The author’s real name is Carolyn Heilbrun, the detective Kate Fansler
Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) of Prime Suspect fame
Friends and readers,
An interim blog: this is me thinking out a few semi-conclusions I’ve come to after a couple of months of reading books about women detectives (history, literary criticism, culture, feminist) and reading and rereading a few such books by men and women. As I’ve written on my Sylvia I blog, I seem to be going through something of a transition after living in this world without Jim for some 9 plus years. Part of this is I am liking books I used to not be able to read, and able to accept optimism and at least sympathize with (understand in a new way from an outward transactional POV) some conventional transactional pro-social-ambition perspectives.
To get to the point here, I find that I can’t resist reading and watching new kinds of material in the detective, mystery-thriller, spy genre kind, which I’ve come back to seeing as closely allied to the gothic. Not that I altogether rejected books with women detectives at the center: my first Internet pseudonym was Sylvia Drake, a minor character in Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy night, and my gravatar for my political blog is a small picture of Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane looking thoughtful.
From Strong Poison: she is supposed the murderer and this is in prison, she is talking to Lord Peter Wimsey (Edward Petherbridge)
The reading came out of my preparing for my coming The Heroine’s Journey course this winter. As you can see, if you go over the look, there is no example among my four slender book choices of a female detective novel. That’s because I couldn’t think of one slender enough for such a short course until I came upon Amanda Cross’s (aka Carolyn Heilbrun’s) Death in a Tenured Position. Most recent and older female detective novels are average size, say 350 pages (Gaudy Night is about this size) because often many combine a “novel of manners” (or domestic romance) with the detective formula. But I found it to be a central category because since surfacing in novels in the 1860s, the type has multiplied in appearances until say today there may be several TV shows featuring a female detective available all at once.
Although I’ve found dictionary-type books with lists and essays on women writers and their detective novels (Great Women Mystery Writers, ed Kathleen Gregory Klein, truly excellent; By a Woman’s Hand by Jean Swanson and Dean James, 200 short entries which have the merit of naming the author as well as the detective and offering enough information to give the reader a gist of what type of mystery fiction this is), it has been very hard to find any essay-like books treating just the category of female detective fiction by women writers. The nature of the material (influences, who’s writing what, movies as a group-creation) has led to many male writers putting female detectives at the center of their series, and many female writers putting male detectives, and these mixed gender creations (so to speak) are often superb in all sorts of ways.
One of my felicitous reading and watching experiences this past year was Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (both book and film), which features a private detective, Atticus Pund (spelt without accents) in a 1950s novel as part of an investigation into a parallel murder today by the old trope amateur sleuth, Sue Ryland in (presumably) 2021 — for its witticism, self-reflexive uses of the core fantasies, styles and yes multi-gender empathies.
Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville) is also intended to appeal to older unmarried career women (the spinster trope transformed & modernized at last)
But as there is a real, findable, and demonstable fault-line and difference between male and female writing, and films made by mostly men or mostly women, and visual art, and music too, and one of my aims as a teacher and writer is to keep women’s literature alive and make it more respected; I’ve been after just the books by women albeit in a multi-gender context. I’ve also tried to stick to films where the central author originally (or continuously) is a woman, and evidence shows women directing, producing, doing set design. The qualification here is all of these are shaped by the kind of detection mystery genre the book/film is written in. I’ve followed Andrew Marr centrally here; Julian Symons’s Bloody Murders is also indispensable.
I’ve come to a few tentative conclusions.
I agree in part with Kathleen Klein’s brilliant analysis (The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre) of the depiction of female detectives mostly in books, but equally by men and women that often these may easily be read and are in fact intended (when conscious) as anti-feminist (meaning the movement for independence and equality) portrayals from a male (in some eras on TV lascivious) POV.
This POV is on display in right now in the incessant arguments and brutal put-downs of Miss Eliza Scarlet (the ever patient Kate Phillips has played many an wholly abject woman, from Jane Seymour in the recent Wolf Hall, to Tolstoy’s hero Andrei’s long-suffering wife, the 2016 serial by Andrew Davies) by “The Duke” Inspector Wellington (the pugnacious, overtly insulting professional police detective played by Stuart Martin, doubtless chosen for his resemblance to the matinee idol type, Richard Armitage) who reiterates constantly a woman cannot be both a real or natural or happy woman and a detective; who needs strong men around her to protect her. Injury was added to insult in the most recent episode (Season 3, Episode 2) where a story was concocted whereby a mean and bullying ex-friend, Amanda Acaster, who repeatedly humiliated and nowadays derides her, is also used to criticize adversely Eliza’s character: Eliza is supposed now to have felt for Amanda trying to have a career using the same manipulative amoral tactics she did when the two were young. She is not charged though her measures were what encouraged a gang of thieves to use her restaurant as a front. But look she surpasses Eliza in the Victoria sponge cake line. The costuming of the program shows some knowledge of the illustrations for such stories in the 1870s/90s, the music is very good, and lines are witty (though usually at Eliza’s expense) and I’d call the presentation stylish. I have spent this much time on it as it’s contemporary and its perniciousness extends to endorsing bullying and mocking non-macho males (Andrew Gower as a homosexual man controlled by his mother).
In many of these detective stories especially the hard-boiled type, and since the 1990s, the woman simply takes on male characteristics, and when she doesn’t and displays genuine female psychology, set of values, life experiences, and is as competent as the males and not just by intuition, by the end of a given book or series, we are to see she has not lived a fulfilled life, which must include marriage and motherhood. This is how Prime Suspect finally ends. In medias res, the female detective of whatever type is often allowed genuine common women’s lives characteristics and we see themes and archetypes familiar in women’s literature, e.g., recent film instance of the mother-daughter rivalry paradigm in Annika where the older heroine is divorced and lives with her teenage older daughter. There is now a line of disguised lesbian socially-conscious fiction, e.g., Val McDermid, seen in film recently featuring Karen Pirie played by Lauren Lyle, of Outlander provenance, dressed in unemphatically non-binary ways
But I don’t agree wholly with Klein (or others who write from her vantage). At the same time, the way out is not to trivialize and pretend to treat as playful amusement “the lady investigator” and her now many daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters, all the while lightly coming to the same conclusion as Klein, with some face-saving and genuinely rescuing qualifications. This is the vein taken by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan in their The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction: a very informative as well as insightful book; it covers amateur and private detectives as well as the spy genre, which Klein does not. Nor is it to ignore this aspect of the genre altogether: Lucy Worsley in her Art of Murder manages this, at the same time as she (curiously) denies that the mass audience for this kind of thing understands it as fantasy (that most murders are not solved, and when solved not by brilliant ratiocinative nor super-scientific techniques, but rather information from people involved) but out of a thirst for violence and fascination with death (this does ally it to the gothic).
What we need to remember is the history of the genre: it first emerges in the later 19th century when women could get jobs and income on their own, go to college as woman (usually women’s colleges). The whole larger genre of detective fiction develops its characteristics when you first have men hired in visible numbers and a real police force. So there were male models for male detectives but no female models for female detectives. This changes (Miss Scarlet and the Duke is quite a startling throw-back) post-World War II when women held on to their array of male jobs and began to be hired, however slowly, and to be promoted to managerial positions in institutions, including the police (Lynda LaPlante modelled Jane Tennison on an actual woman detective).
I suggest that the woman detective was an popular substitute for the “new woman” so distinguished by feminist literary scholars of the 1890s (which never achieved much popularity or was not lasting); she becomes liberated and a real woman as women in our western societies begin at any rate to achieve the right and education for financial and some real sexual independence. We see this in Horowitz’s Sue Rylands and I hope to show other women detectives from the post World War II era.
So as a follow-on from this framework, I hope from time to time to write blogs here when the writer is a male and the portrait less than really feminocentric; on detective fiction found in both books and films; and on Reveries under the Sign of Austen (when the writer is female and the work genuinely l’ecriture-femme, which includes for me a genuinely anti-violence, anti-war and pro-woman political POV, which by the way I do think Prime Suspect was and is: Gray Cavender and Nancy C Jurik’s Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. The victims in these shows are often women tortured by male violence, young children, including boys destroyed and warped by male pedasty, immigrants, mostly women working menial jobs desperately, and yes prostitutes too, and women who murder (including one semi-accidental infanticide) too.
First up for Austen Reveries will be Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position and, for this blog, the older masterpiece, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant investigates the character of Richard III)
Of course Josephine Tey was a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, and the photo is of Jennifer Morag Henderson who wrote an excellent biography
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Fascinating Ellen. Although I no longer write about mystery/crime fiction (or anything really!) I still read and watch quite a bit. There is of course an enormous and ever-increasing amount of material since the advent of Amazon/Kindle and I am sure you will be inundated with suggestions.
From a UK perspective, the leading writer in popular (not that her writing is in any sense populist!) terms is Ann Cleeves who at one point last year had no less than 3 major TV adaptations going on – Vera, Shetland and The Long Call (female, male, male out gay) – Vera, in particular, is essential and game-changing in terms of the female detective and I would be absolutely delighted to read your analysis.
Thank you so much. So good to hear from you. One of many reasons I miss our friendship is you would so often make excellent suggestions for me to carry on with whatever I was doing. (Please don’t feel bad I said this; I a nowadays continually at my fun work and have enough to be getting on with so-to-speak.) I’ve not watched Vera: it is advertised with so little information, but it is on BritBox, which I now subscribe to. I will look into Ann Cleeves. I’ll try Vera tonight 🙂
Holding out against this popular genre becomes increasingly untenable as it takes over so much of PBS programming. I didn’t mention (though I suspect it’s relevant) is that Miss Scarlet and the Duke is one of several originally mostly British produced serials, which is now being funded by American producers.
Hope that you enjoy it Ellen! I don’t know Miss Scarlet and the Duke and after reading your comments it is a programme I would avoid (my viewing of these series is strictly based on enjoyment!).
In terms of novels I was thinking about female detectives who are also feminists (using a broad definition) and remembered the Nell Bray series by Gillian Linscott. Nell is an active suffragette although not every book in the series concerns the movement (https://www.goodreads.com/series/59415-nell-bray).
Shockingly but sadly unsurprisingly some of these books (published from 1991 to 2004) now seem hard to obtain – but while often a hard read (covering WW1 and state repression for instance) they are also a real pleasure.
[…] 16th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short […]
I’ve transferred my analysis of Magpie Murders from my Sylvia II blog here:
It’s self-reflexive: it’s Anthony Horowitz meditating the life and work of a mystery writer, a hack out of the Agatha Christie tradition — only Horowitz knows he is no mere hack and has gone beyond the originating subgenre. We have two different levels of story: in one we are with the writer, Alan Conway, his editor, Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville), the head of the publishing company, Conway’s cynical homosexual ex-lover and his embittered sister, Claire; in the other the characters in Conway’s book most of whom correspond to counterpart characters in the series’ real life, often ironically — except for the detective, Atticus Pund (Tim McMullan, originally Timothy Spall was dreamed of) and the editor, Sue Rylands. The same actor will plays at least 2 roles — one person appears in three (if I’m not mistaken). We also see these characters when they are playing characters who existed decades ago and when they are playing contemporary characters (a downright common trope nowadays is a jump in time but rarely this cleverly done and usually with two different look-alike actors).
It’s not too mechanical, too much artifice of this type would cloy. So beyond Atticus Pund and Sue Rylands, Sue’s sister, Katie (Claire Rushbrook) and Sue’s lover, Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis), a teacher of Greek who would like to go live in Crete with Sue, have no counterparts in the 1950s story in the book. The two murderers are played by different actors, they look and are different, though they do the deed in similar fashion. The murderer’s black girlfriend in the 1950s story in the book has no counterpart in the contemporary life story. You might have expected this to be the other way round, but no. In both narratives, the same black actor plays the Anglican vicar.
What’s fascinating is how we move from book (takes place 1950s) back to life (takes place 2022). The camera is following the 1950s characters and car in the book down the road, we reach a bend and turn and now we are with the 2022 characters in life. One moves back and forth starting with the third episode, Atticus Pund; but he is noticed by no one but Sue Rylands, who at first regards him as simply an individual figment of her imagination, but by the end treats him as a person like herself and enters the world of the book to discover how the book ends. The tone throughout is warm and witty
I am now taught how this kind of material — murders growing out of deep bitterness, jealousy, selfishness, sociopathic impulses — a dog is even poisoned — can become absorbing and curiously comforting matter — as in Foyle’s War we have good guys and they win through, with a justice of sorts achieved
E.M.
I know I have dwelt far more on the detective sleuthing type and have little on the political spy dystopia kind (Killing Eve), but I will make up for that in a later blog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Eve
I want to keep these blog-essays much shorter than I once did.
[A draft of an] Addendum: women spies. The truth is I’ve only begun to read such books; I’ve read but a few of any kind of these mystery-thriller detective and spy stories (as Marr says very distinct types) about them and seen sophisticated fllm adaptations. But insofar as I have read and seen, the women are treated the way they are as female detectives: made into males, into lascivious targets, stigmatized as someone incapable of this kind of work whose true vocation in life is to cater to men and children. I admit when I see them turned into violent promiscuous males justified by the propaganda of pro-capitalism, anti-communism and mindless nationalism (Homeland) I am sickened. In the last 2 seasons of Foyle’s War and LeCarr’s books the heroes loathe these organizations for their cruelty and amorality, but they do join and work for them. I have not yet found any good books or essays on women spies as a species. I do note that often the woman is presented as high in the organization, not doing the violence herself, unmarried (no private life) and without a moral bone in her body when it comes to murdering “an enemy” — all fitting an old misogynistic stereotype of women without sex and husbands becoming cruel neurotic monsters (see Dickens; in Foyle’s the character is shown to have remorse and perhaps she kills herself towards the last episode?).
Sorry about this Ellen! For women as spies the UK TV series Wish Me Luck is indispensable – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_Me_Luck – it was created by the 2 women behind Tenko.
I would say that two major differences from the mystery genre are first that this is, however loosely, based on real events, second and more importantly, there is no happy ending – or more accurately there is for one central character but not another (and this has nothing to do with any political or moral bias!). This is also strikingly true of the much more sensationalist film Female Agents.
Reblogged this on Moving Toyshop.
Thank you. I too am doing this for enjoyment — sometimes yes one ends up watching bad stuff but I don’t carry on beyond what I need to do to understand it. I find I am enjoying these kinds of genres. At core they are fantasy and escape; and detective stories at least usually mete out mostly poetic justice and when done with a detective with strong moral compass (Foyle’s War) have the effect of making me feel somewhat better.
The detective stories even when hard-boiled (or more sophisticated and violent) seem innocent in comparison with the spy stories.
If you can find and view it, Andrew Marr’s 3 part TV “lecture” or documentary show, Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers is also very good. After I watched it, I felt I understood the difference between the first 6 seasons of Foyle’s war and season 7 (where Foyle is basically working for a spy organization). I’ve written an explanatory blog on that too — it’s very enjoyable to watch (I’m a fan of Marr):
I’ll look that series up too. Nowadays with streaming, there is far too much available 🙂 (if you can afford it).
Enjoying reading about women as detectives. Just finished a so-so novel by Laura Lippman (BALTIMORE BLUES.) Have read all of Sue Grafton’s alphabet books with great pleasure. Very sad was her untimely death. The UK women are good. You mentioned Tey. Jodi Picoult’s recent MAD HONEY provided a murder mystery of sorts while carefully working through other social justice issues. It was co-written by Jennifer Finney Boylan.
Chantel Lavoie: “Thank you so much! I teach An Unsuitable Job for a Woman to my first year students (mostly male) a the Royal Military College of Canada”
My reply: “It’s on my TBR pile — high up. One of my favorites of the Jane Austen sequels is the film adaptation, Death Comes to Pemberley, by Howdidi (I forget her first name), based on PDJames’s (weak) book (one of her last).”
Andrew Gates: “Ellen,
Glad you mentioned the TV series “Vera” it is one of my favorites and is extremely popular and I have been an admirer of Brenda Blethyn for decades, she, rather like Martin Clunes, (Doc Martin) in real life, has a personality nothing like her character Vera
Andrew
My reply: Thank you, Andrew, for that video interview. Hitherto I’d seen Brenda Blethyn as Mrs Bennet in the 2005 P&P and she gave the character a real dignity and presence — my favorite of the Mrs Bennets.
I liked how she talked of the seaside of her childhood and the seascape of this program: the place it occurs in is part of its appeal. 11 seasons! As she says it’s hard for an older actress to land such a good part. I can sources in her background for parallels to the character of Vera. She does bring up how such a job by Vera’s father would have been regarded as inappropriate for a woman, and how she overcomes that by her rough background. She has no suitors (no love interest): Joe, her sidekick, is a surrogate son.
I will carry on watching and I got myself inexpensively an Ann Cleeves novel with Vera as the detective, the first of the series.
On an autistic serial detective: see how far the detective paradigm has penetrated every genre on TV: on PBS there is almost nothing else 🙂
In 2019 French television produced a 9-episode series on an explicitly autistic detective. The series is titled Astrid:
“Astrid Nielsen works in the library of the judicial police. She has Asperger’s syndrome.
“With an incredible memory she excels at analyzing files of ongoing investigations.
“The district commander decides to use [Astrid’s memory] to the fullest, entrusting her with very complex investigations which have remained unsolved to date.
“In French with English subtitles.”
ForeignCrimeDrama.com gives Astrid an excellent review. Some of us might relate to the reviewer’s portrait of Astrid:
“Often the flashbacks of Astrid’s childhood are painful. [Astrid] was teased mercilessly in school until the headmaster insists that she go elsewhere…. In [the] present day, the overwhelming nature of working in the field exhausts her, causing her to break down several times. But her obsession with puzzles always brings her back.”
You can watch Astrid on the PBS Web site for free, courtesy of the following Web address:
https://www.pbs.org/show/astrid/episodes/
You might be able to view the series for free on the PBS video app and the PBS streaming service
[…] blog I was on about Women’s Holocaust Memoirs; if you haven’t picked up from this blog I’m a feminist who nonetheless loves romance, you must’ve been skimming (see my Outlander […]
Linda Bergmann:
“Are you interested in novels written by women that feature either male detectives or female detectives? What about novels written by men which feature female detectives? I’m guessing you never read Nancy Drew growing up. Dime novels, but she was a model of a smart, courageous young woman. Originally in the 1930s but the current reissues have updated the time period and they’re much shorter. My granddaughter has read some. I have always been attracted to detective stories and murder mysteries.
We’ve been watching the very old-1980s- tv series of Miss Marple on Britbox. Sometimes the plots don’t totally hang together (that’s Agatha Christie) but Joan Hickson is very good. She is actually like Michael Kitchen in her quiet delivery. No one would cast such an actual old woman anymore!
We did watch all of Prime Suspect. I felt as if the ending was somewhat upbeat despite her being alone. Deciding to join AA was a positive decision. She didn’t seem sad as she walked out of the station. Thankfully avoiding the male stripper.
I finished Auschwitz and After. The last section of the short entries by other survivors was in certain ways even more brutal than the description of the camps. Maybe because it was one after the other describing how broken their lives were. So intent on surviving and most didn’t even feel as if they were part of the living world.
Linda”
My reply: Dear Linda,
Yes I’m interested in detective novels by women which feature men. I suspect they are the authors themselves in drag part of the time – the way Thomas Cromwell is Hilary Mantel in drag a lot of the time. I’ve taught LeCarre and Conan Doyle and non Wilkie Collins.
I’ve not read many detective novels by men which feature women. According to these histories I’ve read the earliest detective novels with women detectives at the center were by men. According to Klein, they are often sexual objects
in the narratives, shown to be irrational, intuitive, going against their deepest nature — those on TV in the 1980s were sexpots (Charley’s Angels …).
You don’t have to be a feminist to recognize the misogyny in many of these violent tales: way back in the 1950s a classic literary criticism book by Wayne Booth showed how
irony was used to disguise vehement misogyny in the most popular male detective stories – by men for men whether or not detectives were female.
I never read many of these adult ones but I did read Nancy Drew. Oh yes — maybe as many as twenty. I used to own them all. I also read Judy Bolton and even the Dana girls (but by that time I was tiring of it and beginning to root for the “other side”). Nancy Drew books influenced me: she said the best kind of man to marry is an English gentleman 🙂 I recommend Bobbie Anne Mason’s slender but very insightful The Girl Sleuth. I hope it’s still available somewhere. I used to assign that in Writing Across the Humanities at Mason!
Maybe I’ll try the Joan Hickson — I love Michael Kitchen for his supremely humane values — he is constantly quitting – -have you noticed that?
I agree on Prime Suspect. I think at the very end as Tennisn walks away form her job, retired, now orphaned, the mood was triumphant. She had led the kind of life she wanted to lead. She had succeeded splendidly in it. She had had to make a choice and a couple of the episodes suggested she did regret never having a child: the one where she could not see until the very end the mother did it; the last where she could not see the envious girl killed the other favored (by the teacher) by thrusting a knife into her uterus. She regretted the termination a bit. She could not get herself to trust Patrick (Stuart Wilson). All of it very believable and sympathetic. Too bad there are no books
I hope you’re having a good afternoon.
Ellen
[…] by females and when a female is the detective too. Of course it is an outgrowth of my studies of women detectives in all detective fiction which came out of the 4 week mini-course I just taught this past winter and will do again at OLLI […]
[…] The above one of its many covers (having been published in many editions) captures the action and (for me) what’s central to the interest of the book: its self-reflexivity and presentations of different ways of telling supposedly truthful history in at first a playful way. The way the story is for about half the tale conducted. The level of language in which the book is written feels very simple but not the thoughts implied inside Alan Grant’s mind nor his and Tey’s narrator’s descriptions and imitations of kinds of history books. I chose this book as one of those I’d read for a planned course I’d teach in mystery-thriller-detective stories by women: see my A Tangent I cannot Resist: Women’s Detective Stories […]
Linda Bergman:
“When I was a teenager and read many Christie mysteries I preferred Poirot to Miss Marple. But now watching both the David Suchet Poirot series and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple I think she is a more nuanced and sympathetic character. The only one I’ve read recently was Roger Ackroyd which Kay Menchel included in a course a while ago. I would like to read one of the Marples to compare to the show.
Evidently Christie thought Joan Hickson was excellent.
There is a new book just published with 12 new Miss Marple short stories each by a different writer. Called Marple.”
My reply:
Thank you. I too watched the David Suchet series and some of the Joan Hickmans. I never read any Christie mysteries — I think I found them flat when I tried — but I much enjoyed her Autobiography and now have Lucy Worsley who is usually better and more serious than she appears at first. If Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position turns out to be doable, acceptable &c, I have my three for a mini-course; Tey, Daughter of Time; Sayers, Gaudy Night, and Cross, Death in a Tenured Position. I think it’s telling (but of what I’m not sure when it comes to this genre) that two of the women writers used pseudonyms. We know that Heilburn felt her job would have been threatened. I think I finally bought myself the Ackroyd. I liked PDJames’s autobiography too. I’ve read several of the Sayers Lord Peter books and all of the Harriet Vane.”
Ellen
4/24/2023: “A very interesting trio of essays is relevant to last week’s discussion of gender ambiguity in Sarah Caudwell’s fiction in my Trollope&Peers listsev (Caudwell’s books appear to center on a lesbian or non-binary detective)
Carolyn Heilbrun in her Hamlet’s Mother and Other Essays argues that the central idiom of the Detective Novel of Manners, which is what she contends Sayers develops out of Christie and became the dominant form of 1930s so-called Golden Age fiction, and kept up a strong tide in later spy/thriller/political kinds of stories by Le Carre — the central idiom is class. What matters is these are stories about upper class white people — and their woes within their own worlds. What is intriguing and new about this and kept up in later of these Detective/Sleuthing/Mystery books is androgyny, that the male detective is feminized, given a heart, sensibility and many characteristics hitherto associated with women, and women are given independent, aggression, initiative, dress less femininely, have real interests in life and jobs beyond men &c&c
Gaudy Night is a kind of epitome of this.
She then equally argues that starting in the detective type with PD James and in the spy/nationalistic type with LeCarre, this strong class bias is broken down because these authors see through the hypocrisy of this and are interested in the outer world to some extent in the detective type, and centrally in the spy/thriller/nationalistic/political tales.
All this might sound boring but when you work it out in details, the sex becomes fun, and the books become humane and more meaningful.
Last night I watched my first Dalgliesh in years. I know I watched them in the 1980s on Thursday nights with Laura — as well as the Poirot at the time. The umbrella images (paratexts) for that series, Susan, by the way, are a series of mock parodies from Gorey. All the Dalgliesh are on Acorn. It was superb: about a school for nurses where gradually girls are being murdered and we have to discover who did it — the class barrier is broken down by the girls’ origins, by Dalgliesh’s sidekick (who is toxic masculinity and racism embodied), and at the core was a woman who had worked as Nazi in the extermination camps delivering deaths through injections. Bertie Carvel as Dalgliesh was our moral center as gravely as Michael Kitchen as Foyle.
I find the series without this detective presence can be moorless, disappointing. I did try the Miss Fischer series and it was awful. I also tried the first episode of the 1st season of Midsomer Murders (so early Anthony Horowitz), very sensational, overdone, lurid. Perhaps it improved over time?