many years. The famous Pinkerton s Agency in America appointed its first woman detective Kate Warne in 1856, but it was not until 1914 that the Metropolitan Police allowed the formation of The Women s Police Volunteer Service, although women had been allowed to act with the Police in lesser roles from 1883. In 1919 Sofia Stanley became the first women admitted to the full ranks of the Met Police, but the power of arrest was not accorded to female officers until 1923. Astonishingly, the first Woman Detective Constable was not appointed until 1973, over a hundred years after Ware and Hayward produced their novels!

In creating female investigator figures Ware, Hayward and the Victorian sensationists were not only well ahead of their times with pragmatic business heads, it is clear that they also perceived the marketability that came with casting females in this role. They were alive to the reading public s lurid and prurient interest in crime and criminality, and the involvement of women in the unladylike world of crime appealed to the darker side of the Victorian imagination. Wilkie Collins the best known of the Victorian sensationists also saw the advantages of using female investigator figures: Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White, Magdalen Vanstone in No Name and Valeria Woodville in The Law and the Lady all fulfil this role.

Females cast in the unladylike role of investigator tend to be marked by unusual characteristics in the work of these novelists. Miss Gladden is well-versed in the typically male fields of anatomy, criminal psychology, and Victorian law, while Mrs Paschal is left to fend for herself after the death of her husband leaves her in dire financial straits. Marion Halcombe when first encountered by Walter Hartwright appears initially to be the epitome of female beauty, but when she turns around to meet his gaze is revealed to be ugly . Magdalen Vanstone is marked by her name as a societal outcast and adopts a variety of unladylike roles and deceptions in an effort to regain her fortune, only to find that her traditionally passive sister Norah obtains this by complying with social norms and expectations. Valeria Woodville finds herself involved with the bizarre even by Wilkie Collins s outlandish standards figure of Miserrimus Dexter. In moving outside the conventional bounds of Victorian society, these female investigator figures are closely related to the female criminals of Victorian crime fiction Lydia Gwilt in Collins s Armadale, for instance, or Lady Audley and Aurora Leigh, the eponymous heroines of Mary Elizabeth Braddon s two most famous works. Lady Audley is a particularly good example where we see the typical equation of criminal behaviour with insanity. The connection is easily explained. If crime is a deviance from social and legal norms, then crime is by default construed as insanity, because such acts cannot be seen as the acts of normal and right-thinking people. In Lady Audley s Secret, Lucy Lady Audley defines her criminality in just such terms:

Yes, a madwoman. When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say the truth. When you say that I murdered him treacherously and foully, you lie. I killed him because I AM MAD! because my intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and insanity.

The same idea is still alive and well today. In Kate Atkinson s When Will There Be Good News?, speaking of a man who has murdered a mother and two of her three children in cold blood, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe observes:

He was declared fit to plead. If stabbing her mother and two children is sane then what s the definition of insane? Makes you wonder, doesn t it?

Here we interestingly observe the social function of crime writing which is, as W.H Auden suggests in his excellent essay The Guilty Vicarage , to reinforce social norms and values. Crime fiction, for all that it deals with criminality, danger and the subversive, is arguably the most conservative of forms. It is safe for society to write deviant criminal behaviour off as madness, especially where it is violent, rather than accepting that it is a common occurrence and perpetrated by normal people for reasons that they consider perfectly good. Perhaps the use of female investigator figures acts as another layer of safety in this formula by distancing criminal events and activity still further from reality .

Into the 20^th century

In the 20^th century, female investigator figures have become more common, in line with the gradual acceptance of females in such roles. The pre-eminent figure of what is known as Golden Age crime fiction is Miss Marple, the unlikely investigative heroine of a sequence of twelve novels and two collections of short stories by Agatha Christie. Closely related to her in literary terms is Patricia Wentworth s Miss Silver, who stars in no less than thirty-two novels. Wentworth s fictional world is as deadly yet as cosy as that of her sisters in crime Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers. Murder follows her detective heroine as surely as night follows day, but is never dark and deep enough to outwit the apparently serene Miss Silver, whose recreation of the crimes she encounters is as sure and steady as is the progress of her knitting.

Strikingly different is the figure of Ida Arnold in Grahame Greene s 1938 novel Brighton Rock. Ida is a full-bosomed, free-drinking, sexually active and undeniably flesh-and-blood character, motivated to investigate the causes of the death of Fred Hale by a combination of personal desire for adventure and refusal to accept the Brighton Police s inadequate explanation of his death which has intriguingly involved a stick of Brighton rock. In doing so, Ida finds herself embroiled in a tale of genuine fear and darkness a world away from the almost comforting milieux of Misses Marple and Silver. Her value system, based around notions of right and wrong, is thrown into stark relief against Pinkie s and Rose s Catholic notions of good and evil and Greene uses this creative conflict as a means of exploring the nature of crime. Like the celebrated American crime novelist Raymond Chandler, Greene creates what W.H. Auden describes as the great wrong place a wrong world that neither Ida s investigation nor Greene s philosophising can make right. Ida, unlike Miss Marple or Miss Silver, does not preside over a world of comforting moral certainty, and her persona as investigator reflects this.

Different again is the eponymous investigator-heroine of Peter O Donnell s Modesty Blaise novels. She is perhaps best conceived as an agglomeration of female James Bond, Lara Croft and Sigorney Weaver s character from Alien. Modesty (how ironic that name is!) is introduced on the first page of Modesty Blaise as [a] remarkable woman . Violent and sexually promiscuous, she is still more liberated that Ida Arnold a product of the 1960s but in many ways inhabits a more conventional moral universe where goodies are good and baddies are bad. Like the other female investigators we have considered, she does not quite conform. Her flat, for example, at first gives the impression of warmth and simplicity , but upon closer inspection reveals strange enigmas in that simplicity, a curious mingling of styles which should have clashed but astonishingly blended. O Donnell emphasises that Modesty is a combination of cold ferocity and inflexible will and as such she seems to be a kind of feminist icon, but it is hard to escape the extent to which she in fact conforms in a discomforting way to male fantasy.

Summing up the case

It is always important to consider the role of male and female voice in literary texts, as it is central to issues of gender representation. In much crime writing (even where it is written by women) the predominance of the male voice is striking. This is especially evident in the first person narratives of much hard-boiled crime fiction. The figure of the female investigator is, therefore, an interesting phenomenon. As we have seen, writers dealing with crime have employed female investigators in varying ways to explore the nature of crime, society and investigation. Even when at their most liberated, as in the case of Modesty Blaise female investigators serve a distinct function to and inhabit a different psychological, sociological and literary space to their male counterparts. In a world of criminality and violence, these female investigators reassure us that women are not solely passive victims of crime, but instead have important agency.

Questions to consider

Think carefully about crime texts you have read and/or about film and television crime dramas you have watched.

In what ways are you encouraged to see female characters in general?

In what ways do female investigators tend to be used?

In what ways is their role important?

Are they represented in positive or negative ways?

In what ways do they hold power and in what ways are they disempowered?

Is this different to the representation of male investigators? If so, how?

References and recommended reading

For those interested in the use Victorian authors make of female investigator figures in crime, try the following:

1. Mike Ashley (ed) Sisters in Crime London: Peter Owen Publishers (2013).

2. Andrew Forrester The Female Detective London: British Library Press (2014).

3. William Stephens Hayward Revelations of a Lady Detective London: British Library Press (2013).

4. Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White, No Name, The Law and the Lady all of which are available in a range of editions.

Of the twentieth century authors mentioned in this article, try the following:

1. Peter O Donnell Modesty Blaise London: Souvenir Press (2005)

2. Patricia Wentworth wrote 32 Miss Silver novels: start with Miss Silver Intervenes, The Chinese Shawl and The Clock Strikes Twelve.

3. Agatha Christie wrote twelve novels and two collections of short stories featuring the iconic Miss Marple: start with At Bertram s Hotel, Sleeping Murder and The Murder at the Vicarage.

4. Grahame Greene s Brighton Rock (1938) exists in a range of editions.

Useful critical reading:

1. W.H. Auden The Guilty Vicarage Harper s Magazine (May 1948 edition)

2. George Orwell Raffles and Miss Blandish Horizon Magazine (1944)

3. John Scaggs Crime Fiction London: Routledge (2005)

4. P.D. James Talking About Detective Fiction London: Faber and Faber (2010)