Ladies First: Groundbreaking Women in Crime Fiction

Any mystery lover knows how significant Agatha Christie is to the crime-fiction genre. But she wasn’t the only woman on the scene—nor the first. Women crime writers have always been influential in the world of mysteries, and here are a few who may be less familiar to even a dedicated reader.

If you were investigating the case of the modern crime novel—scouring its pages for prints, swabbing carefully to get a read on its DNA—you might expect the trail of its origins to lead back to the usual suspects: Dupin and Holmes, Poirot and Marple, Spenser and Sam Spade. But this literary genealogy is incomplete without the inclusion of the women (many of them not named Agatha Christie) who helped shape the genre but haven't commanded lasting literary attention. Inspect the list below to find any number of overlooked gems that deserve a second look. 

Anna Katharine Green

Edgar Allen Poe wrote the first detective story by an American author—but the first detective novel was the work of Anna Katharine Green, with 1878’s The Leavenworth Case. While the actual detective—Ebenezer Gryce—isn't much of a presence throughout most of the narrative, he's quite memorable when he is on the page. And, he does manage to stay several steps ahead of the narrator, a young lawyer who takes it upon himself to assist in the investigation of the wealthy Horatio Leavenworth's murder in the hopes of exonerating the beautiful (but possibly murderous) niece of the deceased. This book predates both Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, and it's a worthwhile read to see how Green's novel (which was a bestseller in its time) influenced the evolving mystery genre. 

See also: The Leavenworth Case: The Most Popular Mystery Novel You've Never Read
 

Mary Roberts Rinehart 

Mary Roberts Rinehart picked up the torch some thirty years after Green, publishing dozens of mysteries and earning the title of “the American Agatha Christie,” even though she was writing over a decade before Christie’s debut. Rinehart’s The Bat featured a costumed villain, which Batman creator Bob Kane cites as one of his inspirations, and was also one of the earliest examples of an audiobook—aka talking book recording—in 1933.

Also worth checking out is her novella The Buckled Bag, which manages to entertain and intrigue over the course of a brisk seventy-page read. Rinehart's protagonist is a sharply observant private nurse who is recruited to freelance for a detective firm. There are a lot of interesting class and gender dynamics in play—characters seem to confide in Hilda Adams partly because she's a woman and partly because her functional role is that of a high-level servant. 

See also: Mary Roberts Rinehart: The American Agatha Christie

Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett was a notable science-fiction writer and screenwriter (hello, The Big Sleep—co-written with William Faulkner!—and, on the other end of the spectrum, an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back), but before all that she wrote stories for Black Mask and a solid noir novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944), starring hardboiled PI Ed Clive as he investigates the murder of a nightclub singer he’s in love with. Enter here for all the femme fatales, fistfights, and plot twists you’d expect from any of Brackett’s male contemporaries in the genre.

See also: Adventures in Screenwriting: The Amazing Leigh Brackett
 

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

One of Raymond Chandler’s favorite writers, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote nearly twenty detective novels from 1929 to her death in 1955. Check out The Blank Wall (1947), in which wartime housewife Lucia Holley tries to protect her family’s name after her daughter becomes romantically entangled with a gangster by accident. Although dutifully going through the motions of gardening, grocery shopping, and icebox repairs, Lucia still manages to dispose of not one, but two bodies while becoming entangled with a gangster of her own and grappling with the stirrings of feminism in herself and her daughter. 

See also: The Godmother of Noir: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
 

Margaret Millar

Margaret Millar’s Edgar Award-winning The Beast in View (1955) is an absolute must-read for anyone who likes good psychological suspense. Helen Clarvoe, a wealthy 30-year-old recluse who lives in a second-rate hotel, receives a threatening phone call from a woman from her past. Helen enlists her financial advisor to track down this woman, and what unfolds is a chilling novel about how a simple phone call is enough to ruin several lives, written in spare, sardonic prose using a modern structure with effortlessly shifting points of view. Millar was also married to Ross MacDonald, author of the acclaimed Lew Archer series. (P.S. If you’re going to pick one book from this list to read right now, make it The Beast In View.)

See also: Beats in View: Margaret Millar at 100
 

Marcia Muller

Up to the 1970s, mysteries penned by women featured male detectives or female amateur sleuths. It wasn’t until Marcia Muller introduced Sharon McCone to the world that we had our first hardboiled female private investigator. In Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), she investigates the murder of a San Francisco antique store owner. A murder is outside of her normal scope as a staff investigator for the All Souls legal co-op, but Sharon is thoroughly up for the challenge. Liberated, pragmatic, and tough, she paved the way for other female PI characters like Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski.
 

Liza Cody

While Sharon McCone was technically the first hard-boiled female PI on the scene, Liza Cody’s Anna Lee preceded the aforementioned V.I. and Kinsey. Debuting in 1980 in Dupe, this London private investigator’s first outing concerns the film industry and a young woman whose death in a car accident might not have been so accidental. Anna has a deliciously droll voice, deals expertly with sexism from her coworkers at Brierly Security (including from the other woman in the office, her boss’s secretary), and is often called upon to fix things for her male downstairs neighbor, making her every bit as contemporary as modern-day lady PIs.

Eleanor Taylor Bland 

Eleanor Taylor Bland was the creator of the first African-American female police detective in crime fiction: Marti MacAlister, a tough-but-empathetic workaholic transplant from the Chicago Police Department to Lincoln Prairie, Illinois (a thinly veiled version of Waukegan), widowed with two kids at the start of the series (Dead Time, 1992). Marti deals with casual racism and sexism from coworkers and the public alike, but she also earns their respect with her dogged determination and acute intuition. In Dead Time, she looks into a string of deaths at a rundown hotel and ties the killings to a crime ring that stretched back to the Vietnam War.

See also: Top Female Crime and Mystery Authors

Know of another writer who belongs on this list? Drop a note in the comments!

 


Kristen Lepionka grew up mostly in her local public library, where she could be found with a big stack of adult mysteries before she was out of middle school. In the name of writing research, she has gone on multiple police ride-alongs, taken a lock-picking class, trespassed through an abandoned granary, and hiked inside an Icelandic volcano. Her writing has been selected for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Grift, and Black Elephant. She is also the editor of Betty Fedora, a semi-annual journal that publishes feminist crime fiction, and lives in Columbus, Ohio with her partner and two cats.

Comments

  1. susan59srw

    I started reading alot in elementary school (loved ordering Scholastic). We were a reading family, Dad with his westerns, Mom with her mysteries, my sister mostly science fiction. By high school, I had gone through Mom’s collection which included Christie & Rinehart along with Leslie Ford & Mignon Eberhart (her favorites), Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Phoebe Atwood Taylor and Patricia Wentworth. They were in a short, wooden bookcase with glass doors which my sister took after her passing, tossing the books without telling me.

  2. Bruce Arthurs

    Liza Cody’s Eva Wylie books (Bucket Nut and two others) are also notable, with a protagonist who confounds all expectations of a main character. From Cody’s website: “She is society’s nightmare of what happens to the ugly, uneducated, angry, neglected child when she grows up to be a big, strong, ugly woman.” Plus having the mystery plot be an unwelcome distraction from dealing with a life of unending, grinding poverty.

  3. Dina Willner

    Maxine O’Callaghan – her Deliah West actually beat Sharon McCone into print though it was only a short story.

  4. Sharon Haas

    Thanks for this article and some authors to add to my list. I have read most of Rinehart’s books but the others are ones I din’t know about.
    Also, I was amused by the line ‘grew up mostly in her local public library’ in your bio because I tell people that I was mostly raised by librarians whose names I never knew. lol

  5. Leigh

    What a fabulous post! I love this and can’t wait to read these books. Great job of bringing these women to the forefront on such a special day!

  6. Bob Schneider

    I believe that Emma Murdock Van Deventer (1853-1914) using male pen name Lawrence L. Lynch was the first American author to create a female professional detective, Madeline Payne. She appeared in two of Van Deventer’s 24 or so books, Madeline Payne; The Detectives Daughter in 1884 and Moina; or Against the Mighty in 1891. The novels are very long (and not very good) and most modern readers would not have the patience and stamina to get through them, yet Van Deventer was a popular author during her lifetime and should get more credit for being a pioneer in the world of PI fiction.

  7. Record Straight

    The first detective novel written by an American author was ‘The Dead Letter’, written in 1866 by Metta Fuller Victor. It is also the first detective novel written by a woman.

    • bob schneider

      Madelyn Payne was the first “professional” woman detective character (she was paid to investigate crimes) created by a female American author. I do not believe the characters in “The Dead Letter” fit this precise description.

  8. bob schneider

    Madelyn Payne was the first “professional” woman detective character (she was paid to investigate crimes) created by a female American author. I do not believe the characters in “The Dead Letter” fit this precise description.

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