Some Female Sleuths I Like!

With this year’s Davitt Awards for women’s crime fiction coming up, I thought it might be fun to talk about some fictional female sleuths I’ve enjoyed reading about over the years. I prefer cosies to thrillers, though I do enjoy the occasional police procedural. In fact, I will be including an unusual one in this post, of which more later. 

Firstly, the most famous of this lot is Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s elderly heroine, who is best known for the village mystery, though she does travel, usually as a gift from her nephew Raymond, who is a successful novelist. Wherever she goes there is bound to be a murder! 

Miss Marple is sharp as a tack. She tends to be underestimated by the baddies, for whom she plays dumb, but the police generally respect her if they have worked with her before. Her ability to solve crimes is helped by her understanding of human behaviour. Quite often she will comment that a suspect reminds her of someone in her village - and she’s right. In her first story collection, The Thirteen Problems, she is part of her nephew’s Tuesday night friends group, who gather to discuss unsolved mysteries. Without any examination of the crime scene or footprints in the flower beds, she listens carefully and works out the answers to all the mysteries. 

She has a wide variety of friends and relatives upon whose expertise she can count for her research, whether it’s a boy who knows about maps or, in The 4.50 From Paddington, a freelance housekeeper friend whom she asks to get a job in a house near the site of a murder seen by a friend of hers on the train one evening. This is different from other detective characters who don’t seem to bother with outside expertise to help them. 

Two of Australian author Kerry Greenwood’s women sleuths are next on my list. Since the hugely popular TV series,  1920s detective Phryne Fisher is well known to all, so I’ll keep it short. I discovered these books after reading about them in a newspaper article. They sounded fun - and so they were. Phryne Fisher lives and works in Melbourne in 1928-29. She is a professional private detective who does charge for her services, although she will also investigate a case that she feels is important. She has the money to be able to do what she wants, without worrying about what others think. She has two minions, taxi drivers Bert and Cec, who are Communists, and two wards, Ruth and Jane, with whom she lives in a “bijou” house in St Kilda, not far from where I live now. Her maid Dot is also her assistant, able to identify any clue with 

domestic connections, whether it’s the kind of notepaper used in an anonymous note or how recently the floor has been waxed and polished at a crime scene. 

I loved the flavour of the 1920s in the city where I live, and enjoyed all the books, though the earlier ones were better, in my opinion.

Kerry Greenwood’s other heroine, Corinna Chapman, has not yet made it into a TV series, alas! There are seven books so far in the series. Corinna lives in the present-day Melbourne CBD, in a building called Insula,  designed as a Roman apartment block, over shops of some of the owners, including Corinna’s bakery, Earthly Delights. Her neighbours are a kooky and likeable bunch, who end every novel with a party down in the basement. Corinna looks a lot more like her creator than the sylph-like Phryne and, unlike Phryne, enjoys cooking. The recipes included in each book are Kerry’s, and easy to make, unlike those in many other cosies I’ve read. Corinna has a gorgeous boyfriend, Daniel Cohen, who is the actual private detective in this series, but of course, she helps him in puzzling the mysteries out. Oh - and they aren’t murder mysteries, though there are occasional baddies who threaten death. There are things, and sometimes people, missing. In one case there were sabotaged chocolates from a high quality chocolate shop. Each novel has a theme, whether it’s Christmas or TV soapies or cults. They’re great fun. To be honest, I like Corinna’s adventures better than Phryne’s. And I’ve made some of the recipes, successfully. 

Another female sleuth I quite like is Kathy Reichs’s Tempe Brennan. Her adventures have become a TV series, Bones, though I haven’t seen much of that. I have read a number of the books. Temperance Brennan, who works in Canada, is a forensic anthropologist like her creator. That means she examines the gruesome remains of murder victims(usually before unwisely investigating whatever crime has been committed to create those dead bodies). I have been fascinated by forensics since being commissioned to write an article about it for the NSW School Magazine many years ago. It’s connected to my love of archaeology. 

Tempe does seem to have at least one scene in each of the books I have read in which she is caught in a locked room with the killer who snarls some variation on, “You interfering bitch! I’ll kill you!” But the books are entertaining stuff anyway. I heard the author speak at a Melbourne bookshop once, and say she had been invited to do a cameo on Bones. She said no until she found out she was going to meet David Boreanaz(better known to me as Angel, the vampire with a soul, from Buffy). That changed her mind quickly.

Agatha Raisin is another sleuth who has turned up on TV. The books are by M.C Beaton, who also wrote Hamish Macbeth. Agatha is a delightfully flawed middle-aged woman who has taken early retirement to live in Carsely, a village in the Cotswolds. Agatha is vain, gets jealous easily, smokes like a chimney and is willing to cheat; she solves her first mystery, in The Quiche Of Death, because she has to - she cheated in a village baking contest and the judge dropped dead, apparently from eating the quiche she entered. While not a fan of gardening, she cheats again in The Potted Gardener, getting a whole pre-planted garden delivered overnight to look good in a gardening festival. But she is a likeable character in general, basically kind-hearted, and very good at the crime investigations, and she eventually sets up a detective agency. There are quite a few murders for such a small place, to the point where, whenever she has been in London or overseas, her friends in Carsely joke that things have been quiet while she was away, no murders, but now she is back...

There are a lot of quirky characters in the books. But that seems to be the way of the village mystery. 

Guerline Scarfe is the heroine of  Simon Petrie’s Matters Arising From The Identification Of The Body. This one is a sort of police procedural, but set on Titan. Guerline, a sole parent with family issues, is also a police detective investigating the death of a girl who went out into Titan’s freezing, poisonous atmosphere and took off her spacesuit helmet. Unquestionably suicide, but... why? I liked that the story was crime fiction but also hard SF and that the answer was science fictional. I’ve reviewed it on this blog, if you want to check it out. There is a planned sequel not yet out at this writing, but definitely read this one! 

So, those are some of my favourites - what about yours?