They are lawyers, reporters, doctors, cops, old ladies with pets, car-pool moms, college professors, actresses, caterers, even Egyptologists. As diverse in fiction as in real life, women fill volumes in the mushrooming mystery genre.
First among equals, however, are a handful of private eyes-smart, street-savvy, feisty and very female, arguably the most interesting crime-solvers around.
In the dozen years since Sara Paretsky’s “Indemnity Only” and Sue Grafton’s “A is for Alibi” first caught the eyes of readers and reviewers, the two have become well-nigh queens of contemporary crime fiction, their success paving the way for others.
“The mystery genre is stronger than it’s ever been,” says Dulcy Brainard, mystery editor of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly. The mystery novel, once a narrow segment of a market confined largely to “hard-boiled” detective tales or “cozy” whodunits, today has become a powerful force in mainstream fiction, spawning megasellers by John Grisham and Scott Turow and attracting a vast readership that includes President Clinton.
The books are popular with good reason.
“These are writers who give you story,” says Brainard. “And there’s resolution. That’s another thing you’re not guaranteed in fiction. Here, it might not be justice, but there is usually an end achieved. And it’s great escape.”
And while Brainard says that the women-in-mysteries boomlet may be yielding to the latest wave of “regional” mysteries-plots set outside the usual big-city locales-they remain a force.
Grafton’s latest, “K is for Killer” (Henry Holt, $22.95), opened at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list in April, and the publisher claims a huge-by-any-standard 600,000-copy first printing. (More usual for an ongoing mystery series would be 25,000.)
And if past performance is a guide, Paretsky’s new “Tunnel Vision” (Delacorte, $21.95) is a certain best-seller as well.
The female private eyes offer a compelling blend of personality and plot, with fast-paced, first-person narration:
Kinsey Millhone, quick-witted, big-hearted Californian of Grafton’s alphabetical series, trades her usual daylight routine for the night side in “K is for Killer.”
V.I. Warshawski, Chicago-based private eye who provides author Paretsky with a forum for reflections on feminism and complex tales of financial and political corruption, makes her seventh appearance in “Tunnel Vision” in June.
Carlotta Carlyle, a Bostonian who plays blues guitar and drives a taxi, grows more real with each book from Linda Barnes. Last year’s “Snapshot” is just out in paperback; “Hardware” is due in March 1995.
Why women? And why now?
Well, why not?
“I think a female protagonist comes a little closer to how people really live and think,” Grafton says. “We are more willing to be vulnerable on the printed page. I think we have humanized the process.”
Barnes says: “When I grew up, most of the women I knew were schoolteachers or nurses, if they worked outside the home. Now the women I know are museum directors and police officers and private investigators and lawyers and doctors. That’s a massive societal change. I don’t think that it’s a matter of the writers of female private-eye novels getting in ahead of reality. I think we mirror what is happening to society.”
Who are these characters and where do they come from? Their creators reflect on the journey:
Sue Grafton
Sue Grafton, in her 50s and a Californian like her character, had written two mainstream novels and established herself as a television writer before she “found” Kinsey Millhone. Since “A is for Alibi” was published in 1982, the series has become hugely popular.
Grafton, whose voice echoes her Kentucky origins, calls her ambitious, alphabetical project “the place where I fight my demons.” More so than her counterparts, she identifies with her creation.
“She is me, so whatever I am is what she is, with certain differences. For instance, we have both been married twice and divorced twice, but I’m married for a third time, and I’m sticking. I have three grown children, and she has no children, though I wouldn’t put anything past her.
Grafton eschews the constraints of real time, real place. Kinsey, currently in 1985, “lives in a time warp, poor thing.” And in the books, Santa Barbara is transformed into Santa Theresa.
Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky, 46, began writing her first book, “Indemnity Only,” 15 years ago while she was a marketing manager for a large Chicago insurance company. For years she had fantasized about creating a female private eye, one who “essentially avenges the female sex” from its role as temptress, the “underlying cause of what goes wrong,” in classic hard-boiled detective novels.
Thus was born V.I. Warshawski, half-Polish, half-Italian, smart and tough and very much a feminist.
“I didn’t want Philip Marlowe in drag,” says Paretsky, who lives in Chicago. “What I really wanted was a woman who was like me and my friends-the difference is that she didn’t pull her punches. She didn’t feel like she had to make nice.”
Paretsky kept her “day job” for the first three books, but when Tri-Star bought movie rights (the picture, starring Kathleen Turner, was a stiff), she began to write full-time.
Warshawski has softened a little since her first appearance, though she remains the prickliest, most stubborn, most physical and most violent of her cohorts. (In “Tunnel Vision,” V.I. suffers her third serious head injury in seven years.) She’s also the most psychologically complex, with the most ambitious and multilayered adventures.
In “Tunnel Vision” she investigates the murder of a society woman, tries to rescue the dead woman’s daughter from a deranged father and tries to help a homeless family she finds in the basement of her office building.
Linda Barnes
Boston-based writer Linda Barnes created Carlotta Carlyle after writing-and wearying of-four books about an actor and amateur sleuth named Michael Spraggue.
“I was killing all his friends and relatives to get him involved in these cases. He was getting very depressed. I was getting very depressed about it too.”
Carlotta, introduced in an award-winning 1985 short story, “Lucky Penny,” is more satisfying.
“I wanted to have a character who lived a hard life in a tough world but who perceived everything through a sort of skewed sensibility that would make it bearable,” Barnes says. “She sees things from a sort of off-center perspective.”
As for her plots, which address such issues as exploitation of illegal aliens (“Coyote”) and the music business (“Steel Guitar”), Barnes says: “Basically I start with an issue or idea that I want to talk about. I want to talk about betrayal. I want to talk about obsession-then I try to find a story and characters.”
Marcia Muller
Marcia Muller’s life is full of mystery. Not only is she author of what may be the longest-running female private-eye series around but she’s also married to author Bill Pronzini (“The Nameless Detective”) and a respected anthologist of crime-fiction short stories.
“We live and breathe the business,” Muller says from their home in Petaluma, Calif.
Muller started writing Sharon McCone in the early ’70s, breaking into print with her in 1977. After 15 books, she says, Sharon McCone “is my imaginary playmate, my best friend, closest associate.”
The framework of the series-McCone is a ’60s-style idealist who investigates for a Berkeley legal cooperative-came from a conference on women and the law that Muller covered during a brief career as a reporter.
Though Sharon was at first something of a naif, Muller says, “as time went on, she began to respond to the really bad things she saw-and she became more cynical, more hard-edged, a lot less willing to put her trust in people. She also began to notice violent tendencies in herself that she worries about now.”
Karen Kijewski
Sacramento novelist Karen Kijewski began her Kat Colorado series with 1990’s award-winning “Katwalk,” and her work has improved with each book. “Wild Kat” is her fifth.
“I can’t say that I had a definite picture of Kat in mind when I started writing,” Kijewski says. “I knew she would be an independent, strong woman, that she would have qualities of courage and bravery and daring but not foolhardiness. I’m not a big fan of people who do foolish things, either in real life or in books.”
Kat is smart, beautiful and unattached except to the friends she regards as family. Like other female detectives, she is motivated by a personal quest for justice and a visceral reaction to people.
FICTIONAL PRIVATE EYE FILE
Here are profiles of the more popular female detectives:
Carlotta Carlyle
(Author Linda Barnes)
Personal: 33; 6 feet 1; curly red hair. Ex-cop. Has killed two people. Divorced.
Family and friends: Longtime on-and-off affair with son of Boston mob boss. Big sister to 11-year-old Colombian girl. Punk-artist housekeeper is sometime sidekick. Father was an Irish Boston policeman, mother a Jewish labor organizer; both dead.
Lives in Cambridge, Mass., in house she inherited from maiden aunt with parakeet named Red Emma.
Drives a Toyota and a taxi, to help pay the bills.
Packs a .38.
Hobbies/vices: Plays blues guitar, killer volleyball.
Quote: “I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.”
Appears in “A Trouble of Fools,” “The Snake Tattoo,” “Coyote,” “Steel Guitar,” “Snapshot.”
Kat Colorado
(Author Karen Kijewski)
Personal: 33; 5 feet 7; blond-streaked, wash-and-wear hair, green eyes. Friends call her Katy.
Lives in a neat two-bedroom house in Sacramento with dog named Ranger.
Family and friends: Mother was alcoholic who drank herself to death and fatally neglected Kat’s little sister. Best friend is newspaper advice columnist Charity. Long-distance romance with police detective in Las Vegas.
Drives a Bronco.
Packs a .380.
Quote: “I’ve got guts and determination but not the mindless optimistic bounce-right-back of youth. It’s admirable. It’s also shortsighted. And sometimes it’s dangerous.”
Appears in “Katwalk,” “Katapult,” “Kat’s Cradle,” “Copy Kat” and “Wild Kat.”
Sharon McCone
(Author Marcia Muller)
Personal: 39. Attended University of California at Berkeley on scholarship, working nights as security guard. One-eighth Shoshone Indian.
Lives in a cottage near the Glen Park district of San Francisco with two cats, Ralph and Alice.
Family and friends: Dad was Navy chief petty officer; mom raised five tough kids. Current lover is environmental activist Hy Ripinski.
Hobbies/vices: “Caffeine, white wine, chocolate and an addiction to late-night Grade-B movies.”
Drives a red MG.
Packs a .45.
Quote: “I felt as if I’d started along a straight corridor and somehow made a wrong turn into a maze. Too much more of this bumping my nose against its walls and I’d lose touch with everything that mattered.”
Appears in “Edwin of the Iron Shoes,” “Ask the Cards a Question,” “The Cheshire Cat’s Eye,” “Games to Keep the Dark Away,” “Leave a Message for Willie,” “Double,” “There’s Nothing to be Afraid of,” “Eye of the Storm,” “There’s Something in a Sunday,” “The Shape of Dread,” “Trophies and Dead Things,” “Where Echoes Live,” “Pennies on a Dead Woman’s Eyes,” “Wolf in the Shadows,” “Till the Butchers Cut Him Down” (coming in July).
Kinsey Millhone
(Author Sue Grafton)
Personal: 34. Twice divorced. Ex-cop. Recently left longtime job as staff investigator for insurance company to freelance.
Lives in a garage apartment in fictional Santa Theresa, Calif.
Family and friends: Parents died in car wreck when she was 5; raised by aunt. Elderly neighbor, police captain, neighborhood bartender form surrogate family.
Drives a vintage pale blue VW.
Packs a Heckler & Koch P9S.
Hobbies/vices: Runs to keep in shape.
Quote: “In the hazy zone where wakefulness fades into sleep, in that leaden moment just before the mind sinks below consciousness, I can sometimes hear them murmuring. They mourn themselves. They sing a lullaby of the murdered.”
Appears in “A is for Alibi,” “B is for Burglar,” “C is for Corpse,” “D is for Deadbeat,” “E is for Evidence,” “F is for Fugitive,” “G is for Gumshoe,” “H is for Homicide,” “I is for Innocent,” “J is for Judgment” and “K is for Killer.”
V.I. Warshawski
(Author Sara Paretsky)
Personal: Age 40; 5 feet 8. V. is Victoria and I. is Iphigenia. Friends call her Vic. Divorced. Former public defender.
Lives in a Chicago two-flat.
Family and friends: Father was Polish Chicago cop, mother was Italian; both dead. Friends include various ex-lovers and connections from her old days of liberal activism.
Drives a Trans Am.
Packs a .38 Smith & Wesson.
Hobbies/vices: Shares two dogs with neighbor. Runs to keep in shape.
Quote: “That was a fact of my business life: People were always more or less peeved with me for the questions I asked. It was only fatigue, or chronic financial stress, that made me care now.”
Appears in “Indemnity Only,” “Deadlock,” “Killing Orders,” “Bitter Medicine,” “Blood Shot,” “Burn Marks,” “Guardian Angel,” “Tunnel Vision.”
