As much as any hairy, beer drinking male can be I believe that I am in touch
with my feminine side. I ride a girl’s bicycle, I went to a women’s college
at Oxford and I have seen several episodes of Sex and the City (though I am
not willing to admit the exact number for fear of damaging my hard-boiled
crime writing credentials). As a kid in Northern Ireland I had two older
sisters who kept me out of trouble and now I have two young daughters whose
agenda is precisely the opposite. I grew up in an era of impressive female
role models (Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, Mrs Thatcher) so I have
never had a problem enjoying female protagonists in fiction, especially in
detective fiction which became my go-to genre. Now that I have written a XX
chromosomed detective in my book Fifty Grand, I thought I would share my own
idiosyncratic list of 10 favourite female gumshoes:
10. Kinsey Milhone: The star of Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Series
(beginning with A is for Alibi) and several short stories, Kinsey is a plain
Jane with a brilliant mind who cuts her own hair, lives in a garage and eats
peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Unsurprisingly perhaps her husband, a
cop, divorced her and throughout most of the series she lives alone, though
not without romantic entanglements. Kinsey was born in Santa Teresa,
California (a thinly disguised Santa Barbara) and had a fairly uneventful
life until she was five when her parents were killed a car wreck which she
barely survived (rather like Law and Order SVU’s Mariska Hargitay who just
missed out on my top 10 and who, in real life, famously survived the
decapitation death of her mother Jayne Mansfield). Grafton is a no nonsense
writer and Kinsey is a no nonsense private eye. She’s seen both sides of law
enforcement as a teenage delinquent and as a former police officer; she’s
intelligent, has occasional flashes of humour, but above all has a good head
for detail. Grafton is now up to T is for Trespass (with a prospective run
of 1 million copies) and no doubt Kinsey will make it all the way to Z is
for Zoanthropy.
9. Velma Dinkley: Stuck with dim-witted frat boy Freddie Jones,
sorority queen Daphne Blake, cowardly stoner Norville (Shaggy) Rogers and
his sandwich eating great Dane, Scooby Doo, Velma Dinkley has spent the last
forty years putting fraudulent fair ground operators and ‘haunted’ hotel
owners out of business in the animated TV series Scooby Doo. Without her
glasses Velma is legally blind, but as is sometimes the case her other
senses have been heightened and nothing can blunt her razor sharp
intelligence. Long before Michelle Obama came on the scene Velma Dinkley
made book smarts cool. Her detecting skills are primarily old school
deductive reasoning coupled with a healthy empiricism, though her success is
in part attributable to the sheer incompetence of her adversaries whose
schemes are often overly complex and easily foiled by meddling kids.
8. Cordelia Gray: We first meet Cordelia Gray in P.D. James’s novel An
Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and then ten years later in The Skull
Beneath the Skin. In Unsuitable Gray inherits a detective agency after the
death of her more experienced partner, James thus ironically mirroring The
Maltese Falcon, though her primary case is not about a mythical black bird
but is a rather prototypical English family secrets fable. Initially
Cordelia is shy, awkward, mannered, slightly irritating and unsure of
herself but as the pages turn she gains confidence and character and when
Adam Dalgliesh, James’s greatest creation, appears in a cameo at the novel’s
end, we don’t really need or want him to be around. What’s terrific about
the two Cordelia Gray novels is that wonderful Jamesian sense of moral
ambiguity - the idea that justice is an illusory concept available to us in
the Republic of Plato not in the United Kingdom of GB & NI. Gray was
extremely well served in the television version by the aloof and attractive
Helen Baxendale.
7. Jessica Fletcher: During the six years (don’t ask) that I was
student I spent many a long afternoon waiting for Countdown to come on by
idly watching American TV import Murder She Wrote. The series followed the
adventures of Jessica Fletcher, a sprightly mystery novelist (played with
bel esprit by English actress Angela Lansbury) living in the small Maine
hamlet of Cabot Cove. Every week someone in the community was murdered, the
local police flatfooted, and into the gap would step Jessica who used eagle
eyed observation and deduction to find the guilty party - usually out of
towners or “young people” whose motives tended to be greed or sexual
jealousy. Any good statistician would have noticed Cabot Cove’s
extraordinary murder rate and as the series progressed (running eventually
from 1984 - 1996) Jessica increasingly travelled abroad where, naturally,
homicide always found her. By the final season it had become apparent - to
me at least - that Ms Fletcher was a diabolical serial killer who got her
kicks by framing a series of youthful naifs and badgering them with iron
logic into confessing to crimes they did not commit.
6. Nancy Drew: Heroine of more than 200 ghost-written novels from the
1930's onwards Nancy Drew has evolved from a teenage flapper to a bobby
soxer to a pseudo hippie to a modern career girl. Rich, 18, clever, with a
conveniently dead mother, Nancy is an amateur sleuth with the time and money
to solve crimes both frivolous and often surprisingly serious, aided
sometimes by her attorney father or her cadre of friends. For a brief
ante-Potterian period the playgrounds of the western world were divided into
boys reading Hardy Boys books and girls reading Nancy Drew. Unable to bear
the insufferably smug Hardy Boys I much preferred the slightly caustic,
manipulative and invincible Drew. Nancy Drew’s influence cannot be
underestimated, inspiring legions of American female cops, judges and
politicians and crime writers like Laura Lipmann, Sara Paretsky and Linda
Fairstein. Drew uses the tools of observation, persistence and her own gut
instinct for a wrong ‘un - which is usually right on the money.
5. Dr. Kay Scarpetta: Like Nancy Drew and Kinsey Milhone, Patricia
Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta was also careless enough to lose a parent while she
was a child (her father from leukemia) but also a husband in a bombing on
the Tube. In the early novels Dr. Scarpetta is the Chief Medical Examiner
for the Commonwealth (not the state, Wikipedia) of Virginia but later she
moves into private practice. Scarpetta is a brilliant and meticulously
professional ME, unafraid to put herself in personal danger and not cowed by
the political shenanigans and compromises of her bosses. Scarpetta is
unashamedly stylish, driving a new Merc and cooking elaborate Italian food
in a custom built, restaurant grade, kitchen in her sumptuous home.
Scarpetta’s skills are many: intelligence, attention to detail, charm and
hard headed determination. Perhaps the only person who could ever thwart her
would be her creator the formidable Patsy Cornwell whose book jacket
photograph is one of the most intimidating in the business.
4. Precious Ramotswe: Except, ironically, in Botswana, you would be
hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t read at least one of Alexander
McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books. The Susan Boyle of the
crime fighting world Mma Ramotswe is a rather large, slightly comic, jovial
lady who runs a private detective agency in the Botswanan town of Gaborone.
Of course like Miss Boyle Precious has hidden depths: smart as a whip, an
astute judge of character and with a self taught detecting skill set she is
a force for good in a turbulent and often quite depressing landscape.
Solving murders, missing persons cases and thefts Ramotswe is a charming,
wise and likeable character that everyone could do with as an auntie. She
loves the Queen, Nelson Mandela and politician Seretse Khama whose son Ian
got moaned at by Jeremy Clarkson and having survived that is now the current
President of Botswana.
3. Detective Inspector Jane Tennison: Helen Mirren is the only actress
alive who could have given the septuagenarian Queen Elizabeth a coiled, icy
sexuality, and her portrayal of hard-bitten London copper DI Tennison is an
extraordinary combination of bullying pugnacity, vulnerability,
intelligence, anger and smouldering sex appeal. Lynda La Plante’s marvelous
character won her an Edgar Award for the first season of Prime Suspect and
Tennison becomes even more conflicted and interesting which each new series.
Typically Tennison must manage a team of competing egos, the media and her
superiors, all the while slowly accumulating evidence, eliminating false
leads and operating with the kind of emotional depth that allows her to see
into the mind of both victim and killer, a thing very few male detectives
could ever do. DI Tennison transcends the cliche of the girl in the boy’s
club, she’s more like a lioness sniffing around a kill both irritated and
slightly amused by the attention of the young male cubs. People praise Prime
Suspect for its twists and momentum but the heart of the piece is Mirren’s
merciless portrayal of Tennison. If I ever was a victim of a serious crime
I’d want Mma Ramotswe’s shoulder to cry on but I’d like Jane Tennison there
to crack the case.
2. Dr. Hilary Tamar: As if this list wasn’t eccentric enough there’s a
pretty good chance that Dr. Tamar is a male Hilary not a female one; but
rather than dwelling on that let’s assume, like her creator, Sarah Caudwell,
she’s a pipe smoking, androgynous glass ceiling shattering she Hilary.
Caudwell, daughter of Claude Cockburn and sister to Alexander, Andrew and
Patrick, eschewed the family business and instead of becoming a journalist
entered the legal profession, specialising in the arcana or taxes, probate
and trusts. Dr. Tamar is the narrator of four densely brilliant mystery
novels written in a studied literary style with barely no concessions to the
tropes of the genre. There’s almost no action, no sex, and the violence is
largely off screen, communicated to us by letters or telexes. Tamar is the
mentor and guiding force behind a group of young barristers at Lincoln’s
Inn, who solve cases that are usually mired deep in the schedules of the
Inheritance Tax Act 1984. If all this sounds unpromising let me reassure
you: Caudwell is an acquired taste but I love these books, for their
unconventional plots, their irony, their wit, their loveable (if a little
unconvincing) characters and the deliciously improbable resolutions to the
stories. Tamar uses sarcasm, gentle teasing and encyclopaedic knowledge of
the tax code to get the job done. Sarah Caudwell died in 2000 of cancer just
before the release of her fourth and last book The Sibyl in her Grave.
1. Miss Jane Marple: Without question Agatha Christie is the greatest
mystery writer of the twentieth or indeed any other century and Miss Jane
Marple is the greatest of her creations. An elderly spinster who lives in
the chocolate box village of St Mary Mead, Marple at first is a gossip and
nosey parker but as the books progress (there are twelve in all) she becomes
a deep old file whose circumspection and rather cross demeanour hide a woman
who has peered into the abyss. Since at least Jane Austen’s Miss Bates we
have had the archetype of the useless, provincial spinster in English
literature; but Christie saw that an elderly unmarried woman could transcend
class and family ties and go anywhere. No one desires Miss Marple, no one is
threatened by her, many do not even see her at all, which suits her just
fine. And Marple can see further than most. She can see through alibis and
lies and deep into the black hearts of her fellow mortals using a classic
rope-a-dope befuddlement to keep everyone’s guard down. Marple, like the
venerable Bede, knows that life is a bird at night flying into a great hall,
full of noise and wonder, behind is darkness, ahead is darkness and the
interval of light is shockingly brief. Seven actresses have played Miss
Marple on the big and small screen (including Angela Lansbury) but for me
Joan Hickson captured best the melancholy keenness of a mind which is even
sharper than those other icons of detective fiction Sherlock Holmes and
Christie’s own Hercule Poirot. Many try to match her intellect and brilliant
mastery of psychology and all fail and it’s actually a little sad that the
retired squadron leaders, vicars and minor aristocrats that make up the
Marple books are such poor fodder for her intelligence. Just once it would
have been nice to see her do battle against a really good nemesis who would
have stretched her a little. But this is a minor quibble, Miss Marple is my
favourite female detective and although you may argue with the other names
on this list I’m confident with my number 1 choice and I’ll stick the
Spinster from Hampshire against anyone you care to throw into the ring.
