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Fictional Female PI's Time Chart
My Definition of a Female PI, Private Investigator, Private Eye, Private Detective, Private Enquiry Agent:
A woman who investigates: crimes, apparent crimes, the threat of crimes, mysterious circumstances/events on at least a semi-regular basis while seeking compensation for her efforts but does not currently work for a government agency, body, group or organization. In short, not a policewoman nor an amateur sleuth but a woman who tries to earn a living by investigating crimes outside of government employment.
I will try to classify the women detectives into various literary categories that I think best captures the writing style/sub-genre into which the author fits. Some of the terms I'll use are: Casebook, Victorian Sensation, Dime Novel, Shilling Shocker/Penny Dreadful, Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Scientific/Medical, GAD, Thriller/Rogue/Espionage, Supernatural, Pulp, Pulp-Influenced, Psychological Suspense, HIBK, Paperback Original, 1970's Feminist-Influenced, Comic, Cozy, etc.
TIME CHART
Year Character Author
1864 Mrs G(ladden?) Andrew W Forrester Jr., psd of James Redding Ware (1832-1909)
1864 Mrs. Paschal W(illiam) Stephens Hayward (1838-1870)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Quasi private/quasi police
Name of agency: ?
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Casebook
Comments: Mrs. Gladden was former police constable. Appeared in The Female Detective. Had a woman assistant.
Mrs. Paschal was a widow, boss was Colonel Warner, was well educated and had some experience as an actress. Appeared in The Experiences of a Lady Detective according to K. G. Klein.
1882 Denver Doll Edwin L(ytton) Wheeler (1854?-1885)
Location: American West
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of agency: ?
Type: Medium Boiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Sort of a Dime Novel combo of Annie Oakley & Dale Evans. Appeared in 4 stories in Beadle's Half-Dime Library in 1882-83. Known as "The Detective Queen". Author also created the "Deadwood Dick" character.
1882 Clarice Dyke Harry Rockwood (aka Ernest Avon Young, Donald J McKenzie) 1832-1873)
Location: Boston
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Works for/with husband, Donald Dyke. Victor Berch has informed me that Clarice's first appearance was actually 12/31/1882 in a story titled "A Wife's Strategy and Her Search for Donald Dyke".
1884 Madeline Payne Lawrence L Lynch (psd of Emma Murdock Van Deventer) (1853-1914)
aka Emily Murdock, aka Emily Medora Murdock, aka Emma Murdock, aka Emily Lynch,
aka Emily Van Deventer, aka E. M. Van Deventer
Location: NYC & environs
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: NA
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation, American Realist
Comments: Appeared in Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter (1884) and Moina, or Against the Mighty, A Detective Story (1891) according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Madeline is a young woman of about 17 or so in her first case. Her deceased father was Lionel Payne, a celebrated detective nicknamed "The Expert" for his ability to unravel complicated mysteries and solve difficult cases. Madeline is forced to go undercover as a detective (using disguises, of course) to unravel the schemes of no less than three fortune-hunters. She pieces together the mysterious events that tied several disparate people together and winds up freeing a falsely imprisoned man, brings justice to the three fortune-hunters, saves a young woman from a rogue, saves a middle-aged woman from the same rogue and reclaims her inheritance from her greedy and cruel stepfather. Madeline is, naturally, exhausted by these efforts so at the end of her first book she travels to Europe for rest and a change of scene. Madeline and some of the other characters from her first book return in a sequel seven years later in her second recorded case. I have only managed to read portions of Moina, or Against the Mighty but it seems to not be more of the same type of Victorian melodrama (secret marriages, bigamy, false imprisonment, stolen inheritances) as the first Payne book. Moina features international intrigue, secret societies, socialists, communists & anarchists, labor disputes & class conflict I believe that Van Deventer was the first American woman author who wrote about a female professional private investigator who was the primary detective character in the story.
Click HERE For more on Lynch/Deventer.
1886 Kate Edwards (Goelet?) Harlan P Halsey (aka "Old Sleuth", Tony Pastor, Judson R Taylor)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of agency: ?
Type: Mediumboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: "Lady Kate, the Dashing Female Detective" seems to be a Dime-Novel version of Honey West who, unlike Honey, manages to keep her clothes on. Kate is 23 years old.
1888 Miriam Lea Leonard Merrick aka Leonard Miller (1864-1939)
Location: London (also Europe & South Africa)
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Alfred Bazalgette of High Holborn
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation?
Comments: Miriam's only appearance is in Mr. Bazalgette's Agent (1888). According to "Andre's" Kindle review on 10/02/13 of The British Library's new edition (and some other sources) Miriam is a 28 year old former stage actress and governess who has fallen on hard times (like Loveday Brooke, see below) through misfortune. Miriam is well educated and can speak French, German and Italian which gets her hired by Mr. Bazalgette's detective agency to track down an embezzler. Her assistant is Emma Dunstan, who poses as Miriam's maid during their travels in pursuit of the absconder. The book is written in diary form and seems to have a "...light-hearted sense of adventure" according to "Andre". Apparently Miriam poses as a writer to provide a cover for her detecting. "Andre" also notes that Miriam is "...dogged, resourceful and sharp-witted". The British Library edition claims that this book is the first British novel to feature a female detective, the notion being that the books about Mrs. Gladding and Mrs. Paschel were collections of stories, not true novels. This sounds like a fun read and I am trying to locate a copy.
I have acquired a copy of Mr. Bazalgette's Agent and found it an entertaining read. Mike Ashley's introduction to the 2013? British Library Crime Classics edition is informative, though I have some qualms with some of what he writes. One point is that Mr. Bazalgette's Agent is not really a novel. I estimate the word count at about 31,000 so I consider it a novella. Ashley suggests that Merrick's reason for belittling his first major published work (and attempting to buy up and destroy any copies he could lay his hands on) was because he realized several of the plot points were very similar to the American Dime Novel "Lady Kate, the Dashing Female Detective (see above) published two years earlier. I propose another theory: Merrick, who was nicknamed "the novelist's novelist" by some of his contemporary author acquaintances, was embarrassed by how he ended the story. The first 2/3's is a charming, light-hearted diary-like description of a woman detective chasing an embezzler across Europe and Africa. Wry humor, subtle satire and wonderful phrasings (along with somewhat reasonable detective work) dominate the first sections of the book. In fact, it seemed like Merrick may have been the inspiration for Mary Roberts Rinehart's lovely little collection of stories titled Bab: A Sub-Deb published just prior to WWI. In the final 1/3 of the book Merrick turns the story into a typical Victorian Sensation melodrama undermining all the clever and witty work he did in the first sections of the book. Taken as a whole, this is an enjoyable book well worth seeking out by those interested in the early development of the fictional female detective and anyone desiring a breezy read by a stylish author. One example of the clever stylings of Merrick occurs early in the book when Miriam describes her fall from higher levels of society . . ."I was a governess until people discovered I had been an actress, and I was an actress till they discovered I could not act". Evidently Miriam was orphaned while she was attending an expensive boarding school (maybe in Belgium?) and was allowed to finish her education due to the school's charity but she was penniless upon graduation. In that regard Miriam reminded me of the Cordelia Gray detective character written by P. D. James (see below) some 85 years later.
1889 Hilda Serene Albert W. Aiken (1846-1894)
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: probably softboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: 25 year old detective appeared in "The Actress Detective: Or, The Invisible Hand: The Romance of an Implacable Mission".
1891 Maggie Everett Harlan P Halsey? (aka "Old Sleuth", Tony Pastor, Judson R Taylor)
Location: ? (1839?-1898)
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of agency: Badger & Co
Type: ? Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: ?
1892 Laura Keen C. Little aka H(arvey K(ing) Shakleford (1841-1906)
Location: American West?
Lone/Agent/ Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in Laura Keen, the Queen of Detectives per Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975).
Appears to be a Dime-novel type heroine maybe similar to Denver Doll? (see above). Note: Laura Keene, born Mary Frances Moss( 1826-1873) was a British stage actress who found success in the US as an actress, theater manager and producer. She was a witness to Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater in 1865. I wonder if C. Little took the name of his detective character from this real life actress?
1892 Dorcas Dene (nee Lester) George R(obert) Sims (1847-1922)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent/Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation & Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Appeared in Dorcas Dene, Detective; Her Adventures. Her dramatist friend, Mr Saxon, acts as her Watson per CJ Rzepka. Retired actress begins working for her neighbor's detective agency before eventually taking it over. Dorcas has to earn living to support her family because artist husband, Paul Dene, has become blind. Household also consists of Dorcas's mother (Mrs Lester) and a bulldog named Toddlekins. Storytelling style and plotlines are similar to the Loveday Brooke stories by C L Pirkis (see below). Stories often involve secret marriages, mistaken identity, lunatic asylums and stolen inheritances. Men behaving badly are ubiquitious.
1894 Loveday Brooke Catherine Louisa Pirkis, nee Lyne (1839-1910)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Lynch Court Detective Agency?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Casebook/Victorian Sensation/Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Upper class woman falls on hard times, works as a PI to earn a living. Boss is Ebenezer Dyer.
Storytelling style and plotlines are similar to the Dorcas Dene stories by George R Sims (see above). Main
difference between Loveday and Dorcas is that at the end of a case Dorcas returns to a loving household
while Loveday seems to have no friends or relatives she can turn to for solice or company. Stories are solid mysteries with genuine detection.
1894 Coralie Urquhart M(ary) E(lizaeth) Braddon (aka Mrs John Maxwell) (1835-1915)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: mediumboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Appeared in Thou Art the Man. Author had written Lady Audley's Secret in 1862. Coralie is not a detective. She happens to piece together the movements and motives of one of her relatives to partially solve a pair of murders in this sordid melodrama.
1894 "The Squirrel"? Charleton Savage, aka Carlton Strange, aka Calthorpe Strange
(All above may have been psd. for Mrs Frances Elizabeth G.
Carey Brock (1827=1905)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled? Literary Classification: Shilling Shocker/Penny Dreadful
Comments: Appeared in The Beech Court Mystery. She is the daughter of a poacher?
1894 Nellie Nugent Detective Edenhope?
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Norton, Larkins & Co.
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Nellie is a typical Dime Novel Girl/Young Woman Detective: shoots, fights, cross-dresses and uses weapons and disguises expertly. Appeared in "Nellie, The Girl Detective or The Mystery of the Mason Mansion" in Old Cap, Collier Library #542 dated 5/12/1894. More info can be found on D. B. Borton's site/Girl Detectives Blog at
dbborton.com. Nellie is about 18 years old. Her bosses are Robert Norton and Jack Larkins.
1894 Annie Cory &/or Dora Bell/Dora White Mrs George Corbett (aka Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett) (1846-1930)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Appeared in When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead. Author also wrote a book of ss titled Adventures of a Lady Detective in 1890 but scant info exists. Is Annie Cory the "Lady Detective"? Or is it Bell White (who works for/with Robert "Bob" White) from Secrets of a Private Inquiry Office? (1890, one of the 15 stories in this book features a woman detective, Dora White, who is a neice of Bob White one of the co-owners of the Bell & White Agency, Dora works undercover). Annie detects alongside her father per Michele B. Slung's reading of Victorian Detective Fiction (1966). Mrs. Corbett was involved in the Women's Rights and Women's Suffrage movements. She wrote at least 12 novels and numerous short stories (most of which appeared never to have been collected in book form) between 1881 and 1922. Below I've compiled a list of works from Wikipedia and other Internet sources with some comments:
The Missing Note (1881) novel-possibly Detective
Cassandra (1884) novel-?
Pharisees Unveiled: The Adventures of an Amateur Detective (1889) novel-Detective/SiFi
New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889) novel-Feminist Utopia/Distopia
Behind the Veil or Adventures of a Lady Detective (1890) short stories, poss magazine pub only-Detective
Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office (1891) short stories, poss magazine pub only-Detective
A Young Stowaway (1893) novel-YA Adventure
Mrs. Grundy’s Victims (1893)-?
When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (1894) novel-Detective
Deb O’Mally’s (1895) novel-?
Little Miss Robinson Crusoe (1898) novel-YA Adventure
The Marriage Market (1903) novel-?
The Adventures of Princess Daintipet (1905) novel-?
An Unwilling Husband (1922) novel-?
1895 Rose Cortenay Spicer Milton Danvers (aka J Edmond Long)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Appears in The Fatal Finger Mark, Rose Cortenay's First Case (1895) as an agent of the agency
owned by Robert Spicer as per CJ Rzepka. May have appeared in six other novels in the 1890's. Possibly appeared in The Grantham Mystery (1893?) although the date may be wrong. The Doctor's Crime, The Detectives Honeymoon, A Desperate Dilemma, Mysterious Disappearance of a Bride, The Lone Cross Manor Mystery, The Squire's Fatal Will. Per G. K. Kline, Rose's husband, Robert Spicer, is the main protagonist/principal detective in most if not all of the stories.
1895 Mignon Lawrence Albert W. Aiken (1846-1894)
Location: NYC & New Mexico
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Joe Phenix's Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Former NYC policewoman detects out West under the guise of being a barber. Partner/boss is Joe Phenix whose real name is Gilbert Barlee. Appeared in "The Female-Barber Detective: Or, Joe Phenix in Silver City" and possibly "The Actress Detective" which I have not yet read. In "The Female-Barber Detective" Mignon is apparently sent West by her boss, Joe Phenix, to track down a fugitive wanted for crimes in NYC. She is quite "mannish", even sporting a thick mustache which needs to be constantly kept in check by a straight razor. Her cover while detecting in New Mexico is to pretend to be a barber. She also disguises herself as a Mexican cowboy when the bad guys get too suspicious of her. She's a quick thinker and can handle herself in a fight. Her putative boss, Joe Phenix, is never actually mentioned in this slow-moving story but one supposes that the Dime-Novel readers of the time knew Mignon worked for Joe.
1895 Caroline "Cad" Metti Harlan P. Halsey (1839?-1898)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in "Cad Metti: The Female Detective Strategist: Or, Dudie Dunne, Again in the Field" and possibly two other stories, one of which was Oscar the Detective or Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective). Oscar Woodford "Dudie" Dunne is Cad's boss/partner. Cad is a beautiful Italian-American dark-haired young woman who can sing, dance, fence, wrestle and shoot with great expertise. She, like her boss, is a master of disguise (what top-notch detective of that era wasn't) and can tail/follow anyone, anytime without being noticed. She also enjoys a good fight and doesn't shy away from administering a severe beating (with her trusty small billy club) to any criminal who deserves it. Cad earns her moniker of "Detective Strategist" mainly by doing the thinking for her boss/partner, Dudie Dunne, on those occasions when Dudie falls prey to a pretty woman of questionable character. The Dudie Dunne character almost shouts out for a deeper analysis than I am qualified to offer. Although he is slight of build, he is quite athletic, adept at disguises and expert at tailing suspects. Both Dudie (the nickname refers to his penchant for dressing like a dude) and Cad often assume the guise of the opposite sex, even when the plot doesn't really call for such actions. Cad and Dudie sometimes even disguise themselves as each other, but, as mentioned above, this cross-dressing doesn't serve to further the plot in any appreciable way. "Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist...,etc." is a Dime-novel, pot-boiler describing the detectives efforts to capture a gang of master criminals who are about to unleash a world-wide counterfeiting scheme. These so-called mastermind criminals were able to somehow organize a sophisticated international plot of great complexity, yet, due mainly to their own stupidity, become easy prey to a couple of NYC detectives who seem to like to cross-dress as much as they like to fight crime. Other than some interesting descriptions of the Sheepshead Bay--Coney Island sections of Brooklyn, this is a poorly written adventure story with little true detection on display.
1898 Lois Cayley Grant Allen (1848-1899)
Location: England, Europe, Asia
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Soft? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Really more Adventuress than Detective as indicated by title of book she appears in, Miss Cayley's Adventures. She is 21, dark complexion, eyes & hair.
1899 Florence Cusak L T Meade & R Eustace aka Eustace Robert Barton (1854-1943)
Location: England? aka Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844-1914)
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Soft? Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Dark blue eyes & raven hair. Appears in 4 stories in Harmsworth Magazine. Narrator/friend is
Dr Lonsdale. The story I read tries to mimic a Sherlock Holmes-type adventure.
1899 Mrs Mollie Delamere Beatrice Maude Emelia Eastwick Heron-Maxwell , nee Eastwick (1859-1927)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency:
Type:? Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: A young widow who is a part time journalist and an appraiser/agent for a pearl merchant. Apparently Mollie foils crimes while working for the pearl merchant? per Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975). Appeared in The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker. After reading these episodic adventures I must say that Mollie is not a professional detective. She is a plucky, fairly intelligent woman who is put on salary and commission by a successful pearl merchant, Mr. Leighton, to act as an agent selling and delivering pearls to the merchants customers. These are really adventure stories in which Mollie does a bit of detecting in order to safeguard the pearls placed in her possession but she usually depends more on luck than skill in thwarting thieves and villains. Mollie's pearl-brokering career and her widowhood both come to an end in the final paragraph of the last story as she marries a wealthy Australian connoisseur of fine objects. The nine chapters/episodes I read were mildly entertaining but somewhat silly.
1900 Dora Myrl Beck M(atthias) McDonnell Bodkin (1850-1933)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Soft Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Appeared in Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective and The Capture of Paul Beck and perhaps in some of her son's (Paul Jr.) adventures. Dora is a Cambridge graduate (mathematics major?), worked as a telegraph girl, telephone operator (similar to Molly Morganthau, see below, 1915 entry), medical doctor, companion and journalist. She is 25, athletic and slim of build in her first book. She can play the piano, handle firearms, ride a bicycle and leap over walls. Dora ages throughout the series and is about 50 years old and enjoying retirement by playing golf with/against her husband (detective Paul Beck Sr.) in the last batch of stories featuring their son, Paul Beck, Jr. (1911?) according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. As with many female detectives, Dora was raised by her father (her mother died in childbirth) and was on her own upon graduation at 18 when her father died, leaving her a small inheritance.
1900 Hilda Wade Grant Allen, aka Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848-1899)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: Scientific/Medical?
Comments: Apparently was a nurse who happens to solve mysteries so probably not eligible for this list.
Perhaps Mary Roberts Rinehart read these stories and named her nurse detective, Hilda Adams, after
Grant Allen's protaganist? Hilda Adams (Miss Pinkerton) is not eligible for this list because she is an
undercover police detective (and a nurse), not a PI. Note on the finances of Rinehart's Hilda Adams: Since she usually was paid both by the police and the families into whose home her boss secretly plants her when working on a case (and when in-between cases she could always find nurse-related employment) she must have made a nice living throughout her long career.
1903 Bella Thorn Tom Henry Gallon (1866-1914)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Secretarial Supply Syndicate, Ltd.
Type: Soft? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Appeared in The Girl Behind the Keys. Probably more an amateur sleuth/typist than a PI per my reading of Michele B Slung's comments in Crime on Her Mind (1975). A new edition of this book was published in 2005 by Broadview Press a Canadian independent academic publisher. I have only managed to read excerpts of the introduction by Arlene Young and portions of a few of the eight stories in this volume. Apparently Bella Thorn, described as a "small-statured 21 year-old" London based trained typist, answers a help wanted ad just as she is about to run out of money (similar to Miriam Lea see above 1888 entry). She soon discovers that her new boss, Neal Larrurd, is a con man and the Secretarial Supply Syndicate is a criminal enterprise. Bella uses her wits to foil the nefarious plans of her boss while still maintaining her job and lucrative salary. The stories seem to be quite charming reminding me of the Mollie Delamere (see above 1899 entry) and the previously mentioned Miriam Lea stories. Gallon, a prolific British author and playwright, wrote well over 40 novels and perhaps 9 plays between 1897 and 1914. Words like rogue, folly, and ghost appear in some of his titles so I have no idea how to classify Gallon as an author. Apparently a family member (his sister?) donated money to create a literary prize named for him which is still awarded today. IMDB claims that the critics of his era considered Gallon a second-rate Charles Dickens. Several of Gallon's works were made into films in the teens and twenties. The stories in this book are somewhat comparable to the Romney Pringle stories co-written by Dr. Thorndyke creator R. Austin Freeman published around the same time (1902). I wonder if Gallon was influenced by reading the roguish Pringle stories and the result were the stories found in The Girl Behind the Keys.
1904 Mademoiselle Lucie Harlan P. Halsey (1839?-1898)
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: ? Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in "Mademoiselle Lucie, the French Lady Detective". Jerry Mack is her male partner.
1906 Frances Baird R(eginald) W(right) Kauffman (1877-1959)
Location: Philadelphia & NYC?
Lone/Agent /Owner: Agent then owner/lone?
Name of Agency: Watkins Private Detective Agency
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Appeared in Miss Frances Baird, Detective: A Passage from her Memoirs (1906) & My Heart and Stephanie (1910). Associates were Ambrose Kemp in the first book & Sam Burton in the second. "Of historical interest only" according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Frances narrates her first book, Sam Burton narrates her second. Kathleen G. Klein considers the second book more a spy/romance than a detective story.
1907 Clarice St. Cyr (de Morney) various authors writing as Nick Carter
Location: NYC & Long Island
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Nick Carter's Detective Agency?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in at least three Nick Carter adventures in Street & Smith's New Nick Carter Weekly #526 "A Double Mystery or Nick Carter's Strong Hand Play" (1/26/1907), #527 "Clarice, the Countess or Nick Carter's Motor Boat Case" (2/2/1907) and #528 "Clarice, the Woman Detective or Nick Carter's Titled Assistant" (2/7/1907). Nick first meets Clarice, who is working as a ladies maid, on an abduction case in the first story. Nick talks Clarice into some undercover detective work to help locate her her employer. In the second story, Nick rescues Clarice from her evil French aristocrat husband and then Clarice becomes one of Nick's detective agents and helps bring to justice her ner'er-do-well (in name only) husband in the third story. These are typical Dime Novel narratives interesting to me mainly due to the settings: New Jersey, Manhattan, the Hudson River, the East River, Long Island's sparsely populated North Fork including the Village of Greenport, Orient Point and its surrounding bays. Clarice makes some good deductions regarding a found wallet and uses a disguise to track down the wallet's owner in the third story She is described as being a raven-haired beauty probably in her early or mid-twenties. Her title is Countess De Morney although her marriage to the evil Count De Morney was never consummated. Once the evil Count is disposed of, Clarice sets her cap for Nick Carter himself . . . but since I can find no further mention of Clarice beyond these three stories, I guess Nick put the kibosh on that idea.
1908 Miss Ethel Boston Charles Marius Eugene Antonin Arnoud aka Antonin Reschal (1874-1935)
Location: A fantasized NYC?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled: ? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage, Dime Novel, Pulp?
Comments: From what I can gather from the Internet, Reschal wrote dozens of outlandish stories that were serialized in French magazines in 1908-1909 about this professional detective living/working in a highly imagined New York and the US where the author's geography bears little resemblance to reality. Nina Cooper adapted and translated eleven of these tales in a 2012 book (ebook?) titled The Adventures of Miss Boston, the First Female Detective. Miss Boston's foil/friend/sidekick is Chief Inspector Sokes of the NYC police? I read an excerpt of one of the stories which had Miss Boston helping Dr. Watson solve the murder of Sherlock Holmes. Don't know quite what to make of these stories but they sure seem to be fun and unusual.
1909 Alice Montgomery Francis W(orcester) Doughty (1850-1917)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Old & Young King Brady
Type: ? Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: ?
1910 Joan Mar Marie Connor Leighton (1861? or 1865?-1941)
Location: ? aka Marie Flora Barbara Connor Leighton, aka Mrs. Robert Leighton
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Appeared in Joan Mar, Detective
1911 Ethel King Jean Petithuguenin (1878-1939)
Location: Philadelphia?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: Fascicule?
Comments: Seems to be similar to Miss Boston (see above 1908 entry). Ten of the stories that originally appeared in French magazines 1911-1914 were translated and adapted by Nina Cooper in a book titled The Adventures of Ethel King, the Female Nick Carter pub by Black Coat Press in 2013.
1911 Ida Lee Marie Conner Leighton (1861? or 1865?-1941?)
Location: England? aka Marie Flora Barbara Connor Leighton, aka Mrs. Robert Leighton
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Appeared in The Bride of Dutton Market.
1912 Judith Lee Richard Marsh, psd of Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Agency: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Appeared in Judith Lee (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), both collections of short stories. Used her lip-reading skills to solve mysteries according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee was published in 2013 by Black Coat Press. Much of the following information I gathered from the introduction by Jean-Daniel Breque: Heldmann/Marsh was a prolific author who tended to write in the mystery/horror/supernatural genres. His most famous book was The Beetle: A Mystery (1897). After publishing various adventure-type stories in the late 1870's and early 1880s he was involved in some type of financial scandal in 1884 and was sent to prison. A year or two after his release he began writing under the name of Richard Marsh in 1888. I was able to read 2 of the 22 Judith Lee stories and found them charming, interesting and well written. I hope to obtain a copy of the Complete Adventures and read all the stories so I can determine if Judith , at least occasionally, accepted a fee for her detective services or if she was just a busybody who "read" peoples private conversations and intruded herself into dangerous situations. I came across a Judith Lee pastiche (or fan fiction) written in 2015 on a site called suffrajitsu.com in which Judith has travelled to New York City to give a speech about teaching the deaf. While there she gets involved with the murder (or suicide) of a strange doctor who practiced an odd form of psychiatry on Riverside Drive in upper Manhattan. The story implies that Judith became involved in the suffragette movement back home in England and used her jiujitsu skills to protect leaders like Emmeline Pankhurst during public appearances and demonstrations. I don't quite know what to make of this story but those interested can click here to read it. Also, the story states that Judith's father was Chinese and her mother was English, I will have to read more of the real Judith Lee stories to verify this.
1914 Mercedes Quero G. E. (Gladys Edson) Locke (1887-1945?)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation/Rivals of Sherlock Holmes/GAD (almost)
Comments: Appeared in That Affair at Portstead Manor (1914), The Red Cavalier (1922), The Scarlet Macaw (1923) & The House on the Downs (1925). "The Locke books were lengthy for this period, running 250 to 300 plus pages." according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women.
That Affair at Portstead Manor (1914)
This is a longish (80,000 words, 266 pages) Country House murder mystery written by a now mostly forgotten author of once popular mysteries set in England. This is the debut of London based private detective Mercedes Quero the tall, slim, brown haired/eyed 20+ year old detective who is working undercover at the titular manor house posing as companion to Lady Pevensy, one of several manor guests. The story is told from the point of view of Mr. Archibald Clavering, a short, balding, rotund, middle-aged bachelor who is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes and finds himself investigating the theft of a diamond necklace, the shooting of an earl, the theft of valuable government papers and the shooting of a baronet. Clavering eventually joins forces with Quero and they (well, mostly Quero) eventually solve the mysterious events that unfolded at Portstead Manor. Had Locke employed fewer secret passages/panels, tightened the plot, not lost track of characters for chapters at a time, and played more fairly with the reader this might be considered a noble precursor to the typical Golden Age mystery novels that would become popular in the 1920s and 1930s. I found the most interesting aspect of the book not the detections of Mercedes Quero nor the various romances/love triangles of the major characters but the budding romance between the middle-aged, worldly, self-absorbed widowed Lady Pevensy and fussbudget, aesthetic bachelor Mr. Clavering. By story’s end Lady Pevensy is not seeking to replace her dearly departed Eustace with matrimony to Clavering but she just wants him to become a friend with benefits, as we say nowadays. Clavering serves as Quero’s Captain Hastings meaning he is occasionally useful at finding clues if he is given proper direction but often comes to fanciful conclusions as to the meaning of the clues. I wonder if Agatha Christie read this book and used Clavering as model for Hastings when she wrote her Hercule Poirot books starting in 1920.
Locke is hardly mentioned in mystery fiction reference books so I had to look around the web for further info on her. Most of the below comes from the Dorchester Atheneum website which is devoted to the history of Dorchester, Massachusetts: Gladys Edson Locke was born in Dorchester, MA and spent most of her life in that section/suburb of Boston. She was highly educated, graduating from Boston University with a master’s degree in English. She later earned a degree in library science at Simmons College. She tutored Latin, Italian and French in a New Hampshire high school. Her education reminds me of her contemporary mystery author, Jeanette Barbour Perry Lee, who wrote about NY detective Millicent Newberry (see below). “In 1917 she became a cataloger in the main branch of the Boston Public Library . . .where she worked for many decades.” She never married. She was an anglophile and often traveled to England and Scotland where she typically set her mystery novels. In this regard Locke reminded me of John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), master of the locked room mystery. Carr was a better constructor of puzzle plots but each were roughly equals as prose stylists. Locke wrote at least 11 mystery novels between 1914 and 1935, Mercedes Quero appeared in only four as far as I can determine. Quero self-describes herself as born to an upper-class family but fell on hard times and had to resort to detective work in order to support herself, much like Loveday Brooke and Miriam Lea (see above). It seems that Mercedes often works with Inspector Burton who appears in her other books but I fear that the Pevensy/Clavering couple mentioned above do not appear in the other three Quero adventures.
1914 Madelyn Mack Hugh C Weir (1884-1934)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner then Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Started as assistant house detective for the Niegel Dry Goods store then becomes owner of a large agency on Fifth Avenue. Housekeeper was Susan Bolton. Reporter Nora Noraker was her narrator. She went to college and modeled herself on Sherlock Holmes per Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Appeared in Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective (1914). Stories are very reminiscent of Doyle's detective stories though not quite as good. Just like Holmes, Madelyn turns to a drug, of sorts, when depressed or bored---Cola berries?? She is so successful in her detecting exploits that at one point she owns an agency employing several "agents" and a secretary/receptionist and a second home---a country house located north of NYC overlooking the Hudson River.
Eventually she becomes wealthy enough to downsize her agency and work part time solving crimes that interest
her. The one story I read was entertaining but unfairly-clued. She is 25 at the start of her adventures.
1914 Miss Balmy Rymal Arthur Stringer
Location: US?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Security Alliance
Type: Soft
Comments: Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975) suggests that the main client of the agency Balmy
works for is the Jeweler's Protective Union. Winfred (Winkie) Ealand is Balm's love interest and sometimes partner/assistant.
1915 Violet Strange Anna Katherine Green (Roelphs) (1846-1935)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Teenage heiress secretly works as PI to raise cash to help estranged (by father) older sister.
Appeared in The Golden Slipper & Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915). Several of the stories feature
puzzling plots with satisfying solutions. These stories are somewhat more easily approached by modern readers compared to the author's Gryce/Butterworth works. Mike Grost maintains that Strange is not a Sensation character and Green is not a Sensation writer. Green's stories are less sordid and better plotted and contain more detection than the typical Victorian Sensation novel but in my opinion she is pretty darn close to being a Sensation author. Maybe I'll call Violet a Rival of Sherlock Holmes? I have discovered that Candida Martinelli adapted all the Violet Strange short stories and converted them into YA novels in 2014. Her website states "The stories are based on A.K. Green's 1914 short stories, but they are completely re-imagined and re-written for pre-teens and teens today." The adapted stories are set in the year 1899. The concept is interesting and the cover art looks great Click thevioletstrangemysteries.wordpress.com/HERE to view the site.
1916 (1913?) Clare Kendall Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes & Scientific/Medical
Comments: Appeared in a Craig Kennedy story "The Ear in the Wall" as the owner of a detective agency
specializing in helping women. Maybe a precursor to Dol Bonner's relationship with Nero Wolfe? Clare is described as a dark-haired, grey-eyed, not-unattractive, intelligent woman who had started out as an operative for one of the large NYC detective agencies and eventually opened her own agency. Like Reeve's main detective, Craig Kennedy, and his other detective/adventuress creation Constance Dunlap (see below), Clare seems to spend much of her time fighting against or dealing with the pervasive corruption created by the Tammany Hall political machine which dominated NYC from roughly 1840 to 1930. Clare apparently also worked closely with the suffragette movement. I recently read some previously unknown to me Clare Kendall short stories serialized in 1913. Generally the stories were not very impressive. The ubiquitous municipal corruption detailed in "The Ear in the Wall" seemed absent in these earlier stories. Also, Clare has a boyfriend (of sorts) in this series, a Dr. William "Billy" Lawson who owns Lawson Laboratories. It comes in handy to have an eager admirer who will act as your assistant and run lab tests any time, day or night.
Here is a list of the 1913 stories:
"A Skirmish With the Occult"
"The Pearl Doctor"
"The House of Cards"
"The Temple of Beauty" (I have not read this one)
The Mystery of the Stolen Da Vinci"
From the 1913 story illustrations, Clare sported quite a collection of hats.
1915 Mary (Molly) McKenna Morganthau Babbitts Geraldine Bonner (1870-1930)
Location: NYC & environs
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Whitney & Whitney Law Firm
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: HIBK?
Comments: Former department store worker and telephone switchboard operator turned part time sleuth. She is 23 in her first adventure and ages in real time during her series. Molly sometimes worked with reporter/husband "Soapy" Babbitts. Molly often uses her telephone operator skills to eavesdrop on important conversations. Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women believes Molly was the first blue collar worker who became a female detective. Molly collected at least two large rewards in addition to being paid by the Whitney & Whitney law firm for her undercover sleuthing so she surely was a professional investigator. Appeared in The Girl at Central (1915), The Black Eagle Mystery (1916), and Miss Maitland, Private Secretary (1919).
The Girl at Central mostly takes place in a rural New Jersey county roughly halfway between Philadelphia and New York City. Molly has been dispatched there by NYC telephone company headquarters management to help out a shorthanded central switching station office. Small town life and the operations of a telephone central substation are interestingly described. Trains, planes, automobiles and horse-drawn carriages play important parts in the story. Some might think the solution to the crime is a bit of a cheat but I think Bonner fairly-clued the ending. Molly is back home in Manhattan with a newly acquired husband and living in a well appointed apartment thanks to the large reward she collected by solving her first case when she gets involved in The Black Eagle Mystery. The Black Eagle being the name of a Manhattan office building in which mysterious events and crimes occur. Miss Maitland, Private Secretary takes place partly in Manhattan and partly on a Long Island estate. All three stories offer interesting insights into how certain classes of people lived during the World War I era. Bonner's writing style is similar to that of Mary Roberts Rinehart: lively and interesting narration, some HIBK moments, a modern (for the time) wry writing style. Some jarring ethnic and racial slurs creep into the stories which hurt the charm factor of Molly's narration. Bonner plays fair with the reader, to some extent, in that most of the clues are laid out so the solutions could, in theory, be arrived at before the final chapter. The key to solving Bonner's mysteries before Molly does is to identify the hidden or secret relationships between and among the various characters in each mystery story. Molly's charm factor gradually erodes as the series progresses. As Molly attains material things (a husband, more money, a nice apartment) she becomes more dismissive of others who are not so fortunate. She treats her poor housekeeper very rudely at times. Molly's character goes from being quite compassionate in the first book to almost uncaring by the third book. This fact combined with the casual tossing about of ethnic and racial slurs (which, in light of the fact that Molly is half Jewish and half Irish, seems a bit odd) prevents me from recommending these stories to casual mystery readers. Serious students of the history of the American detective/mystery story should read these stories. Interesting side note: Miss Maitland, Private Secretary was made into a motion picture in 1920, a year after the novel was published. It was re-titled "The Girl in the Web", the title referring to the somehat complex plot Bonner had created. Looking over the cast listed on IMBD it seems as though the film version eliminated the roles of Molly herself and the Whitney father and son lawyers who usually play small but key roles in the stories.
I have kept printed copies of Molly's three adventures so if anyone cannot find copies online or in used bookshops, I might be able to provide copies. My email appears at the top of this page.
1916 Constance Dunlap Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner?
Name of Agency:
Type: mediumboiled? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage & Scientific/Medical
Comments: Housewife then widow then adventuress then criminal then detective? Appeared in Constance Dunlap, Woman Detective (1913?). Stories are written in the same overwrought melodramatic style as Reeve's
Craig Kenney stories. New (at the time) inventions, such as fish-eye lenses, are often showcased in the stories.
Municipal corruption seems endemic.
1917 Millicent Newberry Jeanette Barbour Perry Lee (1860 or 1861-1951)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner
Name of Agency: Tom Corbin's Agency, then her own (The Millicent Newberry Agency)
Type: soft Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation & Rivals of Sherlock Holmes?
Comments: Former seamstress, short but somewhat stout with grey hair & eyes. Milly lives with her elderly mother who often needs "looking after". One of Milly's former social cases eventually becomes maid/companion to the mother. Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women says Millicent appeared in 3 books The Green Jacket (1917), The Mysterious Office (1922) & Dead Right (1925) but not in Simeon Tetlow's Shadow (1909) so 1917 would seem to be her proper debut date. Millie is as much a social worker as a PI. K. G. Klein points out that, when possible, Millicent would prefer to reform rather than punish wrongdoers.
The Green Jacket is a longish (60,000? words) novel that would have been better served as a 30,000 word novella. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a valuable emerald necklace from the house of an affluent family outside of NYC. Two years after the apparent theft, Milly is hired by the owner of the necklace to finally discover what really happened to the jewels. Milly ensconces herself in the house ostensibly as a seamstress and listens, questions, observes and searches until she eventually solves the case. The solution is a bit of a letdown but makes sense after all the secrets and misunderstandings occurring between the family members. Although Milly is never described as a beautiful woman, she does receive two marriage proposals during the story, one from a man older than herself and one from a younger man. Milly's agency is successful enough to have two offices. A busy downtown office for routine cases and one uptown staffed only by herself for the more subtle cases that call for a social worker rather than a detective. The titular "green jacket" does not describe the emerald necklace but is the wool jacket that Milly knits continuously during the case and finishes once the case is solved.
The Mysterious Office is a shorter novel, about 50,000 words. Milly is hired to discover who stole a $25,000 pile of currency carelessly left unattended for a few minutes on top of a businessman's desk. She is ostensively brought in to the office as some kind of efficiency expert and, after several days, solves the case. As in her first recorded case, various misunderstandings and secret-keeping among the office workers and the businessman's family drive the plot. Also, stock market speculation plays a key role in the story. I hoped to see the author gradually changing her writing style from Victorian Sensation to a Golden Age of Detection style, but it did not happen in this story. I noticed a bit of shift to a Mary Roberts Rinehart/HIBK style but nothing more than that. Maybe in her third recorded case, Millicent will show more of a Golden Age nuance since at least four Agatha Christie books and one Lord Peter Wimsey book, that hopefully Lee read, were published by the time the final Millicent Newberry book, Dead Right was published in 1925. Milly discovers a clever stenographer/typist in the titular office and offers her a job as a detective trainee in her own agency.
Jeanette Lee was an educated woman and worked as an instructor and/or professor of English Literature and related subjects at five different colleges, her last position was at her alma mater, Smith College, before she left the academic world in 1913 to become a full time writer. I count 22 books that she published between 1900 and 1926 but she seems to have published no books after 1926. Less than 15% of her output seems to be in the mystery/detective genre. I find it difficult to categorize the bulk of her published works. She seemed to write about a wide variety of subjects and themes. Lee was married to Gerald Stanley Lee who was a Congregational pastor, author, magazine editor and lecturer. He published 10 books between 1896 and 1922 but none after that date that I can find. Most of his books seem to be about history, religion, inspirational and health related topics. Jeanette Lee dedicated several of her books to her husband. I found it interesting that Lee used the word "wistful' or "wistfully" at least 3 or 4 times in each of her first two Millicent Newberry books. I wonder why Lee only wrote three books about detective Millicent Newberry and no books at all after 1926? She seems to have written many magazine articles and short stories. One would have to go through her papers, which are deposited at Smith College, to discover why she published no books during the last 25 years of her life. It seems that Jeanette Lee was the first American woman author to create a female professional detective who owned her own agency.
1917 Evelyn Temple Ronald Gorell Barnes (aka Lord Gorell) (1884-1963)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/ Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Soft/ Literary Classification: Golden Age, Medical/Scientific?
Comments: Scientific detective? Michele B Slung labels her as an amateur sleuth so probably ineligible for this list.
Appeared in In the Night (1917) in which Evelyn is in her early 20's and Red Lilac (1935) in which she is her mid-30's per Coleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Gorell was a WWI hero, involved with many charities, a magazine editor, co-president of the Detection Club alongside Agatha Christie in the late 50's and early 60's. Perhaps he served as a model for the Lord Peter Wimsey character in the books by Dorothy Sayers? His 14 books published between 1917 and 1954 were all scrupulously fairly clued but perhaps best described as workmanlike. Evelyn Temple was not his main series character as she appeared in only 2 of his 14 books. Above info was gathered from the GA Detection wiki and Wikipedia.
I finally read the first Evelyn Temple book, In the Night (1917). This is a fairly-clued country house mystery in which Evelyn helps to solve the murder of her friend's father. She works with bloodstains, footprints and fingerprints then makes some solid deductions from these clues. Unless Evelyn started charging for her detective work in her second recorded case, which I doubt, she really should not be on this list but I'm leaving her on because I like the character and because In the Night was a well-written, early Golden Age mystery which deserves to be rescued from obscurity. Updated 2/2023.
1918 Solange Fontaine (Mrs) F(ryniwyd Wynifried Margaret) Tennyson Jesse (Harwood)
aka Fryn Jesse aka F. Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958)
Location: France
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: na
Type: Softboiled (but does sometimes carry a gun) Literary Classification: GAD & Supernatural & Psych Suspense
Comments: Solange seems to accept payment for her services so I believe she should be on this list. According to Michael Grost there is an uncollected group of short stories from 1918, a second group of stories collected and published in 1929 called The Solange Stories, and an uncollected story from 1930. The stories are well written with coherent plots and well developed characters. Mike Grost compares Jess's style to that of Somerset Maugham's. Solange claims to have the ability to sense the presence of evil.
What follows are my thoughts after reading all the Solange stories that were collected and published in 2014:
Solange Fontaine was the daughter of Englishwoman Emily Manningtree-Trent (of a respectable Sussex family) and Dr./Professor Fontaine, a Frenchman who was a police forensic scientist (crime scene blood, dust, hairs, etc. just like R. A. Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke) employed by the French Surete and sometimes consulted by Scotland Yard. In the early stories it is not clear exactly what type of medical/scientific work Dr. Fontaine does. In the later stories he is more clearly shown as a forensic scientist. Solange works in her father’s lab(s) as his assistant (she is expert in fingerprints, poisons and metric (crime scene?) photography. Solange is also, somehow, qualified to defend clients in French court so she appears to be an “avocet” or roughly the equivalent of an English barrister (also like Dr. Thorndyke). She considers herself a criminal anthropologist, being a follower to a certain degree of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) the Italian criminologist, some of whose theories, like the “born criminal” distinguishable by various physical traits, were eventually rejected by later science. A more modern description of Solange would be along the lines of a criminal psychologist or a criminal profiler. She claimed to be able to sense or detect “hidden evil” in people and places. The stories demonstrate that this special sense, although it sometimes misleads her, never fails her. She was technically employed by the French police (and like her father often consulted with Scotland Yard) but she did occasional freelance detective work, sometimes for a fee, sometimes gratis. She is about 30 years old in the 1918-19 stories and several years older in the 1929 stories. Solange lived in many places while growing up including England, France and various West Indies (or Caribbean) islands. As an adult she traveled to the US and numerous other foreign countries. The settings for the stories are Paris, Southern France, England and a few Caribbean islands. She is pursued by an American journalist stationed in Europe in most of the 1918-19 stories. She eventually advises the journalist to look elsewhere for love because she felt she would lose her unique “gift” if she married (or lost her virginity, I’m not sure which). By rebuffing her suitor Solange resolves the mystery plot vs. marriage plot dilemma posed by K. G. Klein. Solange doesn't need to worry that one will impinge on the other in the later stories. Solange is fluent in both French and English but seems more at home in France. She is described a pretty (not beautiful) petite woman with blondish or very light brown hair which she always wears in a short cut. She smokes cigarettes and occasionally caries a small pistol when she knows she will be in a perilous situation. She is described as having a slim boyish figure and is athletic since she plays tennis and can scramble up a rope when necessary. Solange, like E. Phillips Oppenheim’s detective the Baroness Clara Linz, is very cosmopolitan. People who are worried about a crime or a potential crime seem to want to confide in her.
Doug Greene’s introduction to the 2014 edition is very informative. I do take issue with his classification of Solange as an “Occult’ or ‘Supernatural” detective similar to William Hope Hodgson’s character Carnacki (The Ghost Finder). Solange does not actively seek out occult or supernatural situations, she is more along the lines of a psychic or clairvoyant detective who comes across evil almost by chance. Jesse’s stories, to me, are more similar to E. C. Bentley’s Philip Trent (note that Solange's mother's maiden name was Trent) stories combined with Agatha Christie’s Harley Quinn stories. Jesse varies the occult/supernatural content greatly from story to story.
Jesse led a surprisingly full life, making contributions to fiction, true crime writing and journalism, despite suffering from morphine addiction (due to the aftermath of a horrible hand injury from an airplane propeller accident), severe migraines and intense mood swings. Her family life was, to say the least, unusual. “Fryn” Jesse was a grandniece of British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).
The stories are listed below as they appear in The Compleat Adventures of Solange Fontaine published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 2014 (with magazine publication dates noted). The version of the book I read has one glaring typo...on an inside title page the author's name is misspelled as Jessie instead of Jesse. The stories are best read in the order published in the book rather than the chronological order of first magazine publication dates:
“Emma-Brother and Susie-Brother” (11/1918) set in and around Nice
“The Green Parrakeet” (12/1918) set in and around Nice
“Mademoiselle of the Mantles” (8/1918) Marseilles & Martinique, very racist story
“The Lovers of St. Lys” (2/1919) hills above Nice
“The Mother’s Heart” (3/1919) Paris, Cuba, Martinique, Trinidad & Barbados
“What Happened at Bout-du-Monde” (4/1919) St Martin?
“The Sanatorium” (6/1919) Nice & vicinity
“The Pedlar” (12/1929) London & Sussex?
“The Reprieve” (10/1929) London & Sussex?
“The Canary” (8/1929) London
“Lot’s Wife” (11/1929) Nice, London, Isle of Wright, Paris, Cannes
“The Black Veil” (9/1929) St. Tropez/St. Raphael vicinity & Draguignan
“The Railway Carriage” (11/1931) Sussex?
1918 Barbara "Baddie" Pretlow Arthur Stringer (1874-1950)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: The Locke Agency
Type: medium?
Comments: Appeared in The House of Intrigue. Baddie is a former criminal then a detective then a criminal again. Kathleen G. Klein describes this book as a "non-detective crime and mystery story."
1919? Lucille Dare Marie Connor Leighton (1865-1941)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: Soft Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975) notes that Lucille is a mistress of disguise and has
been involved in many cases, most are unrecorded. Appeared in Lucile Dare, Detective. Maybe she is an ancestor of M. G. Eberhart's writer/detective Susan Dare? The novel seems to be a Victorian Sensation Novel but Leighton wrote it 18 or so years after Victoria's death and 8 years after Edward VII's death. Writing style is very similar to that of M E Braddon and the early Lawrence L Lynch (see above)----overwrought and melodramatic compared to the styles of F Tennyson Jessie and Geraldine Bonner (see above) and Mary Roberts Rinehart, each of whom were writing in a more modern style.
1920 Millie Lynn Rawson Cecil L. Bullivant
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Type: Soft
Comments: Appeared in Millie Lynn, Shop Investigator along with Ken Rawson, whom she will eventually marry.
1920 Shiela Crerar Ella M. Scrymsour (1888-1962) born: Ella Mary Campbell-Robertson
married name: Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol
acted under the name: Joan Thorpe-Mayne
Location: Scotland & London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Psychic, Supernatural, Occult
Comments: Appeared in six short stories published in The Blue Magazine over several months in 1920. Twenty-two year-old Sheila …”was a petite maid, with nut-brown hair and grey eyes.” Orphaned at a very young age, she was taken in and raised by a kindly uncle who lived in the Scottish highlands. Her idyllic childhood/girlhood ended when her uncle died of an unexpected heart attack. It turned out her inheritance consisted only of the heavily mortgaged house she had lived in for most of her life. Refusing to sell her beloved home, she entered into a five year lease with a rich American widow. Shiela then traveled to London intending to find employment so she could earn enough money to lift the mortgage. Unable to find a job (I guess the ability to play golf, ride horses, play the piano and sing were not in great demand in London in 1920) she had a vision (she always suspected she had the second-sight) to use her psychic abilities to help people and make money. She took out an ad in The Times as follows “Lady of gentle birth, Scottish, young, penniless, possessing strong psychic powers, will devote her services to the solving of uncanny mysteries or the laying of ghosts...” Fortuitously, Shiela's first case takes her back to Scotland where she manages to make a decent living solving numerous mysteries involving ghosts, demons and werewolves over the next five years while living in rented rooms in Edinburgh. She eventually saves enough money to pay off the mortgage and move back into her childhood home in the Highlands with her new husband. The stories are run-of-the-mill descriptions of ghosts and visions and hauntings and strange deaths and ancient Scottish curses. These stories lack the beautiful writing and interesting plots of the Solange Fontaine stories by F Tennyson Jesse (see 1918 entry above). Interestingly, Jesse and Scrymsour are almost exact contemporaries: both born in 1888 and dying within four years of each other. I wonder if they ever met? Shiela does show plenty of courage and moxie in her adventures but the author's writing style seems dated, even for 1920. Scrymsour was an actress and playwright and in addition to these ghost stories also wrote science-fiction/fantasy books and romance type novels. In 2006 Ash-Tree Press published in hardcover these six ghost stories under the title Shiela Crerar, Psychic Investigator. In 2021 Wild Side Press published the six stories as an ebook titled The Adventures of Shiela Crerar, Psychic Detective. If you are in the mood, Shiela’s adventures can be read HERE.
1922 Prudence "Tuppence" L. Beresford (nee, Cowley) Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner?
Name of Agency: International Detective Agency aka International Detective Bureau aka
Blunt's Brilliant Detectives***
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Thriller, Espionage, GAD
Comments: Tuppence is the daughter of a clergyman who joins the Voluntary Aid Detachment and serves as a nurse/military driver during WWI. At the war's end she meets up with a childhood friend (Tommy Beresford) and begins her on again-off again adventures in espionage and detection. She appeared in five books:
The Secret Adversary 1922
Partners in Crime 1929
N or M 1941
By the Pricking of My Thumbs 1968
Postern of Fate 1973
Although Christie gives conflicting clues as to age, I believe Tuppence is about 22 and Tommy is about 23 in their first book in which the action takes place in 1919. Tuppence is in her mid or late 20s in Partners in Crime and is described as a small, dark-haired women. The book contains 14 linked short stories wherein Christie attempts to satirize popular fictional detective of the past and current eras. Some of the stories are pure thrillers others contain some decent detection. Christie intends Tuppence to be a charming character and she succeeds in that goal. Tuppence assumes the identity of confidential secretary, Miss Robinson, to husband Tommy who has taken on the persona of the former owner, Theodore Blunt. Tommy's employer, the Secret Service, finds it expedient to have one of their agents and his clever wife pretend to run the agency in order to catch some spies. The couple do eventually help capture the spies but along the way they solve some interesting mysteries and collect fees for their efforts. Christie gives her readers a pleasant surprise at the end of the book which puts a temporary halt to Tuppence's taste for action and adventure.
***In my Dell paperback edition printed in Feb. 1967 Christie unaccountably changes the name of the detective agency from International Detective Agency to International Detective Bureau in the last couple of stories. Blunt's Brilliant Detectives is really just the agency's slogan but I like it as the real name.
1923 Sylvia Shale Mrs Sydney Groom
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Pemberthy's
Type: softboiled?
Comments: 25 year old daughter of a former Scotland Yard detective. Came to New York to make a name for herself. Appeared in Detective Sylvia Shale.
1927 Katherine "Kitty" Alexandra Climpson Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Middle-aged spinster appearing in at least two Lord Peter Wimsey stories: Unnatural Death and
Strong Poison. She's the owner of the secreterial/detective agency nicknamed "the Cattery" that Lord Peter helped to set up mainly so he could employ her investigative abilities on an "as needed" basis. Often Kitty deploys one of her employees on a case but sometimes she goes undercover herself to help Lord Peter.
1928 Miss Maud Silver Patricia Wentworth psd of Dora Amy Dillom, nee Elles (1878-1961)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Elderly spinster turns to PI work to supplement her retirement income after a career as a governess and schoolteacher. Author had an interesting publishing history. She published 6 non-mystery novels between 1910 & 1915 then 25 crime novels between 1923 & 1936, one featuring Miss Silver (Grey Mask, 1928). Further on then she published 32 crime novels between 1937 & 1961, 31 of them featuring Miss Silver. Since Christie's Miss Marple and Wentworth's Miss Silver both first appeared in print in the late 1920s, I wonder who influenced who or if both authors realized their characters independent of the other? Also, why did Miss Marple go on to much greater publishing success than Miss Silver. Wentworth seems to have been just as good a writer (and a slightly better stylist) than Christie. Was Christie a far superior plotter? Perhaps Miss Marple was able to at least partially ride on Poirot's coattails whereas Wentworth's failure to create an additional strong detective character hurt Miss Silver's chances of greater success? I welcome correction on the above numbers and dates from Wentworth fans.
Quote from The New Thrilling Detective website: "Lighter reading, and populated with mostly female characters (and of course the star-crossed young lovers whose romance was endangered until Miss Silver saves the day), this series became so popular in the United States that this British author’s primary publisher was in Philadelphia."
Carol Westron wrote a wonderful piece comparing Miss Silver and Miss Marple on the Promoting Crime blog back in 2014: Click HERE to read it.
1928 Lynn MacDonald Kay Cleaver Strahan (1888-1941)
Location: American West especially Oregon
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Appeared in seven books between 1928 & 1936, the first and perhaps the best being The Desert Moon Mystery (1928). She was tall with reddish hair and gray eyes. This info taken from The Thrilling Detective site owned by Kevin Burton Smith with much of the info supplied by John Norris.
1931 Yola Yates C(ecil?) B(oyd?) Yorke
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: According to Erika Janik in Pistols and Petticoats, Yola owns her own agency in "Hot Numbers" in the May 1931 issue of Gangster Stories, a 3rd tier pulp magazine. I do not know if this was her only appearance in print. I can find almost no information on C. B. Yorke other than this was likely a psd. He or she created a more well known character, Queen Sue, a tough, smart gun moll who sometimes headed her own gang and sometimes worked alone. I count several Queen Sue stories in the "gangster" pulps, mostly in the early 1930s. Yorke also created another character, Velma Dare (maybe a relative of Eberhart's Susan Dare?) who apparently was framed and fell into the gangster life. I have not yet been able to read a copy of "Hot Numbers".
1932? Baroness Clara Linz E(dward) Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of agency: Advice Limited
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage & GAD
Comments: She is English by birth, Austrian by marriage, glamorous and cosmopolitan. Seems to be a
widow at the time of the stories. Exotic foreigners are prominent. Sometimes pretends to be the agency's secretary rather than its owner for no apparent reason other than to keep her connection to the agency a secret? Clientel is drawn mostly from the upper classes and nobility. The Baroness is more mature and thoughtful (and a better detective) than Oppenheim's other female PI, Miss Mott, (see below). Here is a listing of her recorded cases:
"Thirty-Nine Wooden Boxes"
"An Olympian Debacle"
"Broken Engagements"
"Too Many Dukes"
"The Ritz Hotel Conference"
"Between the 8th Green and the 9th Tee" aka "The Ranelagh Mystery"
"Help for Mr. Goldman"
"The Lonely Man"
"A Family Understanding"
"The Listening Lady"
"A Gift from the Gods"
Some of these stories were published (possibly with editorial changes) in the American slick magazines Ladies' Home Journal and Women's Home Companion in 1933 & 1934 according to Project Gutenberg Australia. Clara is wooed by a Spanish nobleman through most of the stories and eventually accepts his marriage proposal, after helping to restore his family fortune. Clara smokes cigarettes, rides horses, plays golf and is considered quite beautiful.
1933 Madame Rosika Storey Hulbert Footner (1879-1944)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Pulp? & HIBK?
Comments: Beautiful and aloof. Her secretary/narrator/companion is Bella Brickley (who has curly red hair). Rosika lives near Gramercy Park in NYC and has a pet monkey. She seems to solve cases by use of good guesswork, "practical psychology" and fortuitous prior knowledge of certain facts or people. The stories don't appear to aspire to play fair with the reader. Bella Brickley has to be the most fawning narrator in all of detective fiction. By comparison, she makes Bunny Manders seem almost arrogant toward Raffles. Although the stories are by no means silly, some of Rosika's actions and attitudes seem quite silly to a modern reader, though certainly not to Bella.
1933 Olga Knaresbrook Hazel Campbell
Location: England?
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments:
1933 Trixie Meehan T T Flynn
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Blaine Agency
Type: medium boiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: A spunky Lois Lane type; usually paired with fellow agent Mike Harris.
1934 Grace "Redsie" Culver Roswell Brown (aka Jean Francis Webb)
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Noonan Agency
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: She is the nominal secretary/assistant to "Big" Tim Noonan. Her sometime sidekick is
Jerry Riker.
1934 Peggy Fairfield E(loise) S Liddon (1897- ?)
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification; GAD & Scientific/Medical
Comments: Appeared in The Riddle of the Russian Princess (1934) and The Riddle of the Florentine Folio (1935). According to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women, Peggy was a student of criminology and used scientific methods.
1935 Miss Lucie Mott E Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Mott's Enquiry Agency
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Appeared in Ask Miss Mott (1936) based upon a series of magazine stories published in 1935 Most of the stories are of the Romantic/Adventure/Thriller type. Only one or two feature actual detection. Miss Mott writes an advice column for a weekly (or bi-weekly) London women's magazine. She is sort of a combination Ann Landers and Martha Stewart. With the help of her uncle, who is a Scotland Yard detective, she decides to open an investigation agency almost on a whim. Kathleen Gregory Klein describes Miss Mott as "An ineffective detective without any ethical code and a romantic fool with a craving for excitement." Ouch. Although the stories were written in 1935 they almost seem to be taking place in 1895 (minus all the cars and telephones). Miss Mott has to be rescued from criminals by either her uncle or her quasi-criminal boyfriend in many of the stories. Her clientel is drawn mostly from the lower and middle classes. Lucie does sometimes carry a small pistol and she is not afraid of to use it. Here is a listing of the stories (with alternate titles) as described by Project Gutenberg Australia:
"Ask Miss Mott"---magazine & ebook book title
"Burglars Must Dine"---book title, "Dinner Without Masks"---magazine title, "Miss Mott Intervenes"---alt title
"The Magic Popgun"---magazine & book title
"Noah's Ark"---book title, "The House of Dread"---magazine title
"Buttercups and Daisies"---book title, "Behind Barred Doors"---magazine title
"The House by the River"---magazine & book title
"Lost Miss Greene"---no magazine publication, the only "pure" detective story in the series
"Meredith Walks Out"---book title, "Against Orders"---magazine title
"Marconi Saves Miss Mott"---book title, "First Catch the Girl"---magazine title
"The Terrified Wife"---book title, "The Other Letter"---magazine title
"Informers Still Pay"---book title, "Settled Out of Jail"---magazine title
Project Gutenberg Australia has some nice illustrations by Floyd M Davis that appeared in Collier's Magazine.
1935 Violet McDade Cleve F(ranklin) Adams (1895-1949)
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: McDade & Alverado Detective Agency
Type: hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: Her partner is Nevada Alverado, who apparently is a very attractive woman.
1936 Sarah Watson D B McCandless
Location: Midwest US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Watson Detective Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: Heavy-set, middle-aged widow. "Young" Ben Todd is her assistant. Based in a small town. Prototype for Bertha Cool?
1937 Carrie Cashin Theodore Tinsley
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Cash & Carry Detective Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: Beautiful and dangerous. Aleck Burton poses as her boss for "appearances".
1937 Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner Rex Stout (1886-1975)
Location: US, NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Partner then Owner?
Name of Agency: Bonner & Raffrey, Inc. then later Bonner Detective Agency, Incorporated
Type: MediumBoiled Literary Classification: GAD?
Comments: Twenty-four year old upper class woman falls on hard times so starts a detective agency to earn a living. Sally Colt aka Sally Corbett is one of her agents. Appeared in one novel of her own, one Tecumseh Fox novel and several Nero Wolfe adventures (most notably "Too Many Detectives").
Dol's agency is initially located on the 32nd floor of a fancy Park Avenue office building near 47th Street. Her extremely wealthy best friend, Sylvia Raffray, provided the initial $9,000+ seed money to start Dol in the PI business.
Dol's detecting style and personality is most similar to Gale Gallagher (1947), Sharon McCone (1978) and Anna Peters (1980); serious-minded, thoughtful and courageous when necessary. She is described as having light brown hair, caramel-colored eyes, long coal-black eyelashes with a narrow, attractive face. She has a younger brother in her first book but I don't think he is mentioned again in her later appearances. Dol states in so many words that she is really "down" on men and currently has little interest in a romantic relationship with any man. Her mother died when Dol was young and her father later lost his fortune via stock market gambling and subsequently committed suicide which not only forced Dol out of the leisure class but also out of high society circles (except for a few of her closest friends). Dol's was dumped by her fiance once she became penniless. What a nice guy! Oh, by the way, the man attempting to date Dol in The Hand in the Glove eventually admits that he was only feigning interest in her in order to get closer to her richer, more attractive best friend . . . no wonder Dol doesn't like men.
Here is a list of Dol's appearances in print:
1937.....The Hand In the Glove aka Crime on Her Hands (her own novel)
Slow-paced murder mystery with most of the action taking place on a country estate in Connecticut, not too far from NYC. Stout creates a cast of mostly affluent characters with motives and opportunities to kill an industrialist but provides none of them with a solid alibi. Dol makes some good deductions concerning the murder method and is able to find a key piece of evidence using her keen observational skills. The plot, told in third-person narration, is no better or worse than a mediocre Nero Wolfe plot. The primary weakness of this book is the absence of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. Because Archie is not telling this story, snappy dialogue, breezy narration and humor are all absent. Had Stout condensed this wordy novel into a shorter novella format he would have made this a better story instead of the somewhat dull and meandering read it actually is. While the Dol Bonner character is serious, intelligent and courageous she is not strong enough to carry a full-length novel unless Stout provides her with a first-rate plot. He did not do so in this story. Even the presence of Nero Wolfe foil, NYC police Inspector Cramer, in some of the late chapters did not add any spark to the story. Most of the characters are unhappy people with serious romantic and psychological problems of their own creation . . . and this was all before any murders occurred. Interesting note: Stout two years later used a similar setting/family situation in his Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar.
1940.....Bad For Business (Tecumseh Fox novel): Have not yet read this one. I believe one of Dol's four female ops in this story is a very young and inexperienced Amy Duncan.
1956....."Too Many Detectives" (Nero Wolfe novella)
By 1956 Dol's agency has grown from two operatives in 1937 to four full time salaried ops and seven on-call free-lancers. Her wealthy original partner, Sylvia Raffray, seems to have departed the scene and Dol has moved her office from expensive Park Avenue to a more sensibly priced location on 50th Street near Madison Avenue. Sally Colt is her top op and women make up the majority of her staff (two of four full time and four of seven part time). Dol actually supplants Archie as Wolfe's #1 in this story as Wolfe solves a murder after being summoned to Albany as part of a state-wide investigation into wire-tapping abuses by New York's licensed private investigators. Archie mentions that Dol "is about my age" and Sally is a few years younger than he is. Since Dol was 24 in 1937 does that make her and Archie 43 in this story? Or, does Dol now fully enter the Wolfe/Goodwin "we don't really age" universe which would make her probably 34 or so.
1957.....If Death Ever Slept (Nero Wolfe novel)
A wealthy business man, who suspects his daughter-in-law of numerous nefarious actions, hires Wolfe to get the goods on her. Late in the novel Wolfe realizes he needs a canny female PI to find the key piece of evidence. Dol and her assistant, Sally Colt, do not disappoint and Wolfe collects his fee (presumably sharing some of it with Dol). Much to Archie and Fritz's surprise, Wolfe invites Dol to a private breakfast strategy session in his bedroom. Would like to have been a fly on the wall that morning in the old brownstone.
1959.....Plot It Yourself (Nero Wolfe novel)
A group of authors, dramatists, publishers and literary agents hire Wolfe to discover who is behind a complicated scheme to extract large amounts of money from publishers and authors based upon questionable but serious plagiarism claims. Early in the book Wolfe hires Dol and Saul Panzer to search two Greenwich Village apartments for a damaging piece of evidence. Then starting about midway into the book Dol and her main op, Sally Corbett***, aid the investigation further by performing various other detective type tasks for Wolfe. They each have several lines of dialogue and are both present in the old Brownstone for the climactic final scene when Wolfe names the murderer. Archie describes Dol this way: "...the only female owner and operator of a detective agency in New York."
***Stout changes the name of Sally Colt to Sally Corbett in this story. Did Stout just forget the last name of this minor but continuing character or had Sally gotten married between her last appearance in 1957 and this appearance in 1959. Archie just skims over this apparent name change as both he and Wolfe refer to Sally as Miss Corbett (not Mrs. Corbett or Miss Colt) throughout the story. Since Stout supplies no explanation I will supply my own: Sally did get married in 1958 but was widowed or divorced shortly thereafter. Either for professional or sentimental reasons, Sally prefers to keep her married name instead of reverting back to her maiden name of Colt.
1963.....The Mother Hunt (Nero Wolfe novel)
Wolfe needs a female op for a specific job and Archie chooses Dol Bonner's best op--Sally Corbett (nee Colt). Sally performs satisfactorily and helps Wolfe track down the missing mother of a mystery baby left on a young widow's doorstep. Archie foregoes his usual flirting with Sally either because she is now married and/or because he is currently romantically involved with client Lucy Valdon. Maybe Lucy should have hired Dol and Sally at the get-go because it takes Wolfe more than two months and more than $14,000 of Lucy's money to solve the case. Dol has moved her agency office yet again, this time from 50th Street near Madison Avenue to somewhere on 45th Street. Although Dol is mentioned, she does not actually appear in this story. Sally enters the plot about 60% into the novel and exits at about the 67% mark.
1938 Mary Carner Zelda F Popkin (1898-1983)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Blankfort's
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Department Store Dick. That's how Sharon McCone got her start---guarding dresses.
1938 Carole Trevor Hugh Pentecost (aka Judson P Phillips)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Old Towne Detective Agency
Type: medium boiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: She is assisted by her ex-husband, Maxwell Blythe.
1939 Anna Halsey Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Pulp?
Comments: Anna was a 240 pound middle-aged woman who ran a high-class detective agency in Los Angeles. She sub-contracts Philip Marlowe in "Trouble is My Business" to persuade/force a dangerous gambler's moll to "get her hooks out of a rich man's son." Anna's agency is too genteel to soil its hands with any rough stuff so she farms this perilous job out to Marlowe. Anna's receptionist/secretary is a tall beautiful blonde named Gladys who was "worth eighteen grand a year in divorce business" to Anna's agency. Anna gets very upset when Marlowe tries to date Gladys. Was that because Anna feared a loss of income if Gladys was unavailable for "honeypot" duty or was it because Anna was sweet on Gladys? Although Anna debued about the same time as two other fat female detectives, Sarah Watson (see above) and Bertha Cool (see below), Anna dressed very stylishly as opposed to the more slovenly appearance of these other two plus-size PI's. I wonder if Anna Halsey appeared in any other Chandler stories?
1939 Bertha Cool Earle Stanley Gardner, writing as A. A. Fair (1889-1970)
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: B Cool Confidential Investigations
Type: hardboiled Literary Classification: Comic, GAD?
Comments: Plus-size widow starts detective agency to earn a living. She is greedy and unethical.
Her junior partner is Donald Lamb who does all the legwork and much of the thinking. Cool and Lam appeared in 29 novels between 1939 and 1970.
1939 Hilea Bailey Hilea Bailey (psd of Ruth Lenore Marting)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification:
Comments: Appeared in What Night Will Bring (1939), Give Thanks to Death (1940), The Smiling Corpse (1941), Breathe No More, My Lady (1946). Worked for her disabled father and sometimes with boyfriend/newspaperman, Jake Jones. Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women classifies Hilea as more of a narrator/assistant than independent investigator.
1940 Amanda & Lutie Beagle Torrey Chanslor
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owners
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: GAD & Comic?
Comments: The Beagle sisters inherit a detective agency from their brother Ezekiel. Their neice,
Mary?Martha?Marthy? Meecham narrates and Jeff Mahoney "does some of the legwork and all of the heavy lifting"
per T & E Schantz. The author was a children's book illustrator.
1941 Jean Abbott Frances Crane
Location: SF
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner?
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: Pulp-Influenced
Comments: Former New Mexico shopkeeper marries a San Francisco based PI (Patrick "Pat" Abbott) and
assists him on some of his cases. According to Victoria Nichols & Susan Thompson in Silk Stalkings (1988)
this series of 26 books leans more to HIBK school than mean streets but Mike Grost considers her better classified as pulp-influenced.
1943 Miss Grace Pomeroy Anna Mary Wells (1906-2003)
Location: NYC?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Keene Agency
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Appeared as a secondary character/assistant in the first and third of three novels written by Wells in the 1940's. Grace was a former teacher who became a nurse to a psychiatrist, Dr. Hillis Owen. Grace acts as sort of a Della Street to her doctor boss and aids his investigation into after-effects of a murder case in the first book, A Talent for Murder (1942). While Dr. Owen is away in military service, Grace gets a job with a detective agency and on her own solves her second case in Murderer's Choice (1943). Grace apparently has a very minor role in the author's third mystery novel, Sin of Angels (1948). J F Norris on his site Pretty Sinister Books has a detailed review of Murderer's Choice showing the front & back covers of the Dell Mapback edition. CLICK HERE TO VIEW IT
1947 Gale Gallagher Gale Gallagher (aka Will Oursler & Margaret Scott)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Acme Investigating Bureau, G. K. Gallagher, principal.
Type: medium-boiled Literary Classification: Pulp & HIBK
Comments: Skip Tracer/PI. Maybe a precursor of Stephanie Plum (minus the smart mouth and kookie family)? Appeared in I Found Him Dead (1947) and Chord in Crimson (1949). Patsy Higgins (a young Brooklyn woman) is her secretary/assistant. Gale learned her investigative skills from her father, a NYC policeman who was killed in the line of duty when Gale was a teenager. Gale's mother had died in childbirth. Gale was educated in a convent boarding school. She is described as having light reddish brown hair and being about thirty or so years old in her first recorded case. Her agency's office is located on Fifth Avenue, no cross street mentioned but I gather that it must be in the Midtown area between 34th and 59th Streets). She lives in an apartment in the West Fifties, the northernmost section of the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood (which is now called Clinton by some residents). Gale is very concerned with fashion. She is constantly describing how she dresses and the reasoning behind each choice of outfits. Gale often re-freshens her make-up but she does carry a gun and thinks nothing of scrambling up fire escapes and trespassing to advance her investigations so her adventures were not solely aimed at a female readership. She acquires a handsome boyfriend in her first recorded case and my understanding is that she is still involved with him in her second case. Gale wears a lot of different hats during her investigations, not as part of various disguises but because they go along with all her different fashion outfits. She also smokes cigarettes and drinks hard liquor, in moderation. Oursler and Scott copied the Ellery Queen technique of pretending that the character's name is also the author's name.
1949 Miriam Birdseye Nancy Spain (1917-1964)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Birdseye et Cie - detectives
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Comic
Comments: Miriam was a former actress turned detective according to Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind.
Appeared in 6 books:
Death Goes on Skis 1949
Poison For Teacher 1949
Cinderella Goes to the Morgue aka Minutes to Midnight 1950
R in the Month 1950
Not Wanted on Voyage 1951
Out, Damned Tot 1952
Spain was a British celebrity journalist who also wrote books about other detective characters besides Miriam and wrote at least 10 non-fiction books. Spain supposedly based Miriam's looks and personality on actress Hermione Gingold. K. G. Klein describes Miriam this way "...does very little detecting; she is too busy being clever and zany." Apparently Miriam opened her detective agency on a whim. Nancy Spain (and several others) were killed in an airplane crash while traveling to cover the 1964 Grand National horse race taking place near Liverpool.
1950 Eli? Donovan James L Rubel
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification: Paperback Original?
Comments: Appeared in No Business for a Lady.
1955 Mavis Seidlitz Alan Geoffrey Yates (aka Carter Brown)
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Secretary then op then partner then lone?
Name of Agency: Johnny Rios Detective Agency or Rio Detective Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Paperback Original
Comments: Dizzy blonde bombshell. Prolific author wrote over 200 books using at least eight detective protaganists of which Mavis was the only woman, I think. As far as I can determine she appeared in 12 books between 1955 and 1974 as follows:
Honey, Here's Your Hearse (1955)
A Bullet for My Baby (1955)
Good Morning, Mavis (1957)
The Loving and the Dead (1959)
None But the Lethal Heart (1959)
Tomorrow Is Murder (1960)
Lament For a Lousy Lover (1960)
Murder Wears a Mantilla (1962, orig pub 1957 without Mavis)
The Bump and Grind Murders (1964)
Siedlitz and the Super-Spy (1967)
Murder Is So Nostalgic (1972)
And the Undead Sing (1974)
1956 Miss Flora Hogg Austin Lee (aka John Austwick, Julian Callender) 1904-1965
Location: England?
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: Ex-school-mistress according to Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975). Miss Hogg appeared
in nine books between 1955 and 1963.
1957 Honey West G G Fickling (aka Gloria & Forrest Fickling)
Location: LA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Paperback Original
Comments: Combines Marilyn Monroe's looks with Emma Peel's athleticism. Inherited father's
detective agency. Boyfriend/sidekick is Johnny Doom?
1959 Marla Trent Henry Kane (aka Anthony McCall, Kenneth R McKay, Mario J Segola)
Location: NYC b 1918
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency: Marla Trent Enterprises
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Paperback Original
Comments: Beauty & brains; sometimes paired with Peter Chambers. Appeared in Private Eyeful (1959) & Kisses of Death (1962) according to Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling Detective website.
1972 Cordelia Gray P D James (1920-2014)
Location: London aka Phyllis Dorothy James
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Pryde's Agency
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: 22 year old woman with an unusual childhood upbringing inherits a detective agency from
her friend and former business partner. Appeared in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982). James's other detective character, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector and later Commander Adam Dalgleish, has small but important appearances in both of Cordelia's novels and she is occasionally mentioned in some of Dalgleish's novels. There were two different British TV series according to Wikipedia, one in 1982 and the other 1997-2001. I wish James had written more adventures featuring Cordelia. She was an appealing character and an important figure in the history of female private detectives.
1973 Nicole "Nikki" Sweet Fran Huston (psd of Ron S Miller) b 1936
Location: Calif?
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification:
Comments: Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975) notes that Nicole is a cop's daughter who seems to
be a female version of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Appeared in The Rich Get It All (1973). K. G. Klein says that Nicole herself is an ex-cop.
1974 Delilah West Maxine O'Callaghan (1937- )
Location: So Calif
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: West & West Investigations
Type: hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Former LAPD policewoman starts detective agency with her husband (also ex-LAPD) and then carries on
after his death. Delilah was a swimmer and gymnast in college. The prototype for all realistic, post-feminist era hardboiled female PI's? After husband Jack dies, Delilah eventually changes name of her agency to West Investigations. Her office is in the city of Santa Ana and most of her casework is based in Orange County, CA. One wonders how much more success would have come O'Callaghan's way had she finished and published the first Delilah West novel soon after the publication of the first Delilah West short story (1974). O'Callaghan would have then beaten Marcia Muller (see below) to the punch by about two years According to the Thrilling Detective website (which credits Victoria Esposito-Shea for her help) here is a list of Delilah's recorded cases:
1974-"A Change of Clients"-short story
1981-Death Is Forever-novel
1982-Run From the Nightmare-novel
1989-Hit and Run-novel
1991-Set-Up-novel
1994-"Bad News"-short story
1996-Trade-Off-novel
1997-Down for the Count-novel
????-"Deal With the Devil"-short short story
1998-"Diamonds Are For Never"-short story
????-"Somewhere South of Melrose"-short story
????-"Going to the Dogs"-short story
????-"Belling the Cat"-short short story
The four stories noted with question marks (instead of dates) appeared in Bad News and Trouble (Brash Books, 2014), the first complete collection of all seven of the Delilah West short stories. Ms. O'Callaghan wrote a one page introduction to this slim volume but only gives vague hints as to when each of the stories was written/first published. My guess is the undated stories were written in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Style-wise, O'Callaghan is closer to Grafton (minus the wisecracks) than to Muller or Paretsky, or is it more accurate to say that Grafton is closer to O'Callaghan than to Muller or Paretsky? Chicken or the egg? All four are wonderful detective story writers and I am a fan of them all.
1975 Angela Harpe James D Lawrence
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: African American PI. Former police officer, fashion model and call girl per Colleen A Barnett.
Appeared in four novels in 1975: The Dream Girl Caper, The Emerald Oil Caper, The Gilded Snatch Caper & The Godmother Caper. K. G. Klein considers the books as not much more than soft-core pornography. Kevin Burton on the Thrilling Detective website considers the series "racist, sexist, sadistic trash, etc."
1976 Madge L. Hatchett Lee McGraw
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/ Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary classification:
Comments: A female Mike Hammer? Appeared in one novel, Hatchett (1976) per Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling Detective website.
1976 Charity Bay Arthur Kaplan
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Charity's one recorded case was in the novel A Killing for Charity (1976). From what I read around the Internet Charity is a most unpleasant character. "Definitely more Honey West than Sharon McCone" according to Dale Stoyer & Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling Detective website. At least Honey was a sort of nice person. Charity seems to have been a real mean b_ _ _ _. I only include her here because of her potential historical importance. Maybe Charity can be grouped with Madge Hatchett and Angela Harpe (see both above) as a bad girl side-shoot of the 1970's Feminist-influenced realistic PIs as represented by Cordelia Gray, Delilah West, Sharon McCone, Anna Lee, Anna Peters, Kinsey & V. I.
1976 (more accurately 1980+) Edwina Charles (aka Adele Herrmann) Mignon Warner
Location: England?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Edwina is a 35 year-old, slim, attractive, blonde clairvoyant who has appeared in 14 books between 1976 and 2021. I believe that she became sort of a PI in the books published in the 1980s. The author is an Australian who now lives in the British Isles.
1977 Sharon McCone Marcia Muller (1944- )
Location: SF
Lone/Agent/Owner: First agent then owner
Name of Agency: All-Souls Legal Co-op then McCone Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced & Thriller/Rogue/Espionage in her later cases
Comments: First post 1970's feminist era realistic hardboiled female PI to appear in a novel written by a woman? Early job was in department store security----guarding dresses. Novels are uneven; short stories are generally top-notch. Novella, "The Broken Men" is a near masterpiece. Sharon is 5'6" (same height as Kinsey Millhone) and fairly athletic with straight black hair that gradually is turning gray as the series progresses. Thought she was more than 90% Scotch-Irish and a small % Native American but 2/3 into her series discovers she is 100% Native American (Shoshone). Muller is the best ss writer of the Big Four.
1978 Helen Keremos Eve Zaremba (1930- )
Location: Canada/US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: First lesbian PI? Appeared in six novels between 1978 and 1997 as follows: A Reason to Kill (1978), Work for a Million (1986), Beyond Hope (1987), Uneasy Lies (1990), The Butterfly Effect (1994) and White Noise (1997)
1978 Judith (never Judy) Eve Bernstein Singer Sharpe Susan Isaacs
Location: Long Island, NY
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: NA
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced & Comic
Comments: Really does not belong on this list because Judith Singer is technically an amateur sleuth (but she most likely did receive a $5,000 reward posted by a regional dental association for solving the murder of a local periodontist, so that does make her a professional, sort of). Judith has appeared in four recorded cases (two novels and two short stories) as follows: Compromising Positions (1978), "Compliments of a Friend" (2000), Long Time No See (2001) and "After Lunch" (2008?). Judith is a 34 year old suburban housewife and mother of two when the series begins and ages throughout the saga. She is a blunt-spoken, sharped-tongued, warm-hearted, intelligent Jewish woman who has managed to involve herself in four murder investigations that occurred in her Long Island bedroom community of Shorehaven, NY. Her indepth knowledge of the inhabitants and customs of her suburban community combined with a keen intelligence is what allowed her to solve these murders. She is usually aided in her investigations by three continuing characters; a sexy homicide detective, her best friend Nancy (who is a borderline alcoholic and serial adulterer) and her annoying, empty-headed friend, Mary Alice (nicknamed Malice). The stories are bitingly satiric and hilarious funny; the detection is not bad, either. I can only wish that Susan Isaacs would stop writing mainstream novels and concentrate on producing more Judith Singer tales. For more about Judith click HERE
1979 Anna Jugedinski Phyllis Swann
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Street smart former cop?
1979 Barbara Arenas Lourdes Ortiz
Location: Spain
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Sort of a female James Bond type in a Telenovela type story titled Picadura mortal (1979). The author was a well-respected mainstream writer in Spain but wrote this book as a rush job.
1979 Arlette Sauve van der Valk Davidson Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003)
Location: Strasbourg, France
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Arlette van der Valk, Counsel & Aid: Personal & Family Problems
Type: Softboiled? Literary Classifiction: 1970s-Feminist Influenced & Thriller
Comments: The widow of Dutch policeman Piet van der Valk has moved from Amsterdam to Strausbourg, in her native France, after tracking down her husband's killer. Her three children are grown and out of the house. Living fairly well on her widow's pension is not enough to cure empty nest syndrome. Arlette goes back to school and receives a degree in physical therapy (or perhaps she already had gotten this training in Holland). Helping mostly teenagers walk again after falling off motorbikes does not relieve her boredom. University professor Arthur Davidson, an Englishman who works for a European bureaucratic agency as a behavioral sociologist (he also has connections to Strasbourg University and the local police because criminal behavior is one of his specialties) meets the 50 year old Arlette as a patient then woos and marries her. He convinces her to open an Advice Bureau/quasi detective agency to better utilize her mental talents (and to aid him in his sociological research). Arlette receives the blessing of the local police commissioner, acquires a gun and some physical defense training, opens a consulting office in a partitioned-off section of the foyer to her and her husband's apartment, inserts ads in local papers and soon gains a few clients, some of whom actually pay her. Arlette is described as a tall, long-legged blonde (now going gray), hazel-eyed, plain-looking, with a somewhat voluptuous figure. She grew up in the South of France in a small town located between Marseilles and Toulon to a petit-bourgeois family. Her father was a struggling bookseller and an amateur linguist. She met Dutch policeman Piet van der Valk while attending university in Paris, married him and moved to Amsterdam where they had two sons and adopted a daughter. Besides French, Arlette speaks English, Dutch and some German and Spanish. In addition to appearing as a recurring secondary character in ten or more van der Valk novels she has appeared in three novels on her own as a detective character: The Widow (1979) and Arlette (1981). Arlette, although often argumentative, generally has a fairly easy-going personality and has realistic views of herself, marriage, child-rearing and her fellow human beings. Her first book features three cases which she resolves with varying degrees of success while facing some dangerous situations. It also tells the story of her difficult transition from widowhood to a second marriage. This book acts as almost a travelogue of her current home city of Strasbourg wherein Freeling describes the history and various neighborhoods of this not-quite-French, not-quite-German city situated a short distance from the Rhine River in eastern France. In her second book Arlette treads similar ground as her first. She takes on multiples cases and is able to resolve some of them reasonably well. One point where Arlette differs markedly from her contemporary PIs: Unlike Cordelia and Kinsey and Sharon and VI, Arlette rarely lies to further her investigations or to protect herself from danger. I count maybe two small lies in her first two books whereas Kinsey seems to almost gleefully tell a falsehood every twenty pages. Arlette also appeared as a secondary character in Lady Macbeth (1988) the 10th (of 16) book in Freeling's police detective Henri Castang series.
1979 Alison B. Gordon Walter Wager (1924-2004) aka John Tiger, Walter Herman, Lee Davis Willoughby
Location: Beverly Hills, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Gordon Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Espionage
Comments: Alison is a 5' 5" thirtysomething-year old widow with light brown hair, big brown eyes and a voluptuous figure. After college she was a CIA field agent for seven years in Africa, Vietnam and Thailand. She speaks five languages and is skilled with automatic weapons and knives. Her hobby is sculpting. She carries a .357 magnum, charges $400 a day plus expenses, smokes Sobranie cigarettes and drives a Porsche. Her agency, located on Wilshire Blvd near Rodeo Drive, has perhaps as many as twenty employees. She is clever, arrogant beautiful and ruthless. Alison has an older sister named Jan who lives in La Jolla with her husband and twin teenage daughters. Alison appeared in three books: Blue Leader (1979), Blue Moon (1981) and Blue Murder (1982).
These are not detective stories; they are action/adventure/espionage/thrillers. Alison is a Honey West/Emma Peel type heroine. Author Walter Wager wrote about thirty books between 1954 and 2002, nine of them novelizations of TV shows like I Spy and Mission Impossible under the psd. of John Tiger. The Alison Gordon books seemed to have been written with the aim of being sold to Hollywood but although Wager did not succeed in that goal three of his non-Alison Gordon novels were made into feature films: Viper Three (1975) was the basis for Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), Telefon (1975) was filmed as Telefon (1977) and 58 Minutes (1987) was adapted for film as Die Hard 2 (1990). These are plot-driven stories with plenty of action, large casts of characters but zero detection.
1980 Anna Lee Liza Cody
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Brierly Security
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Former cop. Works as a low level corporate drone for an agency that doesn't appreciate her skills.
Here is a list of Anna's novel-length cases:
Dupe (1980), Bad Company (1982), Stalker (1984), Head Case (1985), Under Contract (1987), Backhand (1991).
There was also a TV series in 1993.
1980 Anna Peters Janice Law aka Janice Law Trecker (1941 - )
Location: Washington DC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Executive Security
Type: Medium-boiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Anna Peters was featured in a nine-book series published between 1976 & 1997. Anna (a young woman with a somewhat shady background) worked for a big oil company as a researcher/troubleshooter in the first 3 books (1976-1978) and then went independent, opening her own investigation agency in the 4th book (The Shadow of the Palms) in 1980. The author aged Anna throughout the series. Had Ms. Law started Anna off as a PI in the first book, she would have beaten Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone to the punch by about a year or so. Law's writing style is very similar to Muller's. Anna Peters is a serious-minded woman just like Sharon McCone. Neither are prone to Kinsey Millhone-like wisecracks nor VI Warshawski-like over-the-top fearless recklessness. Both characters occasionally offer pointed social observations but are inclined to believe that most people have their faults and virtues and should generally be accepted for what they are (unless they commit serious crimes).
1981 Maggie Elliott Elizabeth Atwood Taylor
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Comments: Vassar grad appeared in 3 books between 1981 & 1992:
The Cable Car Murder 1981
Murder at Vassar 1987
The Northwest Murders 1992
1982 Kinsey Millhone Sue Grafton (1940-2017)
Location: So Calif
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: Millhone Investigations or Kinsey Millhone Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Former cop. Novels are generally strong, short stories vary in quality. Along with Marcia Muller
(see above) and Sara Paretsky (see below) author is considered among the "Big Three" of current female detective fiction writers.
Sadly, Ms. Grafton died in late December 2017. I enjoyed her work and thought she was the most consistent of the post-feminist era female PI writers. There will be no "Z" Kinsey Millhone mystery novel. Y is for Yesterday was Kinsey's last case. RIP Sue Grafton.
1982 V(ictoria) I(phigenia) Warshawski Sara Paretsky (1947- )
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: Warshawski Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Though author's short stories vary in quality, overall they are stronger than Grafton's but weaker than Muller's. Novels tend to show author's ultra liberal-leaning beliefs but storytelling is not hurt by this. Seems to write fewer but longer novels compared to Muller and Grafton. VI is 5'8" strong and athletic. Attended University of Chicago as an undergraduate on a basketball scholarship (power forward I imagine but I don't think U of Chicago had an intercollegiate woman's basketball team in the 1960s so I guess Vic attended college in the 1970s). Graduated from U of Chicago law school and worked in the Chicago public defender's office for a few years before becoming a PI. Was of Polish/Italian/Jewish heritage. Tends to specialize in white-collar and/or financial/corporate crimes. More strident and high-strung than her cousins West, McCone and Millhone.
1984 Kate Baeier Gillian Slovo (1952- )
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Lone: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Books are reported to be political/left-wing/progressive. Kate has appeared in five books:
Morbid Symptons (1984), Death by Analysis (1986), Death Comes Staccato (1988), Catnap (1994) and Close Call (1995) per Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website.
1985 Apol.lunia (Lunia) Guiu Maria Antonia Oliver
Location: Spain
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: More realistic and less sexual than other Spanish detective Barbara Arenas (see above). Appeared in Estudi en lila in 1985.
1986 Emma Victor Mary Wings (1949 - )
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 5 books between 1986 & 1998.
1987 Carlotta Carlyle Linda Joyce Appelblatt Barnes (1949- )
Location: Boston
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: 6" 1" red-haired ex-cop now PI/cab driver. Carlotta appeared in 12 novels between 1987 & 2009 and two SS between 1985 & 1996 according the Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website. Carlotta is, I believe, is at least partly the inspiration for the character, Tess Monagham (see 1997 entry below).
1987 Caitlin Reece Lauren Wright Douglas (1947- )
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in five books between 1987 & 1994.
1988 Claudia Valentine Marele Day
Location: Sydney, Australia
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled?
Comments: Appeared in 4 books between 1988 & 1994.
1988 Mavis Levack Marele Day
Location: Sydney, Australia
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: Softboiled
Comments: A spinoff from the Claudia Valentine series (see above). Mavis appeared in a series of SS mostly written in the 1990's.
1988 Meg Lacey Elisabeth Bowers
Location: Vancouver
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium-boiled?
Comments: Meg is a divorcee with 2 children. She specializes in missing child cases. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website describes Meg as " . . . an all-together appealing character, satisfyingly down to earth and easy to identify with." Why Bowers only wrote 2 books about Meg Lacey is a mystery in and of itself:
Ladies Night, 1988
No Forwarding Address, 1991
1988 Catherine Sayler Linda Grant aka Linda V. Williams aka Linda Verlee Williams (1942- )
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner then co-owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification: Thriller, 1970's Feminist-influenced
Comments: Catherine specializes in corporate security and white-collar crime according to the review posted on Amazon on 7/3/14 by Carl Brookins. Other online reviewers classify Catherine as a financial PI and/or a High-Tech PI. From my reading one book in the series I have gleaned the following info: Catherine is the daughter of a retired SFPD detective. Her ex-husband is a SFPD homicide detective. Her current live-in lover is also a PI with a separate business. Her office is located in a gracious Victorian house. 29 year-old Amy is her receptionist/secretary, Chris (female) is her assistant op, Jesse (an African-American man) is her partner. She keeps an office cat named McGee and a house cat named Touchstone. Grant/Williams wrote six novel-length adventures about Catherine, as follows:
Random Access Murder, 1988
Blind Trust, 1990
Love Nor Money, 1991
A Woman's Place, 1994
Lethal Genes, 1996
Vampire Bytes, 1998
Some Catherine Sayler short stories may also exist in anthologies published in the 1990's. The series seems to be written in the style of Muller/Paretsky. There is little humor in the narration or dialogue. Quite frankly, Catherine is sort of a "Debbie Downer" type. No wisecracks like Kinsey Millhone, no humorous situations line Stephanie Plum. I will try to read more of her books but A Woman's Place was not fairly clued. A typical reader will not be able to deduce the corporate prankster nor the poison email sender nor the killer from clues that the author provides in the story. Maybe Ms Grant did a better job in Catherine's other adventures.
1988? Kat Colorado Karen Kijewski (1943 - )
Location: Sacramento Calif.
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Appeared in 9 books between 1988 and 1998. Suspense seems to dominate over detection in this series.
Kat is 5'7" tall and once worked as a bartender.
1989 Clio Browne Delores Komo aka Dolores Komoroski
Location: St Louis
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Inherits her fathers PI agncy. Deceased husband was a cop. Appeared in only one book, Clio Browne, Private Investigtor in 1989. Clio was a middle-aged, African-American widow whose mother aids/hinders her investigations.
1989 Claire Conrad & Maggie Hill Melodie Johnson Howe (1943- )
Location: Los Angeles & NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium boiled? Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced?
Comments: Claire acts as the eccentric genius Nero Wolfe type and Maggie is the wiseacre Archie Goodwin type according to Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling detective website. Appeared in The Mother Shadow (1989) and Beauty Dies (1994).
After reading both books I have these comments:
Claire Conrad takes on the Nero Wolfe role as an eccentric private detective with a reputation for solving difficult cases. She is a 6-foot-tall, lean (not fat like Wolfe), blue-eyed, 50-something year old woman with silvery-white hair. Like Wolfe, Claire considers herself a genius and, on occasion, proves it. She was born in Pasadena but grew up in the great capitals of Europe so one assumes that her parents were involved in diplomatic service. Claire seems to have family wealth beyond what she earns from her sleuthing fees. Unlike Wolfe, Claire will travel about without major complaint when the situation calls for it. She always carries a fancy walking stick and considers herself an accomplished horsewoman. The death of her parents in a car explosion when she was young is the one mystery she has not been able to solve.
Maggie Hill plays the Archie Goodwin role. She is a 5' 6", 35-year-old divorcee who is Clair Conrad’s biographer and assistant. When the first book opens Maggie is an unsuccessful novelist, currently working temp jobs as a secretary/assistant to put food on the table. Her ex-husband is a LAPD detective. Like Archie, she was born in Ohio and eventually found her way to the big city (LA, not NY). Maggie has dark brown hair and eyes and full sensuous lips.
Boulton is Claire’s English butler/chauffeur/bodyguard who acts sort of like a combination of Fritz Brenner (Wolfe’s housekeeper/chef) and Saul Panzer (Wolfe’s best operative). Boulton will often help Maggie with her clue-gathering chores.
The Mother Shadow (1986) introduces Maggie to Claire and they investigate potential crimes involving a dysfunctional family who make Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald's fictional families seem like the Brady Bunch. Beauty Dies (1994), was a well-written yet somber murder mystery that explored the problems of inherited wealth, marriages of convenience, high fashion modeling/couture and the pornography industry. All the characters (including Clair and Maggie) are either depressed or unhappy or unfulfilled or dissatisfied with their lives. The book jacket of the edition I read had this to say
“. . . Claire Conrad and Maggie Hill answer Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with an original, witty, and distinctly female voice . . .” I agree with this description except for the word “witty”. There is little wit and virtually no humor in these books. Therein lies the key difference between Rex Stout and Melodie Johnson Howe . Stout usually imbued his Nero Wolfe stories with wit and humor and a certain joy/zest for life mainly exhibited through Archie’s breezy narration skills. Maggie’s narration style just does not attain the high Archie Goodwin standard so Howe’s fiction, like Stout’s non-Wolfe/Goodwin fiction, manages to be competent but somewhat dull and somber. Maggie comes across as a very sad and depressed woman. She whines about her life at the beginning of the first book something like this: (my words) Wah-wah-wah...my first novel did not sell, my marriage was a failure, my husband cheated on me, I have to live in a crummy Valley apartment instead of a fashionable Beverly Hills house, I have to take temp jobs for which I am overqualified...I don't have any money...wah-wah-wah. God only knows how depressing Maggie's semi-autobiographical novel, Cornsilk, must have been. Glad I don't have to read it. Howe seems to have abandoned her Hill/Conrad characters and now is concentrating on a series of short stories and novels about 40+ actress character Diana Poole who is trying to make a come-back in Hollywood while solving mysteries and crimes along the way.
1989 (Dr.) Kiernan O'Shaughnessy Susan Dunlap
Location: San Diego, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiied?
Comments: Kiernan once worked as a medical examiner (forensic pathologist) north of San Francisco but then turned PI after she was fired from/quit her job under a cloud. She was a gymnast (like Delilah West-see above entry for 1974) when younger. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website describes Kiernan as "...a high-priced private eye, specializing in cases with a medical background." Kiernan appeared in 4 books and 2 short stories between 1989 and 1998. She is 5'1" with short dark curly hair. She works out of her beach house duplex in the La Jolla section of San Diego. Brad Tchernak, a 6'4" 240 pound ex-football player, serves as her housekeeper, cook, dog walker (for their Lab-Wolfhound mix named Ezra) and love interest. Along with the Kiernan O'Shaughnessy saga, author Dunlap had two other mystery series running in the 1980s and 1990s but since 2006 has concentrated mainly on her Darcy Lott stunt double mystery series. Kiernan has a serious-minded, no-nonsense personality similar to Delilah West, Sharon McCone and Anna Peters. She is not a wisecracking Kinsey Millhone type nor a reckless/fearless V. I. Warshawski type. I find the Kiernan O'Shaughnessy character both annoying and unlikeable and although the two stories I've read featuring her were competently written, I probably won't go out of my way to track down additional titles but if happen across any, I'd read them.
1989 Phryne Fisher Kerry Greenwood (1954-
Location: Melbourne, Australia (actually St. Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne)
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Miss Phryne Fisher, Investigations?
Thype: Medium Boiled Literary Classification: Thriller, Cozy
Comments: Miss Phryne (pronounced FRY-nee) Fisher has appeared in 20 book-length adventures between 1989 and 2014. A British TV series titled "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" began in 2012 (I'm not sure if new shows are still beign produced). Phryne (inadvertantly named after a famous 4th Century BC Greek courtesan) is about 28 or maybe a bit older when the series begins in the late 1920s. I don't know if she ages throughout the series. The adventurous Phryne Fisher drives fast cars, flies airplanes, shoots pistols, fights and dances her way through high-society Australia. She enjoys plenty of sex with different partners while solving numerous cases. Although born poor in Australia, her father eventually inherits great wealth in England after several male heirs die during WWI. Maid/social secretary Dorothy (Dot) Williams, whose last name mysteriously changed from Bryant to Williams in the middle of my edition of Cocaine Blues (1989) is Phryn's main assistant. Some of her other "assistants" are Bert (Albert Johnson) and Cec (Cecil Yates), two shady but goodhearted and loyal Melbourne cab drivers. Phryne also adopts two teenage girls early in the series who sometimes are a part of the action. As often happens when an author creates a character set is an earlier time period, Phryne is given all the "good" qualities of a 1920's wealthy flapper but few of the "bad" views, opinions, prejudices, habits a typical woman of that time and class might exhibit. Phryne's boredom with life in high society and her success in cleaning up a cocaine ring and putting an end to the career of an illegal abortionist convinces her to open her own detective agency. Although Phryne is truely a professional investigator it is never clear exactly what she charges her clients and since she spends so much on bribes, tips, hush-money, and other business expenses during her investigations it's provident she is wealthy because I believe she loses money on every one of her cases. Phryne usually confronts and solves multiple mysteries in each book.
On the Phryne Fisher website Kerry Greenwood describes her creation as follows:
". . . Phryne is a hero, just like James Bond or the Saint, but with fewer product endorsements and a better class of lovers. I decided to try a female hero and made her as free as a male hero, to see what she would do. Mind you, at that time I only thought there would be two books."
I will attempt to read more of author Greenwood's books to gain further insights on this detective character.
1990 Michele (Mickey) Knight J M Redmann
Location: New Orleans
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 8 books between 1990 & 2013.
1990 Helen Black Pat Welch
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 10 books between 1990 & 2005.
1990 Gwenn Ramadge Lillian O'Donnell (nee Udvardy) (1926-2005)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner
Name of Agency: Hart Security and Investigation(s) aka Hart S & I
Type: Softboiled Literary Classificarion: ?
Comments: Gwenn is a 32 year-old 5' 1" petite, curly-haired blonde with green eyes. She inherited Hart S & I from her older friend, Cordelia Hart (who inherited it from her father many years earlier). Cordelia died from an unexpected heart attack three years before the start of the series. This echoes the P. D. James Cordelia Gray series (see 1970 entry above) not only because of the obvious double use of the "Cordelia" name but because of the mentor/student relationship between Bernie Pryde/Cordelia Gray and Cordelia Hart/Gwenn Ramadge. Like Cordelia Gray, Gwenn had no prior law enforcement/investigative experience when Cordelia Hart took her on as an office assistant and apprentice agent. Gwenn was born to a wealthy New York City couple who lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. Gwenn attended a prestigious prep school and graduated from Barnard College. She grew up playing tennis, skiing and horseback riding. In college Gwenn excelled in both swimming and track & field. Like Rex Stout's detective character Dol Bonner (see 1937 entry above) Gwenn's parents lost most of their wealth because of bad stock market investments. Her parents moved to an expatriate colony in Mexico in order to conserve the small amount of wealth they managed to retain. Cordelia Hart took pity on the near penniless, pregnant and husbandless Gwenn, hired her, trained her in PI work and encouraged her to get a New York investigator's license. Gwenn lost the unborn baby in a swimming accident but did manage to obtain her license just before Cordelia Hart's sudden death. In addition to the detective agency, Gwenn also inherited Cordelia's East 72nd Street apartment (located between Lexington and Third Avenues). The only current salaried employee of the agency is office manager/assistant/receptionist Marge Pratt, a plain-looking single mother who is a couple of years younger than Gwenn. Hart S & I hires freelance licensed investigators whenever Gwenn cannot handle the agency's workload alone. Their two room office is located on Lower Broadway near City Hall. Under Cordelia Hart (and her father before her) Hart S & I specialized in divorce work, insurance fraud and background checks. Gwenn's involvement in murder cases is something new for the firm making Gwenn's learning curve a driving factor in the story plots. Here is a list of Gwenn's recorded cases:
A Wreath for the Bride (1990), Used to Kill (1993), The Raggedy Man (1995), and The Goddess Affair (1996).
Lillian O'Donnell was born in Trieste, Italy. Her family moved to NYC when she was 5 or 6 years old. She studied the dramatic arts and had some small acting roles on Broadway and TV. Lillian eventually became a stage manager and director of Broadway plays. She left stage work sometime after her 1954 marriage and began her writing career with 10 undistinguished Gothic/Romance type novels between 1960 and 1972. She found her stride in 1972 with the publication of her first Norah Mulcahaney policewoman novel. She went on to write 16 more books in the series ending in 1998. Most critics believe her best work is found in that series. O'Donnell's 3 book Mici Anhult series published between 1977 and 1980 featuring a social worker/NYC Crime Victims Compensation Board investigator gets mixed reviews from critics. The Gwenn Ramadge books are generally not as good as those by Muller, Grafton and Paretsky but then again, during the 1990s not many authors were producing better female PI fiction than the big three just mentioned.
1991 Robin Miller Jaye Maiman
Location: San Francisco then NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 7 books between 1991 & 1999.
1991 Hannah Wolfe Sarah Dunant (1950- )
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: Hannah has appeared in 3 books according to Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website: Birth Marks (1991), Fatlands (1993) and Under My Skin (1995)
1991 Lauren Laurano Sandra Scoppettone (1936 - )
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 5 books between 1991 & 1998.
1991 Jeri Howard Janet Dawson (1949 - )
Location: Oakland, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: Jeri was a former paralegal who appeared in 12 novels & 5 ss between 1991 & 2017 according to Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website.
1991 Veronica (Ronnie) Ventana Gloria White
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Mexican/Anglo PI has appeared in 6 books between 1991 and 2007. Ronnie is the daughter of a notorious cat-burglar husband and wife team. Author is of Puerto Rican/Anglo descent.
1991 Devon MacDonald Nancy Baker Jacobs
Location: St. Paul, Minesota
Lone/Agent/Owner: Partner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled?
Comments: Devon appeared in 3 books: The Turquoise Tattoo (1991), A Slash of Scarlet (1992) & The Silver Scalpel (1993). She was a former elementary school teacher with a tragic family past. She becomes a partner in (father figure) Sam Sherman's Twin Cities detective agency.
1991 Vicki "Victory" Nelson Tanya Huff
Location: Toronto, Canada
Lone/Agent?Owner: Owner?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification: Supernatural/Gothic
Comments: A former Toronto homicide detective Vicki appeared in 5 novels between 1991 & 1997 and one collection of short stories in 2008. Lifetime made a TV series based on the books in 2007. Vicki's cases seem to involve vampires, werewolves, mummies, etc.
1991 Laura Flynn Lesley Grant-Adamson, born Lesley Heycock, (1942 - )
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: Flynn Detective Agency
Type: Medium Boiled Literary Classification:
Comments: Laura is an attractive 30 year-old with long black hair of Irish descent living and working in the north central London district of Islington. Her "flat' is near Barnsbury Square, her office is in Upper Street on the second floor above a boutique shop and a women's gym where she works out regularly. Laura has been divorced for three years. Her only appearance is in Too Many Questions apa Flynn (1991). I believe the author intended to develop a series around this character but then seemed to lose interest. Perhaps the 12 or so new female PIs introduced between 1990 and 1992 (about half of whom were lesbian) overcrowded the field and Grant-Adamson felt she had nothing new to contribute. One of Laura's confidants is her former landlady named Anna Lee, a children's book author. I wonder if Grand-Adamson was paying homage to Liza Cody's PI Anna Lee in the naming her character. We are not given much background on what led Laura Flynn to become a PI other than she once worked for one of the big London agencies before setting up her own office and apparently had no police background. Americans are familiar with the Irish migration to cities like Boston and New York City but the Irish migration experience in London is largely unknown to us here in the US. It seems that the author was going to explore this issue had she continued this series. Lesley Grant-Adamson was a Fleet Street journalist who eventually became a full time writer. Her best known series features amateur sleuth/gossip columnist Rain Morgan (5 novels between 1985 and 1990). In total, Grant-Adamson published 18 books between 1985 and 2003, three of which were non-fiction. Laura Flynn can be thought of as a combination of Cordelia Gray, Anna Lee and Kinsey Millhone. Too bad no further books appeared about this character.
1992 Kate Shugak Dana Stabenow (1952- )
Location: Alaska
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled?
Comments: Kate is a 5'1" Aleut woman who morphs about 1/3? through the series from being an investigator for the Alaska DA's office to a PI. Alaskan born author Stabenow featured Kate in 21 books between 1992 & 2017.
1992 Nell Fury Elizabeth Pincus
Location: San Francisco
Lone/ Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 3 books between 1992 & 1995. Author was a former PI.
1992 Freddie O'Neal Catherine Dain (psd of Judith Garwood)
Location: Nevada
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Appeared in 7 books between 1992 & 1997
1992 Jenny Gordon & C. J. (Cinnamon Jemima) Gunn Jan Grape
Location: Austin, Texas
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owners/partners
Name of Agency: G & G Investigations
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: This detecting duo appeared in 8 or so short stories between 1992 and 1998. Jenny, the primary narrator, is the widow of a former police officer who resigned to open a detective agency. Jenny carried on his PI work after his death. C. J. is her partner and friend. Jenny's two cats, Nick and Nora, sometimes help the investigations. Ms. Grape seems to have concentrated on her police officer Zoe Barrow series of novels in the early 2000's rather than feature Gunn and Gordon in a novel of their own. The few stories I read were well written and entertaining. Jan Grape and her husband ran a mystery bookstore in Texas (Austin?) in the 1990's.
1992 Kate Brannigan Val McDermid
Location: Manchester, England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Kate appeared in 6 novels between 1992 & 1998. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website compares Kate to PI Anna Lee (see 1980 entry above) and wishes there were more books about her. Kate has kickboxing skills.
1993 Catherine "Cat" Caliban D. B. Borton psd of Lynette Carpenter
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Lone/Agent/Owner: Partner?
Name of Agency: Fogg & Caliban, Inc. (in the 7th book)
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy/Comic
Comments: 60 or so year old widow sells her suburban home and acquires and moves into a four unit apartment building (renamed "The Catatonia Arms" because Cat owns three cats that sometimes play important roles in the stories) in a dodgy Cincinnati neighborhood and dreams of becoming a private detective. The eight book Cat Caliban series was originally published during the 1993-2007 time period but the author is currently re-issuing the series starting with adventure #5 in ebook format. See below for my thoughts:
Five Alarm Fire (1996) is the 5th book in the eight-volume Cat Caliban mystery series created by D. B. Borton, the pseudonym used by author Lynette Carpenter. Catherine “Cat” Caliban is a pushy, blunt spoken, warm-hearted, inquisitive 60 year-old housewife/mother/grandmother/widow who owns an apartment building in Cincinnati inhabited by some quirky tenants. Cat’s numerous friends and tenants try to help but sometimes hinder her ambitions of becoming a private investigator. In Five Alarm Fire Cat becomes involved in some dirty-doings at the local arts center while taking a pottery class. Human remains discovered in a kiln, suspicious house fires, a missing collection of valuable Rookwood pottery once owned by a famous African American madam and the confused genealogical histories of some of the characters drive the plot in this cozy mystery.
Six Feet Under (1997) is the 6th book in the Cat Caliban series. The author creates a memorable young woman of mixed-race character named Roxanne "Rocky" Zacharias. Although Rocky (famous as the all-time jump rope queen of Cincinnati) appears in only a small number of pages of this book, her personality influences nearly every page and nearly every character in the story. Author D. B. Borton examines the plight of incarcerated women of little means and less agency in this semi-tragic tale of crime and detection. Why has the newly released Rocky broken parole, offloaded her three kids and disappeared? Cat Caliban and her retired policeman friend, Moses Fogg, try to find Rocky before something bad happens to her and her extended family. The sadness and heartbreak following Rocky since her birth is partly alleviated by the humanity displayed by those trying to help her and the humor generated by Cat during her investigation.
Seventh Deadly Sin (First pub in 2004, re-issued in 2021, action set in 1986)
Catherine “Cat” Caliban, 60 year-old grandmother, widow and aspiring PI, is asked to investigate the murder of a local high school football star. Is his death connected with several other Cincinnati teens recently reported missing or killed? But what can the connection be? Did the teens know each other even though they lived in different neighborhoods and attended different schools? Interest in computers, a controversial televangelist and a youth hotline are the only common threads that seem to run through the lives of the teenagers in question. Cat doggedly follows a series of clues that eventually lead her toward both answers and danger.
Fans of Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth, Miss Marple, Susan Isaacs’ Long Island sleuth, Judith Singer and Stuart Palmer’s schoolmarm sleuth, Hildegarde Withers will enjoy the Cat Caliban series. Since the author sets this humorous series in the mid-1980s the books have a kind of Sue Grafton/Kinsey Millhone vibe: plenty of pay phones, no smart phones, Internet and email are new concepts, etc.
Click HERE to visit the author's website.
1993 Sydney Sloane Randye Lordon
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium-Boiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 7 books between 1993 & 2003. Sidney was a former police officer.
1994 Ling Wan-Ju "Lydia" Chin SJ Rozan
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Chin Investigative Services (or sometimes) Lydia Chin Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Lydia is a twenty-something year old ABC (American Born Chinese) woman who lives with her mother in Chinatown and runs her agency out of a storefront office on Canal Street. Her sometimes partner is Bill Smith, a 40-something white PI who's interest in Lydia is more than avuncular. They appear together (and sometimes separately) in eleven novels and several short stories beginning in 1994. Lydia has a loving but prickly relationship with her mother who strongly disapproves of her chosen profession, not only because of its dangers but also because her detective work rarely brings her into contact with suitable potential marriage partners. Lydia has at least four older brothers who have successful "traditional" careers. Although the author does not clearly state that Lydia is strikingly beautiful, the way male characters tend to react to her (both overtly and covertly) makes it clear that she is one of the most attractive female characters in business today. Lydia is very petite but she is proficient in martial arts and does carry a gun, so she is a match for most of the criminals and lowlifes she runs into during her investigations.
Note: Lydia's mother made her detecting debut in a short story in the March/April 2015 issue of EQMM. She decides to spare Lydia from bother (and imagined danger) by taking on a case herself involving a ghost (maybe), gambling, a disappearing restaurant worker and loansharks. Not a bad story but I want to see more of Lydia herself. I don't think there has been a new Chin ss or novel since 2012.
1994 Tamara Hayle Valerie Wilson Wesley
Location: Newark NJ
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: Hayle Investigative Services, Inc.
Type: Hard-boiled
Comments: Tamara is a 35 year old African-American, divorced single mother, ex-cop now working in the Newark/East Orange area. Tamara grew up in the projects of Newark but her parents moved the family to the close suburb of East Orange when she was a teenager (just after the riots of 1967). She currently lives in her old East Orange house with her young son and works out of an office located on the second floor above a beauty shop in a somewhat run-down three story building close to her home. Tamara worked as a cop for five years in the fictional nearby affluent suburb of Belvington Heights until the persistent racist and sexist behavior of most of her colleagues drove her to quit. Her one-woman detective agency barely breaks even because her caseload consists mostly of insurance fraud, disability scams, runaway teens and cheating husbands. Tamara sometimes contracts on with a bigger agency when money gets really tight but she prefers being her own boss. The four books I read were fairly-clued but a bit depressing. Like many (though certainly not all) female crime writers who began publishing in the 1990s, Wesley infuses no humor in these stories. At times Tamara Hayle comes across as a real "Debbie Downer". Valerie Wilson Wesley constructed good plots, created interesting characters and wrote gripping narratives but... an occasional well placed wisecrack or amusing situation or some wry humor could have made these books a bit more enjoyable for me.
Here is the complete series:
When Death Comes Stealing (1994)
Devil's Gonna Get Him (1995)
Where Evil Sleeps (1996)
No Hiding Place (1997)
Easier to Kill (1998)
The Devil Riding (2000)
Dying in the Dark (2004)
Of Blood and Sorrow (2008)
When Angels Mourn (2024?) This book is written but not yet released possibly because Wilson's publisher, Kensington Publishing Corp., wants to concentrate on her newer (2021-2023) Odessa Jones mystery series.
1994 Maddie Frost/Maddie Hughes Bruce Holland Rogers (1958- )
Location: Los Angeles then Eugene, Oregon
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: Maddie has appeared only in two short stories to date: "Hollywood Considered As a Seal Point in the Sun" (1994) and "Masked Marauders of the Mossbelt" (1998). In the earliest versions of the stories Maddie's last name was Hughes. Mr. Rogers changed her last name to Frost in later iterations of the stories because he felt Maddie Hughes sounded too similar to the Cybill Shepherd detective character Maddie Hayes from the Moonlighting TV series. Maddie Frost moved to the West Coast from the Midwest to become a screenwriter. When that career didn't pan out she became a PI. Both stories involve animals of one sort or another. "Mossbelt" was entertaining and fairly clued. I've not yet been able to read "Hollywood Considered". Maddie smokes cigarettes and eschews a healthy diet. Bruce Holland Rogers is a prolific author of short fiction in several genres; primarily, though not exclusively, Fantasy, Horror and SiFi. Lately he has concentrated on Flash Fiction. I wish he would write more Maddie Frost stories.
1994 Laura Principal Michelle Spring
Location: Cambridge, England
Lone /Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Aardvark Investigations
Type: Softboiled? Litarary Classification: 1970's Feminist Influenced & Psychological Suspense
Comments: Laura appeared in 5 books from 1994 to 2001. Co-owns agency with her lover, Sonny Mendlowitz.
1994 Angela "Angie" Matelli Wendi Lee
Location: Boston
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: ? Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist Influenced & Comic?
Comments: Italian-American girl from East Boston returns from serving in the Marines and becomes a PI. Angie appeared in 5 novels and 4 short stories between 1994 & 2003. One reviewer compared Angie to Stephanie Plum.
1995 Holly-Jean Ho Irene Lin-Chandler
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled?
Comments: Bi-sexual Holly-Jean appeared in three books:
The Healing of Holly-Jean (1995), Grievous Angel (1996) & Hour of the Tigress (1999). She is the daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother. Her English name is Deirdre H. Jones but she prefers Holly-Jean Ho. Had a circus/martial arts background prior to opening her agency when in her 30's. Specializes in computer fraud crimes but often gets mixed up in violent international intrigue. Her office manager is Mrs. Howell-Pryce. Author Irene Lin-Chandler is Taiwanese. Most of this info is from Colleen Barnett's Mystery Women, 2010 edition.
1995 Madeline Moore Aya De Leon (1967- )
Location: Oakland, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner/Lone
Name of Agency: M. Moore Investigations
Type: Medium Boiled
Comments: Appeared in one short story (so far) in Paula L. Woods 1995 anthology Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century. Woods describes De Leon as "an Afro-Latina writer of mystery fiction and other prose." Woods mentioned that De Leon was working on a novel-length adventure for Madeline but it was never published, as far as I can determine. Starting in 2016 De Leon has written four books in her Justice Hustlers Feminist Heist series. Madeline is a 6' tall slim African-American woman in her 30's. Her mentor is Liz Rowe who hired and trained Madeline in her Front Rowe Investigations agency before Madeline went solo. I agree with the Thrilling Detective site...De Leon should write more Madeline Moore stories...I liked her one effort.
1996 Lupe Solano Carolina Garcia-Aguilera
Location: Miami FL
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lupe is Cuban born and owns her own agency in Miami. Author is/was a real-life PI.
1996 Lucy Trimble Brenner Eric Wright (1929-2015)
Location: Ontario Canada
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Apparently Lucy is a librarian/hotelier who inherits (like Cordelia Gray and the Beagle sisters) a detective agency. In this case it was from her cousin. Appeared in:
Death of a Sunday Writer (1996)
Death on the Rocks (1999)
1997 Theresa Esther "Tess" Weinstein Monaghan Laura Lippman (1959- )
Location: Baltimore
Lone/Agent/Owner: Investigator for a lawyer then co-owner of an agency
Name of Agency: Keyes Investigation(s) Inc. or
Keyes Investigations or
Keyes Inc. or
Keyes Private Investigations, Inc.
Type: Medium Boiled?
Comments: Tess is a single 29 year old unemployed reporter with long brown hair (often kept in a braid down her back) and hazel colored eyes when we meet her in the 1997 novel, Baltimore Blues. She is tall and strong with muscular legs and broad shoulders who stays in shape by rowing, running and lifting weights. She scrapes by with various part time jobs (including some detective work) while wondering whether she will ever return to journalism. She is of Irish and Jewish descent and has appeared in 12-13 novels (I can't seem to get an accurate count) and a few short stories between 1997 and 2020. Tess seems to be modeled after Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski: A tall (5'9", one inch taller than V.I.), athletic, physically strong woman who is deeply involved in all aspects of her home city. Tess is sometimes described as "Amazonian" and other times as "lanky" and it is implied that she has a great figure a sleight overbite, a barely visible widow's peak and a few freckles. She does not wisecrack like Kinsey Millhone but is often blunt-spoken and sharp-tongued like V.I. Warshawski. Family members and close friends sometimes call her "Tesser" a nickname she coined for herself when she was a child. It combines parts of her first and middle names (Tess + Esther = Tesser). Other nicknames for Tess are: "Testy", "Baltimore's hungriest detective" and "the accidental detective". Tess attended Washington College, located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland almost directly across Chesapeake Bay from her beloved city of Baltimore. Tess is a loyal Orioles fan and therefore hates the NY Mets because of their humiliating defeat of the Orioles in the 1969 World Series (even though that occurred when she was barely a year old). By her third book (Butchers Hill, 1998) Tess has moved out of temp space at her friend's law firm and opened an office in the ground floor of an old row house in a dicier neighborhood north of her Fells Point residence. She has acquired a carry permit for a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun and gone into partnership with retired Baltimore cop, Edward Keyes, although Keyes just supplies the Investigator's license and collects a small percentage of the agency's profits. Tess's official corporate title is "Vice President" but she claims to be just an "Associate" when it seems expedient to avoid responsibility for some of her actions. In addition to VI Warshawski, I believe Lippman also based Tess on the character of Carlotta Carlyle (see 1987 entry above). Both characters:
Had Irish fathers and Jewish mothers.
Are tall (6"1" Carlotta vs. 5"9" Tess)
Have an important aunt character in the stories.
Live in big East Coast port cities (Carlotta-Boston, Tess-Baltimore)
1997 Margaret Ann (Meg) Darcy Jean Marcy, psd. of Jean Hutchison & Marcy Jacobs
Location: St. Louis
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Miller Security
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian detective Meg Darcy has appeared in 4 novels: Cemetery Murders (1997), Dead and Blonde (1998), Mommy Deadest (2000) & A Cold Case of Murder (2003). She was former Military Police and works for her uncle's security agency. (Some of this info was gathered from The Gay Detective Novel by Judith A. Markowitz).
1998 Precious Ramotswe Alexander McCall Smith
Location: Gaborone, Botswana
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Recently divorced Precious Ramototswe starts a detective agency using an inheritance from her beloved father. She appears to be in her mid-30s at the start of the series and seems to barely age as the series progresses
(20 books and a few short stories between 1998 and 2021). She re-marries about 1/3 through the series. She is described as a "traditionally built" (meaning full-figured), attractive woman who is kind, wise and a pretty good detective. Each book touches on a different aspect of life in the landlocked African country of Botswana and usually multiple mysteries are solved or at least investigated in this warm-hearted series.
1998 Grace Makutsi Alexander McCall Smith
Location: Gaborone, Botswana
Lone/Agent/Owner: Secretary, Assistant Detective, Associate Detective, eventually Partner
Name of Agency: No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Grace (top graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College), a tall, thin, somewhat plain-looking woman in her mid-20s starts out as secretary to Precious Ramotswe and eventually works her way up to a partnership. She is the almost the exact opposite of Precious not only in looks but also in personalty. Grace is judgmental, outspoken, prickly, overconfident and temperamental (but also loyal and faithful). She reminds me of a combination of school-marm sleuth Hildegarde Withers and Parker Pyne/Hercule Poirot's efficient secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon. Grace eventually marries about 1/2 way through the series.
2000 Estelle Aiden (Woody) Woodhaven Amanda Cross psd of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone/Owner?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Woody is a plus-size PI in her 30's. She lives in Brooklyn and has an office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan where her part-time receptionist, Octavia, aids her investigations. She either drives her motorcycle or takes mass transit/taxis to get around town. She was a former Legal Aid (Public Defender) lawyer (like VI Warshawski) before deciding to become a PI. Her only recorded case to my knowledge is in Amanda Cross's Honest Doubt, the next to last book in the Kate Fansler detective series. Woody teams up with Kate to solve a murder at a small New Jersey college. She self-describes herself as fat but does not see that as a disadvantage in solving cases. She is an intelligent and meticulous investigator. I wish Cross had lived to write more of her cases.
2001 Gretchen O'Brien Laura Lippman
Location: Baltimore then Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone then owner?
Name of Agency: SnoopSisters Digest?
Type: Medium Boiled?
Comments: Gretchen is a secondary character introduced about halfway into the Tess Monaghan series (see 1997 entry above). She is similar to Tess in both appearance (tall and strong) and attitude/personality (pushy, stubbron) They both grew up in working class Baltimore neighborhoods and were forced to change careers at about 30 years old. Gretchen had to resign from the Baltimore police force because she could not prove her innocence from a false charge. She became a PI and sort of teams up with Tess in In a Strange City (2001). Gretchen later moves to Chicago and starts up a networking group/website/blog linking independent female PI's throughout the US. SnoopSisters Digest helps out Tess during her case recorded as The Last Place (2002).
2004 Eve DeHaas Tracy P. Clark aka Tracy Clark
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium Boiled?
Comments: Eve is a 5' 8" African-American former Chicago cop who now earns her living running a one person agency. Only appearance was in a 2004 short story titled "For Services Rendered". Ms. Clark states "Eve DeHaas is an earlier version of the character Cass Raines eventually became. "For Services Rendered" was my practice run." See below for Cass Raines's 2018 entry.
2004 Kylie Kendall Claire McNab aka Claire McNab Carmichael (1940- )
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner
Name of Agency: Kendall & Creeling Investigative Services
Type: Medium-boiled?
Comments: Australian Kylie Kendall inherits 51% of a Los Angeles detective agency from a father she never knew. The beautiful 49% co-owner, Ariana Creeling, tries to buy-out her unexpected partner but Kylie refuses and goes into training to become a licensed detective. Kylie is infatuated with Ariana but the attraction is not reciprocated. Kylie and Ariana have appeared in five novels:
The Wombat Strategy (2004)
The Kookaburra Gambit (2005)
The Quokka Question (2005)
The Dingo Dilemma (2006)
The Platypus Ploy (2007)
Kylie appeared solo in the 2007 short story "Animal Act". Author McNab is a dual citizen of Australia and the U.S. and currently resides in Los Angeles. She has written over 50 books and has authored two other lesbian mystery series in addition to the Kendall/Creeling series.
2009 Kate (Catherine) Shackleton (nee Hood) Frances Brody, aka Frances McNeil
Location: Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: (no formal name)
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: The author sets the Kate Shackleton series in 1920s England. Kate is a 30 year-old war widow (her surgeon husband Gerald was reported MIA in 1918) who decides to embark on a PI career in 1921. She often handles missing-person cases. Kate, who ages throughout the series, has appeared in 11 novels and one short story between 2009 & 2019. After reading one recent volume in the series here is some further info: Kate employs a former policeman, Jim Sykes, as her main op. She also uses her housekeeper, Mrs. Sudgen, as an investigator/assistant. Her niece Harriet sometimes involves herself in investigations. In book 10 they acquire a bloodhound, Sergeant Dog. Kate was adopted as a baby by Mr. and Mrs. Hood. Her adoptive father is a local police officer who sometimes aids in investigations. Through her adoptive mother, Virginia, Kate is socially well-connected. In book 11, Kate collaborates with London PI Mrs. Annette Kerner who dubs herself "The Mayfair Detective". Mrs. Kerner draws her clientel from high society and often travels in diplomatic circles somewhat like Oppenheim's Clara Linz (see above 1932 entry). The real Mrs. Kerner did own a London detective agency in the 1920s and was active as a private detective at least through the 1940s. She was sometimes nicknamed "The "Queen of Disguises" and/or "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes". Kate was trained as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse and was a suffragette. She is a photography buff.
2012 Jane Lawless Ellen Hart (1949- )
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-Owner
Name of Agency: Nolan & Lawless Investigations
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Lesbian/Feminist?
Comments: Multi-award winning author Ellen Hart has written 27 books in the Jane Lawless mystery series between 1989 and 2020. Jane transitioned from amateur sleuth to licensed PI in the 20th book of the series Rest for the Wicked (2012). Jane was about 35 years old when the series began and is about 45 in her latest book so author Hart ages her character about one year for every three calendar years. Jane is a divorced lesbian restaurateur who started out using her keen crime solving skills to help friends and fight injustice. Eventually a retired Minneapolis police detective becomes Jane’s mentor and encourages her to study and apprentice for her Minnesota Private Investigator’s license. Jane is a serious-minded, no-nonsense woman (more of a Sharon McCone-type rather than a wise-cracking Kinsey Millhone-type). The books could potentially be dull reads because of Jane’s serious nature but the author avoids dullness by including a highly entertaining pair of sisters in her continuing cast of characters. Cordelia Thorn, who appears in most if not all the books, is Jane’s best friend and a successful theatrical manager. Octavia Thorn-Lester, appearing in some of the books, is a diva actress whose string of ex-husbands just about matches the combined total of the Gabor sisters. When one or the other of these two characters makes an appearance, humor and wit abound. When the two sisters appear together; anything from darkly comic humor to hilarious action can ensue. I don’t quite understand why this author has not attained the fame and respect that her numerical output and quality plotting would suggest. Note: Ellen Hart wrote a second series of mysteries about food critic/amateur sleuth Sophie Greenway that ran to eight books published between 1994 and 2005.
2012-13 Veronica Gianni Alex Fiano (aka A. R. Fiano, aka Alex Rian Fiano)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner/partner
Name of Agency: Gotham Investigations
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Veronica is a 36 year-old bisexual woman who is a partner/co-owner with gay PI Gabriel Ross in their Manhattan based firm, Gotham Investigations. Prior to their partnership Veronica worked as a part-time PI for a large agency. Author Alex Fiano is a LGBTQ+ advocate and an artist in addition to being the author of the Gabriel's World series of thriller/detective stories. Books in the series are: The Hanged Man (2012), Two-Faced Woman (2013), The Book of Joel (2014), Dead for Now (2016) and Hardcore (TBP 2020?).
2013 Geneva Lennon Alex Fiano (aka A. R. Fiano, aka Alex Rian Fiano)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Gotham Investigations
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Geneva is a transgender woman who works as a part-time op for gay PI Gabriel Ross and his partner Veronica Gianni and is one of the continuing characters in the author's Gabriel's World series (see above entry). She once was Gabriel's client and is a former U.S. army weapons expert.
2013 Lana Luna Robert J. Schneider
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: The Pringle-Luna Literary Agency
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: Lana's only recorded case (to date) is "Greenpoint Girls", a self-published novella currently available as an ebook from Amazon's Kindle book site. The 35 year-old former investment analyst inherited a struggling Manhattan literary agency from her uncle. The previous tenant of an empty office suite down the hall was a detective agency so occasionally people show up needing a detective, not a literary agent. Lana's helpful and curious nature (and her plentiful free time due to a lack of author clients) draw her into investigations. Lana is assisted in her detecting efforts by her receptionist/office manager and sole employee, Monica McCool. Since Lana is not a licensed private investigator, she does not accept money upon the successful completion of a case but she will accept gifts from grateful clients. Technically, Lana Luna does not qualify for inclusion on this site but I am making an exception for her. Click HERE to read an excerpt of "Greenpoint Girls" The complete Greenpoint Girls ebook is available from Amazon/Kindle (usually for $2.99 or sometimes even less). You do not necessarily need a Kindle device to read it. You just need an Amazon account to download the ebook to your computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Click on the above link or visit my speedymystery.com site and click on the Greenpoint Girls page for more details.
2014 Yung Hee Tyson Hugh Davidson
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: The Mike Tyson Mystery Team
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Comic
Comments: Yung Hee is the adopted daughter of retired boxer Mike Tyson in the Warner Brothers animated TV series Mike Tyson Mysteries shown on the Adult Swim cable channel. Her Korean mother left her on Mike's doorstep as an infant for financial reasons. Mike took a liking to Yung, adopted her and raised her (including home schooling her) as his own daughter. Yung has been solving mysteries on her father's team since the series debut in 2014. She was born in 1998 and is 5'2" and 105 lbs. Other members of the team are Pigeon (an alcoholic/sex-addicted former human named Richard who was turned into a pigeon by his beauty queen/sorceress ex-wife because of his constant infidelity. The third member of Mike's team is the ghost of John Sholto Douglas the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (1844-1900) who was instrumental in devising the rules of modern boxing. Deezy acts as the Mystery Team's agent but rarely gets any gigs for them. Technically he is a member of the Team but rarely goes on mystery assignments. His team mates don't respect him and generally find him a moocher and an annoyance. His team sweatsuit color is red as opposed to Mike's blue and Yung's pink The TV series is sort of an adult version of Scooby-Doo with Yung acting as the Velma Dinkley character (serious, intelligent, down-to-earth, somewhat naive). The Mike Tyson Mystery Team rarely satisfactorily solve the mysteries they take on (and often make bad situations worse) but the episodes are hilarious anyway. Mike doesn't seem to charge fees for services rendered but I consider Yung a professional detective because she earns her keep by helping her adoptive father attempt to solve his cases. It was revealed in Season 4 (2020) that Yung's biological parents are Michelle (a Korean woman) and Mystery Team member Pigeon (before he was magically changed from a human named Richard into a pigeon by his jealous ex-wife, Sandra). Yung also has a twin brother who Michelle kept to raise herself. Yung is unaware of her family history and it is expected that further episodes will delve into this mystery.
2015 Holly Rachel Gibney Stephen King (1947- )
Location: A disguised and fictionalized Cleveland, Ohio
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner then Co-owner?
Name of Agency: Finders Keepers Investigative Agency
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Horror/Suspense/Thriller/Supernatural
Comments: Holly is a middle-aged (40-ish maybe 50-ish) woman who has appeared as either a supporting
or main character in six of Stephen King's books. She exhibits obsessive-compulsive tendencies, has a serious inferiority complex, is often socially awkward and is very detail-oriented. She began her investigative career by working for retired cop Bill Hodges' detective agency then eventually inherits the agency after Bill's death. By the latest book, Holly (2023) she has taken on retired cop Pete Huntley as a partner and a couple of other employees have joined the firm. Events in Holly eventually lead to the agency finding itself on a solid financial footing and hopefully Holly will continue to investigate crimes, both natural and supernatural, for many years. Here are the books/stories she has appeared in:
Mr. Mercedes (2014)
Finders Keepers (2015)
End of Watch (2016)
The Outsider (2018)
"If It Bleeds" (2020) novella
Holly (2023)
2018 Cassandra "Cass" Raines Tracy Clark aka Tracy P. Clark
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Raines Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Type: Thriller?
Comments: Cass is a 34 year old 5'7" 130 pound African-American former Chicago Police homicide detective. She is a later rendition of PI character Eve DeHaas (see 2004 entry above) about whom author Clark wrote a short story in 2004. Cass was orphaned at age 12 when her mother died and her father soon after abandoned her. She was raised by her grandparents, graduated Univ of Illinois (English degree), worked in the Peace Corps. for two years then graduated from the police academy. Several years into her career she quit the Chicago Police Dept after accidentally shooting to death a teenager due to the rash ineptness of a fellow cop. She turned in her "star" once she recovered from her own gunshot injuries stemming from this botched arrest attempt. She bicycles around Chicago to exercise and stay in shape. Cass's recorded cases so far are: Broken Places (2018), Borrowed Time (2019), What You Don't See (2020) and Runner (2021). She lives on the third floor of a small apartment building she owns in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's Southside. She operates a one-woman agency out of a nearby office building. Cass's adventures lean more toward thriller-like V. I. Warshawski cases rather than more straight detection as found in Kinsey Millhone and early Sharon McCone cases. The author has started a new series featuring Chicago PD homicide detective Harriet Foster: Hide (January 2023), Fall (December 2023) and a third TBA novel in 2024. Although both Cass and Harriet live and work in Chicago, Harriet, according to author Tracy Clark, "does not exist in Cass's universe. They are not acquainted and there are no immediate plans to bring them together, although that might make for an interesting short story at some point." After the third Harriet Foster book is published in 2024 the author is not sure if Cass or Harriet or something completely different will emerge from her pen/typewriter/computer.
Click below link to visit the author's website:
tracyclarkbooks.com/
------------------------------------------------
Some sources I used:
Crime On Her Mind
1975
Michele B. Slung
Mystery Women: An Encylopedia of Leading Women Characters in Mystery Fiction
2001, Volume I (1860-1979) Revised
Colleen Barnett
(This book has become a favorite resource, I must try to track down some of the other volumes and revised editions)
The Woman Detective, Gender & Genre
1988
Kathleen Gregory Klein
This is a scholarly book containing in depth analysis of a selection of characters and authors. A quote from the book jacket "The Woman Detective examines how gender and genre restrictions affect the outcome of nearly 300 novels written between 1864 and 1987." Klein has opened my mind to viewing certain books from a different perspective than I initially approached them. At times I believe Ms. Klein reads more into the words of these authors than really exist in them...but because her intellectual approach to the subject matter is at a level much higher than mine, I defer to her analysis (for the most part).
Victor A. Berch (1924-2015) was for many years the Special Collections Librarian at Brandeis University. He was a bibliographer, collector of Dime Novels, Pulp Magazines and other forms of popular literature. He was expert in many fields of study. Out of the blue one day he emailed me with information concerning the actual first publication date of a Clarice Dyke (see above 1882 entry) short story. Although we only exchanged a couple of emails several years ago, I was astonished that a great scholar like Victor would take an interest in this small website endeavor.
RIP Victor Berch.
Michael E. Grost has given me several tips on improving my website, see below
Mike Grost's comprehensive website: A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection mikegrost.com/classics.htm
Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition
1999
Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones
A fascinating scholarly book covering mostly the 1970s-1990s
Mystery author D. B. Borton has a fascinating site at dbborton.com. Here is a partial quote from her bio:
"D.B. Borton has published eleven mystery novels in two series, the Cat Caliban series and the Gilda Liberty series, in addition the mysteries Smoke and Bayou City Burning and a humorous science fiction novel, Second Coming."
Ms. Borton has extensive knowledge of "Girl Detectives" (defined as unmarried female detectives under the age of 22) and has read many more Dime Novels than I have. I especially enjoy the Girl Detectives blog section of her website.
Click HERE to visit her site.
A woman who investigates: crimes, apparent crimes, the threat of crimes, mysterious circumstances/events on at least a semi-regular basis while seeking compensation for her efforts but does not currently work for a government agency, body, group or organization. In short, not a policewoman nor an amateur sleuth but a woman who tries to earn a living by investigating crimes outside of government employment.
I will try to classify the women detectives into various literary categories that I think best captures the writing style/sub-genre into which the author fits. Some of the terms I'll use are: Casebook, Victorian Sensation, Dime Novel, Shilling Shocker/Penny Dreadful, Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Scientific/Medical, GAD, Thriller/Rogue/Espionage, Supernatural, Pulp, Pulp-Influenced, Psychological Suspense, HIBK, Paperback Original, 1970's Feminist-Influenced, Comic, Cozy, etc.
TIME CHART
Year Character Author
1864 Mrs G(ladden?) Andrew W Forrester Jr., psd of James Redding Ware (1832-1909)
1864 Mrs. Paschal W(illiam) Stephens Hayward (1838-1870)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Quasi private/quasi police
Name of agency: ?
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Casebook
Comments: Mrs. Gladden was former police constable. Appeared in The Female Detective. Had a woman assistant.
Mrs. Paschal was a widow, boss was Colonel Warner, was well educated and had some experience as an actress. Appeared in The Experiences of a Lady Detective according to K. G. Klein.
1882 Denver Doll Edwin L(ytton) Wheeler (1854?-1885)
Location: American West
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of agency: ?
Type: Medium Boiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Sort of a Dime Novel combo of Annie Oakley & Dale Evans. Appeared in 4 stories in Beadle's Half-Dime Library in 1882-83. Known as "The Detective Queen". Author also created the "Deadwood Dick" character.
1882 Clarice Dyke Harry Rockwood (aka Ernest Avon Young, Donald J McKenzie) 1832-1873)
Location: Boston
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Works for/with husband, Donald Dyke. Victor Berch has informed me that Clarice's first appearance was actually 12/31/1882 in a story titled "A Wife's Strategy and Her Search for Donald Dyke".
1884 Madeline Payne Lawrence L Lynch (psd of Emma Murdock Van Deventer) (1853-1914)
aka Emily Murdock, aka Emily Medora Murdock, aka Emma Murdock, aka Emily Lynch,
aka Emily Van Deventer, aka E. M. Van Deventer
Location: NYC & environs
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: NA
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation, American Realist
Comments: Appeared in Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter (1884) and Moina, or Against the Mighty, A Detective Story (1891) according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Madeline is a young woman of about 17 or so in her first case. Her deceased father was Lionel Payne, a celebrated detective nicknamed "The Expert" for his ability to unravel complicated mysteries and solve difficult cases. Madeline is forced to go undercover as a detective (using disguises, of course) to unravel the schemes of no less than three fortune-hunters. She pieces together the mysterious events that tied several disparate people together and winds up freeing a falsely imprisoned man, brings justice to the three fortune-hunters, saves a young woman from a rogue, saves a middle-aged woman from the same rogue and reclaims her inheritance from her greedy and cruel stepfather. Madeline is, naturally, exhausted by these efforts so at the end of her first book she travels to Europe for rest and a change of scene. Madeline and some of the other characters from her first book return in a sequel seven years later in her second recorded case. I have only managed to read portions of Moina, or Against the Mighty but it seems to not be more of the same type of Victorian melodrama (secret marriages, bigamy, false imprisonment, stolen inheritances) as the first Payne book. Moina features international intrigue, secret societies, socialists, communists & anarchists, labor disputes & class conflict I believe that Van Deventer was the first American woman author who wrote about a female professional private investigator who was the primary detective character in the story.
Click HERE For more on Lynch/Deventer.
1886 Kate Edwards (Goelet?) Harlan P Halsey (aka "Old Sleuth", Tony Pastor, Judson R Taylor)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of agency: ?
Type: Mediumboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: "Lady Kate, the Dashing Female Detective" seems to be a Dime-Novel version of Honey West who, unlike Honey, manages to keep her clothes on. Kate is 23 years old.
1888 Miriam Lea Leonard Merrick aka Leonard Miller (1864-1939)
Location: London (also Europe & South Africa)
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Alfred Bazalgette of High Holborn
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation?
Comments: Miriam's only appearance is in Mr. Bazalgette's Agent (1888). According to "Andre's" Kindle review on 10/02/13 of The British Library's new edition (and some other sources) Miriam is a 28 year old former stage actress and governess who has fallen on hard times (like Loveday Brooke, see below) through misfortune. Miriam is well educated and can speak French, German and Italian which gets her hired by Mr. Bazalgette's detective agency to track down an embezzler. Her assistant is Emma Dunstan, who poses as Miriam's maid during their travels in pursuit of the absconder. The book is written in diary form and seems to have a "...light-hearted sense of adventure" according to "Andre". Apparently Miriam poses as a writer to provide a cover for her detecting. "Andre" also notes that Miriam is "...dogged, resourceful and sharp-witted". The British Library edition claims that this book is the first British novel to feature a female detective, the notion being that the books about Mrs. Gladding and Mrs. Paschel were collections of stories, not true novels. This sounds like a fun read and I am trying to locate a copy.
I have acquired a copy of Mr. Bazalgette's Agent and found it an entertaining read. Mike Ashley's introduction to the 2013? British Library Crime Classics edition is informative, though I have some qualms with some of what he writes. One point is that Mr. Bazalgette's Agent is not really a novel. I estimate the word count at about 31,000 so I consider it a novella. Ashley suggests that Merrick's reason for belittling his first major published work (and attempting to buy up and destroy any copies he could lay his hands on) was because he realized several of the plot points were very similar to the American Dime Novel "Lady Kate, the Dashing Female Detective (see above) published two years earlier. I propose another theory: Merrick, who was nicknamed "the novelist's novelist" by some of his contemporary author acquaintances, was embarrassed by how he ended the story. The first 2/3's is a charming, light-hearted diary-like description of a woman detective chasing an embezzler across Europe and Africa. Wry humor, subtle satire and wonderful phrasings (along with somewhat reasonable detective work) dominate the first sections of the book. In fact, it seemed like Merrick may have been the inspiration for Mary Roberts Rinehart's lovely little collection of stories titled Bab: A Sub-Deb published just prior to WWI. In the final 1/3 of the book Merrick turns the story into a typical Victorian Sensation melodrama undermining all the clever and witty work he did in the first sections of the book. Taken as a whole, this is an enjoyable book well worth seeking out by those interested in the early development of the fictional female detective and anyone desiring a breezy read by a stylish author. One example of the clever stylings of Merrick occurs early in the book when Miriam describes her fall from higher levels of society . . ."I was a governess until people discovered I had been an actress, and I was an actress till they discovered I could not act". Evidently Miriam was orphaned while she was attending an expensive boarding school (maybe in Belgium?) and was allowed to finish her education due to the school's charity but she was penniless upon graduation. In that regard Miriam reminded me of the Cordelia Gray detective character written by P. D. James (see below) some 85 years later.
1889 Hilda Serene Albert W. Aiken (1846-1894)
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: probably softboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: 25 year old detective appeared in "The Actress Detective: Or, The Invisible Hand: The Romance of an Implacable Mission".
1891 Maggie Everett Harlan P Halsey? (aka "Old Sleuth", Tony Pastor, Judson R Taylor)
Location: ? (1839?-1898)
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of agency: Badger & Co
Type: ? Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: ?
1892 Laura Keen C. Little aka H(arvey K(ing) Shakleford (1841-1906)
Location: American West?
Lone/Agent/ Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in Laura Keen, the Queen of Detectives per Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975).
Appears to be a Dime-novel type heroine maybe similar to Denver Doll? (see above). Note: Laura Keene, born Mary Frances Moss( 1826-1873) was a British stage actress who found success in the US as an actress, theater manager and producer. She was a witness to Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater in 1865. I wonder if C. Little took the name of his detective character from this real life actress?
1892 Dorcas Dene (nee Lester) George R(obert) Sims (1847-1922)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent/Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation & Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Appeared in Dorcas Dene, Detective; Her Adventures. Her dramatist friend, Mr Saxon, acts as her Watson per CJ Rzepka. Retired actress begins working for her neighbor's detective agency before eventually taking it over. Dorcas has to earn living to support her family because artist husband, Paul Dene, has become blind. Household also consists of Dorcas's mother (Mrs Lester) and a bulldog named Toddlekins. Storytelling style and plotlines are similar to the Loveday Brooke stories by C L Pirkis (see below). Stories often involve secret marriages, mistaken identity, lunatic asylums and stolen inheritances. Men behaving badly are ubiquitious.
1894 Loveday Brooke Catherine Louisa Pirkis, nee Lyne (1839-1910)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Lynch Court Detective Agency?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Casebook/Victorian Sensation/Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Upper class woman falls on hard times, works as a PI to earn a living. Boss is Ebenezer Dyer.
Storytelling style and plotlines are similar to the Dorcas Dene stories by George R Sims (see above). Main
difference between Loveday and Dorcas is that at the end of a case Dorcas returns to a loving household
while Loveday seems to have no friends or relatives she can turn to for solice or company. Stories are solid mysteries with genuine detection.
1894 Coralie Urquhart M(ary) E(lizaeth) Braddon (aka Mrs John Maxwell) (1835-1915)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: mediumboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Appeared in Thou Art the Man. Author had written Lady Audley's Secret in 1862. Coralie is not a detective. She happens to piece together the movements and motives of one of her relatives to partially solve a pair of murders in this sordid melodrama.
1894 "The Squirrel"? Charleton Savage, aka Carlton Strange, aka Calthorpe Strange
(All above may have been psd. for Mrs Frances Elizabeth G.
Carey Brock (1827=1905)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled? Literary Classification: Shilling Shocker/Penny Dreadful
Comments: Appeared in The Beech Court Mystery. She is the daughter of a poacher?
1894 Nellie Nugent Detective Edenhope?
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Norton, Larkins & Co.
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Nellie is a typical Dime Novel Girl/Young Woman Detective: shoots, fights, cross-dresses and uses weapons and disguises expertly. Appeared in "Nellie, The Girl Detective or The Mystery of the Mason Mansion" in Old Cap, Collier Library #542 dated 5/12/1894. More info can be found on D. B. Borton's site/Girl Detectives Blog at
dbborton.com. Nellie is about 18 years old. Her bosses are Robert Norton and Jack Larkins.
1894 Annie Cory &/or Dora Bell/Dora White Mrs George Corbett (aka Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett) (1846-1930)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Appeared in When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead. Author also wrote a book of ss titled Adventures of a Lady Detective in 1890 but scant info exists. Is Annie Cory the "Lady Detective"? Or is it Bell White (who works for/with Robert "Bob" White) from Secrets of a Private Inquiry Office? (1890, one of the 15 stories in this book features a woman detective, Dora White, who is a neice of Bob White one of the co-owners of the Bell & White Agency, Dora works undercover). Annie detects alongside her father per Michele B. Slung's reading of Victorian Detective Fiction (1966). Mrs. Corbett was involved in the Women's Rights and Women's Suffrage movements. She wrote at least 12 novels and numerous short stories (most of which appeared never to have been collected in book form) between 1881 and 1922. Below I've compiled a list of works from Wikipedia and other Internet sources with some comments:
The Missing Note (1881) novel-possibly Detective
Cassandra (1884) novel-?
Pharisees Unveiled: The Adventures of an Amateur Detective (1889) novel-Detective/SiFi
New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889) novel-Feminist Utopia/Distopia
Behind the Veil or Adventures of a Lady Detective (1890) short stories, poss magazine pub only-Detective
Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office (1891) short stories, poss magazine pub only-Detective
A Young Stowaway (1893) novel-YA Adventure
Mrs. Grundy’s Victims (1893)-?
When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (1894) novel-Detective
Deb O’Mally’s (1895) novel-?
Little Miss Robinson Crusoe (1898) novel-YA Adventure
The Marriage Market (1903) novel-?
The Adventures of Princess Daintipet (1905) novel-?
An Unwilling Husband (1922) novel-?
1895 Rose Cortenay Spicer Milton Danvers (aka J Edmond Long)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Appears in The Fatal Finger Mark, Rose Cortenay's First Case (1895) as an agent of the agency
owned by Robert Spicer as per CJ Rzepka. May have appeared in six other novels in the 1890's. Possibly appeared in The Grantham Mystery (1893?) although the date may be wrong. The Doctor's Crime, The Detectives Honeymoon, A Desperate Dilemma, Mysterious Disappearance of a Bride, The Lone Cross Manor Mystery, The Squire's Fatal Will. Per G. K. Kline, Rose's husband, Robert Spicer, is the main protagonist/principal detective in most if not all of the stories.
1895 Mignon Lawrence Albert W. Aiken (1846-1894)
Location: NYC & New Mexico
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Joe Phenix's Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Former NYC policewoman detects out West under the guise of being a barber. Partner/boss is Joe Phenix whose real name is Gilbert Barlee. Appeared in "The Female-Barber Detective: Or, Joe Phenix in Silver City" and possibly "The Actress Detective" which I have not yet read. In "The Female-Barber Detective" Mignon is apparently sent West by her boss, Joe Phenix, to track down a fugitive wanted for crimes in NYC. She is quite "mannish", even sporting a thick mustache which needs to be constantly kept in check by a straight razor. Her cover while detecting in New Mexico is to pretend to be a barber. She also disguises herself as a Mexican cowboy when the bad guys get too suspicious of her. She's a quick thinker and can handle herself in a fight. Her putative boss, Joe Phenix, is never actually mentioned in this slow-moving story but one supposes that the Dime-Novel readers of the time knew Mignon worked for Joe.
1895 Caroline "Cad" Metti Harlan P. Halsey (1839?-1898)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in "Cad Metti: The Female Detective Strategist: Or, Dudie Dunne, Again in the Field" and possibly two other stories, one of which was Oscar the Detective or Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective). Oscar Woodford "Dudie" Dunne is Cad's boss/partner. Cad is a beautiful Italian-American dark-haired young woman who can sing, dance, fence, wrestle and shoot with great expertise. She, like her boss, is a master of disguise (what top-notch detective of that era wasn't) and can tail/follow anyone, anytime without being noticed. She also enjoys a good fight and doesn't shy away from administering a severe beating (with her trusty small billy club) to any criminal who deserves it. Cad earns her moniker of "Detective Strategist" mainly by doing the thinking for her boss/partner, Dudie Dunne, on those occasions when Dudie falls prey to a pretty woman of questionable character. The Dudie Dunne character almost shouts out for a deeper analysis than I am qualified to offer. Although he is slight of build, he is quite athletic, adept at disguises and expert at tailing suspects. Both Dudie (the nickname refers to his penchant for dressing like a dude) and Cad often assume the guise of the opposite sex, even when the plot doesn't really call for such actions. Cad and Dudie sometimes even disguise themselves as each other, but, as mentioned above, this cross-dressing doesn't serve to further the plot in any appreciable way. "Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist...,etc." is a Dime-novel, pot-boiler describing the detectives efforts to capture a gang of master criminals who are about to unleash a world-wide counterfeiting scheme. These so-called mastermind criminals were able to somehow organize a sophisticated international plot of great complexity, yet, due mainly to their own stupidity, become easy prey to a couple of NYC detectives who seem to like to cross-dress as much as they like to fight crime. Other than some interesting descriptions of the Sheepshead Bay--Coney Island sections of Brooklyn, this is a poorly written adventure story with little true detection on display.
1898 Lois Cayley Grant Allen (1848-1899)
Location: England, Europe, Asia
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Soft? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Really more Adventuress than Detective as indicated by title of book she appears in, Miss Cayley's Adventures. She is 21, dark complexion, eyes & hair.
1899 Florence Cusak L T Meade & R Eustace aka Eustace Robert Barton (1854-1943)
Location: England? aka Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844-1914)
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Soft? Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Dark blue eyes & raven hair. Appears in 4 stories in Harmsworth Magazine. Narrator/friend is
Dr Lonsdale. The story I read tries to mimic a Sherlock Holmes-type adventure.
1899 Mrs Mollie Delamere Beatrice Maude Emelia Eastwick Heron-Maxwell , nee Eastwick (1859-1927)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency:
Type:? Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: A young widow who is a part time journalist and an appraiser/agent for a pearl merchant. Apparently Mollie foils crimes while working for the pearl merchant? per Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975). Appeared in The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker. After reading these episodic adventures I must say that Mollie is not a professional detective. She is a plucky, fairly intelligent woman who is put on salary and commission by a successful pearl merchant, Mr. Leighton, to act as an agent selling and delivering pearls to the merchants customers. These are really adventure stories in which Mollie does a bit of detecting in order to safeguard the pearls placed in her possession but she usually depends more on luck than skill in thwarting thieves and villains. Mollie's pearl-brokering career and her widowhood both come to an end in the final paragraph of the last story as she marries a wealthy Australian connoisseur of fine objects. The nine chapters/episodes I read were mildly entertaining but somewhat silly.
1900 Dora Myrl Beck M(atthias) McDonnell Bodkin (1850-1933)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Soft Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Appeared in Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective and The Capture of Paul Beck and perhaps in some of her son's (Paul Jr.) adventures. Dora is a Cambridge graduate (mathematics major?), worked as a telegraph girl, telephone operator (similar to Molly Morganthau, see below, 1915 entry), medical doctor, companion and journalist. She is 25, athletic and slim of build in her first book. She can play the piano, handle firearms, ride a bicycle and leap over walls. Dora ages throughout the series and is about 50 years old and enjoying retirement by playing golf with/against her husband (detective Paul Beck Sr.) in the last batch of stories featuring their son, Paul Beck, Jr. (1911?) according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. As with many female detectives, Dora was raised by her father (her mother died in childbirth) and was on her own upon graduation at 18 when her father died, leaving her a small inheritance.
1900 Hilda Wade Grant Allen, aka Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848-1899)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: Scientific/Medical?
Comments: Apparently was a nurse who happens to solve mysteries so probably not eligible for this list.
Perhaps Mary Roberts Rinehart read these stories and named her nurse detective, Hilda Adams, after
Grant Allen's protaganist? Hilda Adams (Miss Pinkerton) is not eligible for this list because she is an
undercover police detective (and a nurse), not a PI. Note on the finances of Rinehart's Hilda Adams: Since she usually was paid both by the police and the families into whose home her boss secretly plants her when working on a case (and when in-between cases she could always find nurse-related employment) she must have made a nice living throughout her long career.
1903 Bella Thorn Tom Henry Gallon (1866-1914)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Secretarial Supply Syndicate, Ltd.
Type: Soft? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Appeared in The Girl Behind the Keys. Probably more an amateur sleuth/typist than a PI per my reading of Michele B Slung's comments in Crime on Her Mind (1975). A new edition of this book was published in 2005 by Broadview Press a Canadian independent academic publisher. I have only managed to read excerpts of the introduction by Arlene Young and portions of a few of the eight stories in this volume. Apparently Bella Thorn, described as a "small-statured 21 year-old" London based trained typist, answers a help wanted ad just as she is about to run out of money (similar to Miriam Lea see above 1888 entry). She soon discovers that her new boss, Neal Larrurd, is a con man and the Secretarial Supply Syndicate is a criminal enterprise. Bella uses her wits to foil the nefarious plans of her boss while still maintaining her job and lucrative salary. The stories seem to be quite charming reminding me of the Mollie Delamere (see above 1899 entry) and the previously mentioned Miriam Lea stories. Gallon, a prolific British author and playwright, wrote well over 40 novels and perhaps 9 plays between 1897 and 1914. Words like rogue, folly, and ghost appear in some of his titles so I have no idea how to classify Gallon as an author. Apparently a family member (his sister?) donated money to create a literary prize named for him which is still awarded today. IMDB claims that the critics of his era considered Gallon a second-rate Charles Dickens. Several of Gallon's works were made into films in the teens and twenties. The stories in this book are somewhat comparable to the Romney Pringle stories co-written by Dr. Thorndyke creator R. Austin Freeman published around the same time (1902). I wonder if Gallon was influenced by reading the roguish Pringle stories and the result were the stories found in The Girl Behind the Keys.
1904 Mademoiselle Lucie Harlan P. Halsey (1839?-1898)
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: ? Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in "Mademoiselle Lucie, the French Lady Detective". Jerry Mack is her male partner.
1906 Frances Baird R(eginald) W(right) Kauffman (1877-1959)
Location: Philadelphia & NYC?
Lone/Agent /Owner: Agent then owner/lone?
Name of Agency: Watkins Private Detective Agency
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Appeared in Miss Frances Baird, Detective: A Passage from her Memoirs (1906) & My Heart and Stephanie (1910). Associates were Ambrose Kemp in the first book & Sam Burton in the second. "Of historical interest only" according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Frances narrates her first book, Sam Burton narrates her second. Kathleen G. Klein considers the second book more a spy/romance than a detective story.
1907 Clarice St. Cyr (de Morney) various authors writing as Nick Carter
Location: NYC & Long Island
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Nick Carter's Detective Agency?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: Appeared in at least three Nick Carter adventures in Street & Smith's New Nick Carter Weekly #526 "A Double Mystery or Nick Carter's Strong Hand Play" (1/26/1907), #527 "Clarice, the Countess or Nick Carter's Motor Boat Case" (2/2/1907) and #528 "Clarice, the Woman Detective or Nick Carter's Titled Assistant" (2/7/1907). Nick first meets Clarice, who is working as a ladies maid, on an abduction case in the first story. Nick talks Clarice into some undercover detective work to help locate her her employer. In the second story, Nick rescues Clarice from her evil French aristocrat husband and then Clarice becomes one of Nick's detective agents and helps bring to justice her ner'er-do-well (in name only) husband in the third story. These are typical Dime Novel narratives interesting to me mainly due to the settings: New Jersey, Manhattan, the Hudson River, the East River, Long Island's sparsely populated North Fork including the Village of Greenport, Orient Point and its surrounding bays. Clarice makes some good deductions regarding a found wallet and uses a disguise to track down the wallet's owner in the third story She is described as being a raven-haired beauty probably in her early or mid-twenties. Her title is Countess De Morney although her marriage to the evil Count De Morney was never consummated. Once the evil Count is disposed of, Clarice sets her cap for Nick Carter himself . . . but since I can find no further mention of Clarice beyond these three stories, I guess Nick put the kibosh on that idea.
1908 Miss Ethel Boston Charles Marius Eugene Antonin Arnoud aka Antonin Reschal (1874-1935)
Location: A fantasized NYC?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled: ? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage, Dime Novel, Pulp?
Comments: From what I can gather from the Internet, Reschal wrote dozens of outlandish stories that were serialized in French magazines in 1908-1909 about this professional detective living/working in a highly imagined New York and the US where the author's geography bears little resemblance to reality. Nina Cooper adapted and translated eleven of these tales in a 2012 book (ebook?) titled The Adventures of Miss Boston, the First Female Detective. Miss Boston's foil/friend/sidekick is Chief Inspector Sokes of the NYC police? I read an excerpt of one of the stories which had Miss Boston helping Dr. Watson solve the murder of Sherlock Holmes. Don't know quite what to make of these stories but they sure seem to be fun and unusual.
1909 Alice Montgomery Francis W(orcester) Doughty (1850-1917)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Old & Young King Brady
Type: ? Literary Classification: Dime Novel
Comments: ?
1910 Joan Mar Marie Connor Leighton (1861? or 1865?-1941)
Location: ? aka Marie Flora Barbara Connor Leighton, aka Mrs. Robert Leighton
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Appeared in Joan Mar, Detective
1911 Ethel King Jean Petithuguenin (1878-1939)
Location: Philadelphia?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: Fascicule?
Comments: Seems to be similar to Miss Boston (see above 1908 entry). Ten of the stories that originally appeared in French magazines 1911-1914 were translated and adapted by Nina Cooper in a book titled The Adventures of Ethel King, the Female Nick Carter pub by Black Coat Press in 2013.
1911 Ida Lee Marie Conner Leighton (1861? or 1865?-1941?)
Location: England? aka Marie Flora Barbara Connor Leighton, aka Mrs. Robert Leighton
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ? Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Appeared in The Bride of Dutton Market.
1912 Judith Lee Richard Marsh, psd of Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Agency: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Appeared in Judith Lee (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), both collections of short stories. Used her lip-reading skills to solve mysteries according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee was published in 2013 by Black Coat Press. Much of the following information I gathered from the introduction by Jean-Daniel Breque: Heldmann/Marsh was a prolific author who tended to write in the mystery/horror/supernatural genres. His most famous book was The Beetle: A Mystery (1897). After publishing various adventure-type stories in the late 1870's and early 1880s he was involved in some type of financial scandal in 1884 and was sent to prison. A year or two after his release he began writing under the name of Richard Marsh in 1888. I was able to read 2 of the 22 Judith Lee stories and found them charming, interesting and well written. I hope to obtain a copy of the Complete Adventures and read all the stories so I can determine if Judith , at least occasionally, accepted a fee for her detective services or if she was just a busybody who "read" peoples private conversations and intruded herself into dangerous situations. I came across a Judith Lee pastiche (or fan fiction) written in 2015 on a site called suffrajitsu.com in which Judith has travelled to New York City to give a speech about teaching the deaf. While there she gets involved with the murder (or suicide) of a strange doctor who practiced an odd form of psychiatry on Riverside Drive in upper Manhattan. The story implies that Judith became involved in the suffragette movement back home in England and used her jiujitsu skills to protect leaders like Emmeline Pankhurst during public appearances and demonstrations. I don't quite know what to make of this story but those interested can click here to read it. Also, the story states that Judith's father was Chinese and her mother was English, I will have to read more of the real Judith Lee stories to verify this.
1914 Mercedes Quero G. E. (Gladys Edson) Locke (1887-1945?)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation/Rivals of Sherlock Holmes/GAD (almost)
Comments: Appeared in That Affair at Portstead Manor (1914), The Red Cavalier (1922), The Scarlet Macaw (1923) & The House on the Downs (1925). "The Locke books were lengthy for this period, running 250 to 300 plus pages." according to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women.
That Affair at Portstead Manor (1914)
This is a longish (80,000 words, 266 pages) Country House murder mystery written by a now mostly forgotten author of once popular mysteries set in England. This is the debut of London based private detective Mercedes Quero the tall, slim, brown haired/eyed 20+ year old detective who is working undercover at the titular manor house posing as companion to Lady Pevensy, one of several manor guests. The story is told from the point of view of Mr. Archibald Clavering, a short, balding, rotund, middle-aged bachelor who is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes and finds himself investigating the theft of a diamond necklace, the shooting of an earl, the theft of valuable government papers and the shooting of a baronet. Clavering eventually joins forces with Quero and they (well, mostly Quero) eventually solve the mysterious events that unfolded at Portstead Manor. Had Locke employed fewer secret passages/panels, tightened the plot, not lost track of characters for chapters at a time, and played more fairly with the reader this might be considered a noble precursor to the typical Golden Age mystery novels that would become popular in the 1920s and 1930s. I found the most interesting aspect of the book not the detections of Mercedes Quero nor the various romances/love triangles of the major characters but the budding romance between the middle-aged, worldly, self-absorbed widowed Lady Pevensy and fussbudget, aesthetic bachelor Mr. Clavering. By story’s end Lady Pevensy is not seeking to replace her dearly departed Eustace with matrimony to Clavering but she just wants him to become a friend with benefits, as we say nowadays. Clavering serves as Quero’s Captain Hastings meaning he is occasionally useful at finding clues if he is given proper direction but often comes to fanciful conclusions as to the meaning of the clues. I wonder if Agatha Christie read this book and used Clavering as model for Hastings when she wrote her Hercule Poirot books starting in 1920.
Locke is hardly mentioned in mystery fiction reference books so I had to look around the web for further info on her. Most of the below comes from the Dorchester Atheneum website which is devoted to the history of Dorchester, Massachusetts: Gladys Edson Locke was born in Dorchester, MA and spent most of her life in that section/suburb of Boston. She was highly educated, graduating from Boston University with a master’s degree in English. She later earned a degree in library science at Simmons College. She tutored Latin, Italian and French in a New Hampshire high school. Her education reminds me of her contemporary mystery author, Jeanette Barbour Perry Lee, who wrote about NY detective Millicent Newberry (see below). “In 1917 she became a cataloger in the main branch of the Boston Public Library . . .where she worked for many decades.” She never married. She was an anglophile and often traveled to England and Scotland where she typically set her mystery novels. In this regard Locke reminded me of John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), master of the locked room mystery. Carr was a better constructor of puzzle plots but each were roughly equals as prose stylists. Locke wrote at least 11 mystery novels between 1914 and 1935, Mercedes Quero appeared in only four as far as I can determine. Quero self-describes herself as born to an upper-class family but fell on hard times and had to resort to detective work in order to support herself, much like Loveday Brooke and Miriam Lea (see above). It seems that Mercedes often works with Inspector Burton who appears in her other books but I fear that the Pevensy/Clavering couple mentioned above do not appear in the other three Quero adventures.
1914 Madelyn Mack Hugh C Weir (1884-1934)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner then Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
Comments: Started as assistant house detective for the Niegel Dry Goods store then becomes owner of a large agency on Fifth Avenue. Housekeeper was Susan Bolton. Reporter Nora Noraker was her narrator. She went to college and modeled herself on Sherlock Holmes per Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Appeared in Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective (1914). Stories are very reminiscent of Doyle's detective stories though not quite as good. Just like Holmes, Madelyn turns to a drug, of sorts, when depressed or bored---Cola berries?? She is so successful in her detecting exploits that at one point she owns an agency employing several "agents" and a secretary/receptionist and a second home---a country house located north of NYC overlooking the Hudson River.
Eventually she becomes wealthy enough to downsize her agency and work part time solving crimes that interest
her. The one story I read was entertaining but unfairly-clued. She is 25 at the start of her adventures.
1914 Miss Balmy Rymal Arthur Stringer
Location: US?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Security Alliance
Type: Soft
Comments: Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975) suggests that the main client of the agency Balmy
works for is the Jeweler's Protective Union. Winfred (Winkie) Ealand is Balm's love interest and sometimes partner/assistant.
1915 Violet Strange Anna Katherine Green (Roelphs) (1846-1935)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Teenage heiress secretly works as PI to raise cash to help estranged (by father) older sister.
Appeared in The Golden Slipper & Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915). Several of the stories feature
puzzling plots with satisfying solutions. These stories are somewhat more easily approached by modern readers compared to the author's Gryce/Butterworth works. Mike Grost maintains that Strange is not a Sensation character and Green is not a Sensation writer. Green's stories are less sordid and better plotted and contain more detection than the typical Victorian Sensation novel but in my opinion she is pretty darn close to being a Sensation author. Maybe I'll call Violet a Rival of Sherlock Holmes? I have discovered that Candida Martinelli adapted all the Violet Strange short stories and converted them into YA novels in 2014. Her website states "The stories are based on A.K. Green's 1914 short stories, but they are completely re-imagined and re-written for pre-teens and teens today." The adapted stories are set in the year 1899. The concept is interesting and the cover art looks great Click thevioletstrangemysteries.wordpress.com/HERE to view the site.
1916 (1913?) Clare Kendall Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: Rivals of Sherlock Holmes & Scientific/Medical
Comments: Appeared in a Craig Kennedy story "The Ear in the Wall" as the owner of a detective agency
specializing in helping women. Maybe a precursor to Dol Bonner's relationship with Nero Wolfe? Clare is described as a dark-haired, grey-eyed, not-unattractive, intelligent woman who had started out as an operative for one of the large NYC detective agencies and eventually opened her own agency. Like Reeve's main detective, Craig Kennedy, and his other detective/adventuress creation Constance Dunlap (see below), Clare seems to spend much of her time fighting against or dealing with the pervasive corruption created by the Tammany Hall political machine which dominated NYC from roughly 1840 to 1930. Clare apparently also worked closely with the suffragette movement. I recently read some previously unknown to me Clare Kendall short stories serialized in 1913. Generally the stories were not very impressive. The ubiquitous municipal corruption detailed in "The Ear in the Wall" seemed absent in these earlier stories. Also, Clare has a boyfriend (of sorts) in this series, a Dr. William "Billy" Lawson who owns Lawson Laboratories. It comes in handy to have an eager admirer who will act as your assistant and run lab tests any time, day or night.
Here is a list of the 1913 stories:
"A Skirmish With the Occult"
"The Pearl Doctor"
"The House of Cards"
"The Temple of Beauty" (I have not read this one)
The Mystery of the Stolen Da Vinci"
From the 1913 story illustrations, Clare sported quite a collection of hats.
1915 Mary (Molly) McKenna Morganthau Babbitts Geraldine Bonner (1870-1930)
Location: NYC & environs
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Whitney & Whitney Law Firm
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: HIBK?
Comments: Former department store worker and telephone switchboard operator turned part time sleuth. She is 23 in her first adventure and ages in real time during her series. Molly sometimes worked with reporter/husband "Soapy" Babbitts. Molly often uses her telephone operator skills to eavesdrop on important conversations. Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women believes Molly was the first blue collar worker who became a female detective. Molly collected at least two large rewards in addition to being paid by the Whitney & Whitney law firm for her undercover sleuthing so she surely was a professional investigator. Appeared in The Girl at Central (1915), The Black Eagle Mystery (1916), and Miss Maitland, Private Secretary (1919).
The Girl at Central mostly takes place in a rural New Jersey county roughly halfway between Philadelphia and New York City. Molly has been dispatched there by NYC telephone company headquarters management to help out a shorthanded central switching station office. Small town life and the operations of a telephone central substation are interestingly described. Trains, planes, automobiles and horse-drawn carriages play important parts in the story. Some might think the solution to the crime is a bit of a cheat but I think Bonner fairly-clued the ending. Molly is back home in Manhattan with a newly acquired husband and living in a well appointed apartment thanks to the large reward she collected by solving her first case when she gets involved in The Black Eagle Mystery. The Black Eagle being the name of a Manhattan office building in which mysterious events and crimes occur. Miss Maitland, Private Secretary takes place partly in Manhattan and partly on a Long Island estate. All three stories offer interesting insights into how certain classes of people lived during the World War I era. Bonner's writing style is similar to that of Mary Roberts Rinehart: lively and interesting narration, some HIBK moments, a modern (for the time) wry writing style. Some jarring ethnic and racial slurs creep into the stories which hurt the charm factor of Molly's narration. Bonner plays fair with the reader, to some extent, in that most of the clues are laid out so the solutions could, in theory, be arrived at before the final chapter. The key to solving Bonner's mysteries before Molly does is to identify the hidden or secret relationships between and among the various characters in each mystery story. Molly's charm factor gradually erodes as the series progresses. As Molly attains material things (a husband, more money, a nice apartment) she becomes more dismissive of others who are not so fortunate. She treats her poor housekeeper very rudely at times. Molly's character goes from being quite compassionate in the first book to almost uncaring by the third book. This fact combined with the casual tossing about of ethnic and racial slurs (which, in light of the fact that Molly is half Jewish and half Irish, seems a bit odd) prevents me from recommending these stories to casual mystery readers. Serious students of the history of the American detective/mystery story should read these stories. Interesting side note: Miss Maitland, Private Secretary was made into a motion picture in 1920, a year after the novel was published. It was re-titled "The Girl in the Web", the title referring to the somehat complex plot Bonner had created. Looking over the cast listed on IMBD it seems as though the film version eliminated the roles of Molly herself and the Whitney father and son lawyers who usually play small but key roles in the stories.
I have kept printed copies of Molly's three adventures so if anyone cannot find copies online or in used bookshops, I might be able to provide copies. My email appears at the top of this page.
1916 Constance Dunlap Arthur B Reeve (1880-1936)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner?
Name of Agency:
Type: mediumboiled? Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage & Scientific/Medical
Comments: Housewife then widow then adventuress then criminal then detective? Appeared in Constance Dunlap, Woman Detective (1913?). Stories are written in the same overwrought melodramatic style as Reeve's
Craig Kenney stories. New (at the time) inventions, such as fish-eye lenses, are often showcased in the stories.
Municipal corruption seems endemic.
1917 Millicent Newberry Jeanette Barbour Perry Lee (1860 or 1861-1951)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner
Name of Agency: Tom Corbin's Agency, then her own (The Millicent Newberry Agency)
Type: soft Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation & Rivals of Sherlock Holmes?
Comments: Former seamstress, short but somewhat stout with grey hair & eyes. Milly lives with her elderly mother who often needs "looking after". One of Milly's former social cases eventually becomes maid/companion to the mother. Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women says Millicent appeared in 3 books The Green Jacket (1917), The Mysterious Office (1922) & Dead Right (1925) but not in Simeon Tetlow's Shadow (1909) so 1917 would seem to be her proper debut date. Millie is as much a social worker as a PI. K. G. Klein points out that, when possible, Millicent would prefer to reform rather than punish wrongdoers.
The Green Jacket is a longish (60,000? words) novel that would have been better served as a 30,000 word novella. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a valuable emerald necklace from the house of an affluent family outside of NYC. Two years after the apparent theft, Milly is hired by the owner of the necklace to finally discover what really happened to the jewels. Milly ensconces herself in the house ostensibly as a seamstress and listens, questions, observes and searches until she eventually solves the case. The solution is a bit of a letdown but makes sense after all the secrets and misunderstandings occurring between the family members. Although Milly is never described as a beautiful woman, she does receive two marriage proposals during the story, one from a man older than herself and one from a younger man. Milly's agency is successful enough to have two offices. A busy downtown office for routine cases and one uptown staffed only by herself for the more subtle cases that call for a social worker rather than a detective. The titular "green jacket" does not describe the emerald necklace but is the wool jacket that Milly knits continuously during the case and finishes once the case is solved.
The Mysterious Office is a shorter novel, about 50,000 words. Milly is hired to discover who stole a $25,000 pile of currency carelessly left unattended for a few minutes on top of a businessman's desk. She is ostensively brought in to the office as some kind of efficiency expert and, after several days, solves the case. As in her first recorded case, various misunderstandings and secret-keeping among the office workers and the businessman's family drive the plot. Also, stock market speculation plays a key role in the story. I hoped to see the author gradually changing her writing style from Victorian Sensation to a Golden Age of Detection style, but it did not happen in this story. I noticed a bit of shift to a Mary Roberts Rinehart/HIBK style but nothing more than that. Maybe in her third recorded case, Millicent will show more of a Golden Age nuance since at least four Agatha Christie books and one Lord Peter Wimsey book, that hopefully Lee read, were published by the time the final Millicent Newberry book, Dead Right was published in 1925. Milly discovers a clever stenographer/typist in the titular office and offers her a job as a detective trainee in her own agency.
Jeanette Lee was an educated woman and worked as an instructor and/or professor of English Literature and related subjects at five different colleges, her last position was at her alma mater, Smith College, before she left the academic world in 1913 to become a full time writer. I count 22 books that she published between 1900 and 1926 but she seems to have published no books after 1926. Less than 15% of her output seems to be in the mystery/detective genre. I find it difficult to categorize the bulk of her published works. She seemed to write about a wide variety of subjects and themes. Lee was married to Gerald Stanley Lee who was a Congregational pastor, author, magazine editor and lecturer. He published 10 books between 1896 and 1922 but none after that date that I can find. Most of his books seem to be about history, religion, inspirational and health related topics. Jeanette Lee dedicated several of her books to her husband. I found it interesting that Lee used the word "wistful' or "wistfully" at least 3 or 4 times in each of her first two Millicent Newberry books. I wonder why Lee only wrote three books about detective Millicent Newberry and no books at all after 1926? She seems to have written many magazine articles and short stories. One would have to go through her papers, which are deposited at Smith College, to discover why she published no books during the last 25 years of her life. It seems that Jeanette Lee was the first American woman author to create a female professional detective who owned her own agency.
1917 Evelyn Temple Ronald Gorell Barnes (aka Lord Gorell) (1884-1963)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/ Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Soft/ Literary Classification: Golden Age, Medical/Scientific?
Comments: Scientific detective? Michele B Slung labels her as an amateur sleuth so probably ineligible for this list.
Appeared in In the Night (1917) in which Evelyn is in her early 20's and Red Lilac (1935) in which she is her mid-30's per Coleen Barnett in Mystery Women. Gorell was a WWI hero, involved with many charities, a magazine editor, co-president of the Detection Club alongside Agatha Christie in the late 50's and early 60's. Perhaps he served as a model for the Lord Peter Wimsey character in the books by Dorothy Sayers? His 14 books published between 1917 and 1954 were all scrupulously fairly clued but perhaps best described as workmanlike. Evelyn Temple was not his main series character as she appeared in only 2 of his 14 books. Above info was gathered from the GA Detection wiki and Wikipedia.
I finally read the first Evelyn Temple book, In the Night (1917). This is a fairly-clued country house mystery in which Evelyn helps to solve the murder of her friend's father. She works with bloodstains, footprints and fingerprints then makes some solid deductions from these clues. Unless Evelyn started charging for her detective work in her second recorded case, which I doubt, she really should not be on this list but I'm leaving her on because I like the character and because In the Night was a well-written, early Golden Age mystery which deserves to be rescued from obscurity. Updated 2/2023.
1918 Solange Fontaine (Mrs) F(ryniwyd Wynifried Margaret) Tennyson Jesse (Harwood)
aka Fryn Jesse aka F. Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958)
Location: France
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: na
Type: Softboiled (but does sometimes carry a gun) Literary Classification: GAD & Supernatural & Psych Suspense
Comments: Solange seems to accept payment for her services so I believe she should be on this list. According to Michael Grost there is an uncollected group of short stories from 1918, a second group of stories collected and published in 1929 called The Solange Stories, and an uncollected story from 1930. The stories are well written with coherent plots and well developed characters. Mike Grost compares Jess's style to that of Somerset Maugham's. Solange claims to have the ability to sense the presence of evil.
What follows are my thoughts after reading all the Solange stories that were collected and published in 2014:
Solange Fontaine was the daughter of Englishwoman Emily Manningtree-Trent (of a respectable Sussex family) and Dr./Professor Fontaine, a Frenchman who was a police forensic scientist (crime scene blood, dust, hairs, etc. just like R. A. Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke) employed by the French Surete and sometimes consulted by Scotland Yard. In the early stories it is not clear exactly what type of medical/scientific work Dr. Fontaine does. In the later stories he is more clearly shown as a forensic scientist. Solange works in her father’s lab(s) as his assistant (she is expert in fingerprints, poisons and metric (crime scene?) photography. Solange is also, somehow, qualified to defend clients in French court so she appears to be an “avocet” or roughly the equivalent of an English barrister (also like Dr. Thorndyke). She considers herself a criminal anthropologist, being a follower to a certain degree of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) the Italian criminologist, some of whose theories, like the “born criminal” distinguishable by various physical traits, were eventually rejected by later science. A more modern description of Solange would be along the lines of a criminal psychologist or a criminal profiler. She claimed to be able to sense or detect “hidden evil” in people and places. The stories demonstrate that this special sense, although it sometimes misleads her, never fails her. She was technically employed by the French police (and like her father often consulted with Scotland Yard) but she did occasional freelance detective work, sometimes for a fee, sometimes gratis. She is about 30 years old in the 1918-19 stories and several years older in the 1929 stories. Solange lived in many places while growing up including England, France and various West Indies (or Caribbean) islands. As an adult she traveled to the US and numerous other foreign countries. The settings for the stories are Paris, Southern France, England and a few Caribbean islands. She is pursued by an American journalist stationed in Europe in most of the 1918-19 stories. She eventually advises the journalist to look elsewhere for love because she felt she would lose her unique “gift” if she married (or lost her virginity, I’m not sure which). By rebuffing her suitor Solange resolves the mystery plot vs. marriage plot dilemma posed by K. G. Klein. Solange doesn't need to worry that one will impinge on the other in the later stories. Solange is fluent in both French and English but seems more at home in France. She is described a pretty (not beautiful) petite woman with blondish or very light brown hair which she always wears in a short cut. She smokes cigarettes and occasionally caries a small pistol when she knows she will be in a perilous situation. She is described as having a slim boyish figure and is athletic since she plays tennis and can scramble up a rope when necessary. Solange, like E. Phillips Oppenheim’s detective the Baroness Clara Linz, is very cosmopolitan. People who are worried about a crime or a potential crime seem to want to confide in her.
Doug Greene’s introduction to the 2014 edition is very informative. I do take issue with his classification of Solange as an “Occult’ or ‘Supernatural” detective similar to William Hope Hodgson’s character Carnacki (The Ghost Finder). Solange does not actively seek out occult or supernatural situations, she is more along the lines of a psychic or clairvoyant detective who comes across evil almost by chance. Jesse’s stories, to me, are more similar to E. C. Bentley’s Philip Trent (note that Solange's mother's maiden name was Trent) stories combined with Agatha Christie’s Harley Quinn stories. Jesse varies the occult/supernatural content greatly from story to story.
Jesse led a surprisingly full life, making contributions to fiction, true crime writing and journalism, despite suffering from morphine addiction (due to the aftermath of a horrible hand injury from an airplane propeller accident), severe migraines and intense mood swings. Her family life was, to say the least, unusual. “Fryn” Jesse was a grandniece of British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).
The stories are listed below as they appear in The Compleat Adventures of Solange Fontaine published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 2014 (with magazine publication dates noted). The version of the book I read has one glaring typo...on an inside title page the author's name is misspelled as Jessie instead of Jesse. The stories are best read in the order published in the book rather than the chronological order of first magazine publication dates:
“Emma-Brother and Susie-Brother” (11/1918) set in and around Nice
“The Green Parrakeet” (12/1918) set in and around Nice
“Mademoiselle of the Mantles” (8/1918) Marseilles & Martinique, very racist story
“The Lovers of St. Lys” (2/1919) hills above Nice
“The Mother’s Heart” (3/1919) Paris, Cuba, Martinique, Trinidad & Barbados
“What Happened at Bout-du-Monde” (4/1919) St Martin?
“The Sanatorium” (6/1919) Nice & vicinity
“The Pedlar” (12/1929) London & Sussex?
“The Reprieve” (10/1929) London & Sussex?
“The Canary” (8/1929) London
“Lot’s Wife” (11/1929) Nice, London, Isle of Wright, Paris, Cannes
“The Black Veil” (9/1929) St. Tropez/St. Raphael vicinity & Draguignan
“The Railway Carriage” (11/1931) Sussex?
1918 Barbara "Baddie" Pretlow Arthur Stringer (1874-1950)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: The Locke Agency
Type: medium?
Comments: Appeared in The House of Intrigue. Baddie is a former criminal then a detective then a criminal again. Kathleen G. Klein describes this book as a "non-detective crime and mystery story."
1919? Lucille Dare Marie Connor Leighton (1865-1941)
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: Soft Literary Classification: Victorian Sensation
Comments: Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975) notes that Lucille is a mistress of disguise and has
been involved in many cases, most are unrecorded. Appeared in Lucile Dare, Detective. Maybe she is an ancestor of M. G. Eberhart's writer/detective Susan Dare? The novel seems to be a Victorian Sensation Novel but Leighton wrote it 18 or so years after Victoria's death and 8 years after Edward VII's death. Writing style is very similar to that of M E Braddon and the early Lawrence L Lynch (see above)----overwrought and melodramatic compared to the styles of F Tennyson Jessie and Geraldine Bonner (see above) and Mary Roberts Rinehart, each of whom were writing in a more modern style.
1920 Millie Lynn Rawson Cecil L. Bullivant
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Type: Soft
Comments: Appeared in Millie Lynn, Shop Investigator along with Ken Rawson, whom she will eventually marry.
1920 Shiela Crerar Ella M. Scrymsour (1888-1962) born: Ella Mary Campbell-Robertson
married name: Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol
acted under the name: Joan Thorpe-Mayne
Location: Scotland & London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Psychic, Supernatural, Occult
Comments: Appeared in six short stories published in The Blue Magazine over several months in 1920. Twenty-two year-old Sheila …”was a petite maid, with nut-brown hair and grey eyes.” Orphaned at a very young age, she was taken in and raised by a kindly uncle who lived in the Scottish highlands. Her idyllic childhood/girlhood ended when her uncle died of an unexpected heart attack. It turned out her inheritance consisted only of the heavily mortgaged house she had lived in for most of her life. Refusing to sell her beloved home, she entered into a five year lease with a rich American widow. Shiela then traveled to London intending to find employment so she could earn enough money to lift the mortgage. Unable to find a job (I guess the ability to play golf, ride horses, play the piano and sing were not in great demand in London in 1920) she had a vision (she always suspected she had the second-sight) to use her psychic abilities to help people and make money. She took out an ad in The Times as follows “Lady of gentle birth, Scottish, young, penniless, possessing strong psychic powers, will devote her services to the solving of uncanny mysteries or the laying of ghosts...” Fortuitously, Shiela's first case takes her back to Scotland where she manages to make a decent living solving numerous mysteries involving ghosts, demons and werewolves over the next five years while living in rented rooms in Edinburgh. She eventually saves enough money to pay off the mortgage and move back into her childhood home in the Highlands with her new husband. The stories are run-of-the-mill descriptions of ghosts and visions and hauntings and strange deaths and ancient Scottish curses. These stories lack the beautiful writing and interesting plots of the Solange Fontaine stories by F Tennyson Jesse (see 1918 entry above). Interestingly, Jesse and Scrymsour are almost exact contemporaries: both born in 1888 and dying within four years of each other. I wonder if they ever met? Shiela does show plenty of courage and moxie in her adventures but the author's writing style seems dated, even for 1920. Scrymsour was an actress and playwright and in addition to these ghost stories also wrote science-fiction/fantasy books and romance type novels. In 2006 Ash-Tree Press published in hardcover these six ghost stories under the title Shiela Crerar, Psychic Investigator. In 2021 Wild Side Press published the six stories as an ebook titled The Adventures of Shiela Crerar, Psychic Detective. If you are in the mood, Shiela’s adventures can be read HERE.
1922 Prudence "Tuppence" L. Beresford (nee, Cowley) Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner?
Name of Agency: International Detective Agency aka International Detective Bureau aka
Blunt's Brilliant Detectives***
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Thriller, Espionage, GAD
Comments: Tuppence is the daughter of a clergyman who joins the Voluntary Aid Detachment and serves as a nurse/military driver during WWI. At the war's end she meets up with a childhood friend (Tommy Beresford) and begins her on again-off again adventures in espionage and detection. She appeared in five books:
The Secret Adversary 1922
Partners in Crime 1929
N or M 1941
By the Pricking of My Thumbs 1968
Postern of Fate 1973
Although Christie gives conflicting clues as to age, I believe Tuppence is about 22 and Tommy is about 23 in their first book in which the action takes place in 1919. Tuppence is in her mid or late 20s in Partners in Crime and is described as a small, dark-haired women. The book contains 14 linked short stories wherein Christie attempts to satirize popular fictional detective of the past and current eras. Some of the stories are pure thrillers others contain some decent detection. Christie intends Tuppence to be a charming character and she succeeds in that goal. Tuppence assumes the identity of confidential secretary, Miss Robinson, to husband Tommy who has taken on the persona of the former owner, Theodore Blunt. Tommy's employer, the Secret Service, finds it expedient to have one of their agents and his clever wife pretend to run the agency in order to catch some spies. The couple do eventually help capture the spies but along the way they solve some interesting mysteries and collect fees for their efforts. Christie gives her readers a pleasant surprise at the end of the book which puts a temporary halt to Tuppence's taste for action and adventure.
***In my Dell paperback edition printed in Feb. 1967 Christie unaccountably changes the name of the detective agency from International Detective Agency to International Detective Bureau in the last couple of stories. Blunt's Brilliant Detectives is really just the agency's slogan but I like it as the real name.
1923 Sylvia Shale Mrs Sydney Groom
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Pemberthy's
Type: softboiled?
Comments: 25 year old daughter of a former Scotland Yard detective. Came to New York to make a name for herself. Appeared in Detective Sylvia Shale.
1927 Katherine "Kitty" Alexandra Climpson Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Middle-aged spinster appearing in at least two Lord Peter Wimsey stories: Unnatural Death and
Strong Poison. She's the owner of the secreterial/detective agency nicknamed "the Cattery" that Lord Peter helped to set up mainly so he could employ her investigative abilities on an "as needed" basis. Often Kitty deploys one of her employees on a case but sometimes she goes undercover herself to help Lord Peter.
1928 Miss Maud Silver Patricia Wentworth psd of Dora Amy Dillom, nee Elles (1878-1961)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Elderly spinster turns to PI work to supplement her retirement income after a career as a governess and schoolteacher. Author had an interesting publishing history. She published 6 non-mystery novels between 1910 & 1915 then 25 crime novels between 1923 & 1936, one featuring Miss Silver (Grey Mask, 1928). Further on then she published 32 crime novels between 1937 & 1961, 31 of them featuring Miss Silver. Since Christie's Miss Marple and Wentworth's Miss Silver both first appeared in print in the late 1920s, I wonder who influenced who or if both authors realized their characters independent of the other? Also, why did Miss Marple go on to much greater publishing success than Miss Silver. Wentworth seems to have been just as good a writer (and a slightly better stylist) than Christie. Was Christie a far superior plotter? Perhaps Miss Marple was able to at least partially ride on Poirot's coattails whereas Wentworth's failure to create an additional strong detective character hurt Miss Silver's chances of greater success? I welcome correction on the above numbers and dates from Wentworth fans.
Quote from The New Thrilling Detective website: "Lighter reading, and populated with mostly female characters (and of course the star-crossed young lovers whose romance was endangered until Miss Silver saves the day), this series became so popular in the United States that this British author’s primary publisher was in Philadelphia."
Carol Westron wrote a wonderful piece comparing Miss Silver and Miss Marple on the Promoting Crime blog back in 2014: Click HERE to read it.
1928 Lynn MacDonald Kay Cleaver Strahan (1888-1941)
Location: American West especially Oregon
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Appeared in seven books between 1928 & 1936, the first and perhaps the best being The Desert Moon Mystery (1928). She was tall with reddish hair and gray eyes. This info taken from The Thrilling Detective site owned by Kevin Burton Smith with much of the info supplied by John Norris.
1931 Yola Yates C(ecil?) B(oyd?) Yorke
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: According to Erika Janik in Pistols and Petticoats, Yola owns her own agency in "Hot Numbers" in the May 1931 issue of Gangster Stories, a 3rd tier pulp magazine. I do not know if this was her only appearance in print. I can find almost no information on C. B. Yorke other than this was likely a psd. He or she created a more well known character, Queen Sue, a tough, smart gun moll who sometimes headed her own gang and sometimes worked alone. I count several Queen Sue stories in the "gangster" pulps, mostly in the early 1930s. Yorke also created another character, Velma Dare (maybe a relative of Eberhart's Susan Dare?) who apparently was framed and fell into the gangster life. I have not yet been able to read a copy of "Hot Numbers".
1932? Baroness Clara Linz E(dward) Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of agency: Advice Limited
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage & GAD
Comments: She is English by birth, Austrian by marriage, glamorous and cosmopolitan. Seems to be a
widow at the time of the stories. Exotic foreigners are prominent. Sometimes pretends to be the agency's secretary rather than its owner for no apparent reason other than to keep her connection to the agency a secret? Clientel is drawn mostly from the upper classes and nobility. The Baroness is more mature and thoughtful (and a better detective) than Oppenheim's other female PI, Miss Mott, (see below). Here is a listing of her recorded cases:
"Thirty-Nine Wooden Boxes"
"An Olympian Debacle"
"Broken Engagements"
"Too Many Dukes"
"The Ritz Hotel Conference"
"Between the 8th Green and the 9th Tee" aka "The Ranelagh Mystery"
"Help for Mr. Goldman"
"The Lonely Man"
"A Family Understanding"
"The Listening Lady"
"A Gift from the Gods"
Some of these stories were published (possibly with editorial changes) in the American slick magazines Ladies' Home Journal and Women's Home Companion in 1933 & 1934 according to Project Gutenberg Australia. Clara is wooed by a Spanish nobleman through most of the stories and eventually accepts his marriage proposal, after helping to restore his family fortune. Clara smokes cigarettes, rides horses, plays golf and is considered quite beautiful.
1933 Madame Rosika Storey Hulbert Footner (1879-1944)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: Pulp? & HIBK?
Comments: Beautiful and aloof. Her secretary/narrator/companion is Bella Brickley (who has curly red hair). Rosika lives near Gramercy Park in NYC and has a pet monkey. She seems to solve cases by use of good guesswork, "practical psychology" and fortuitous prior knowledge of certain facts or people. The stories don't appear to aspire to play fair with the reader. Bella Brickley has to be the most fawning narrator in all of detective fiction. By comparison, she makes Bunny Manders seem almost arrogant toward Raffles. Although the stories are by no means silly, some of Rosika's actions and attitudes seem quite silly to a modern reader, though certainly not to Bella.
1933 Olga Knaresbrook Hazel Campbell
Location: England?
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments:
1933 Trixie Meehan T T Flynn
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Blaine Agency
Type: medium boiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: A spunky Lois Lane type; usually paired with fellow agent Mike Harris.
1934 Grace "Redsie" Culver Roswell Brown (aka Jean Francis Webb)
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Noonan Agency
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: She is the nominal secretary/assistant to "Big" Tim Noonan. Her sometime sidekick is
Jerry Riker.
1934 Peggy Fairfield E(loise) S Liddon (1897- ?)
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification; GAD & Scientific/Medical
Comments: Appeared in The Riddle of the Russian Princess (1934) and The Riddle of the Florentine Folio (1935). According to Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women, Peggy was a student of criminology and used scientific methods.
1935 Miss Lucie Mott E Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946)
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Mott's Enquiry Agency
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Appeared in Ask Miss Mott (1936) based upon a series of magazine stories published in 1935 Most of the stories are of the Romantic/Adventure/Thriller type. Only one or two feature actual detection. Miss Mott writes an advice column for a weekly (or bi-weekly) London women's magazine. She is sort of a combination Ann Landers and Martha Stewart. With the help of her uncle, who is a Scotland Yard detective, she decides to open an investigation agency almost on a whim. Kathleen Gregory Klein describes Miss Mott as "An ineffective detective without any ethical code and a romantic fool with a craving for excitement." Ouch. Although the stories were written in 1935 they almost seem to be taking place in 1895 (minus all the cars and telephones). Miss Mott has to be rescued from criminals by either her uncle or her quasi-criminal boyfriend in many of the stories. Her clientel is drawn mostly from the lower and middle classes. Lucie does sometimes carry a small pistol and she is not afraid of to use it. Here is a listing of the stories (with alternate titles) as described by Project Gutenberg Australia:
"Ask Miss Mott"---magazine & ebook book title
"Burglars Must Dine"---book title, "Dinner Without Masks"---magazine title, "Miss Mott Intervenes"---alt title
"The Magic Popgun"---magazine & book title
"Noah's Ark"---book title, "The House of Dread"---magazine title
"Buttercups and Daisies"---book title, "Behind Barred Doors"---magazine title
"The House by the River"---magazine & book title
"Lost Miss Greene"---no magazine publication, the only "pure" detective story in the series
"Meredith Walks Out"---book title, "Against Orders"---magazine title
"Marconi Saves Miss Mott"---book title, "First Catch the Girl"---magazine title
"The Terrified Wife"---book title, "The Other Letter"---magazine title
"Informers Still Pay"---book title, "Settled Out of Jail"---magazine title
Project Gutenberg Australia has some nice illustrations by Floyd M Davis that appeared in Collier's Magazine.
1935 Violet McDade Cleve F(ranklin) Adams (1895-1949)
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: McDade & Alverado Detective Agency
Type: hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: Her partner is Nevada Alverado, who apparently is a very attractive woman.
1936 Sarah Watson D B McCandless
Location: Midwest US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Watson Detective Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: Heavy-set, middle-aged widow. "Young" Ben Todd is her assistant. Based in a small town. Prototype for Bertha Cool?
1937 Carrie Cashin Theodore Tinsley
Location: US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Cash & Carry Detective Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: Beautiful and dangerous. Aleck Burton poses as her boss for "appearances".
1937 Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner Rex Stout (1886-1975)
Location: US, NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Partner then Owner?
Name of Agency: Bonner & Raffrey, Inc. then later Bonner Detective Agency, Incorporated
Type: MediumBoiled Literary Classification: GAD?
Comments: Twenty-four year old upper class woman falls on hard times so starts a detective agency to earn a living. Sally Colt aka Sally Corbett is one of her agents. Appeared in one novel of her own, one Tecumseh Fox novel and several Nero Wolfe adventures (most notably "Too Many Detectives").
Dol's agency is initially located on the 32nd floor of a fancy Park Avenue office building near 47th Street. Her extremely wealthy best friend, Sylvia Raffray, provided the initial $9,000+ seed money to start Dol in the PI business.
Dol's detecting style and personality is most similar to Gale Gallagher (1947), Sharon McCone (1978) and Anna Peters (1980); serious-minded, thoughtful and courageous when necessary. She is described as having light brown hair, caramel-colored eyes, long coal-black eyelashes with a narrow, attractive face. She has a younger brother in her first book but I don't think he is mentioned again in her later appearances. Dol states in so many words that she is really "down" on men and currently has little interest in a romantic relationship with any man. Her mother died when Dol was young and her father later lost his fortune via stock market gambling and subsequently committed suicide which not only forced Dol out of the leisure class but also out of high society circles (except for a few of her closest friends). Dol's was dumped by her fiance once she became penniless. What a nice guy! Oh, by the way, the man attempting to date Dol in The Hand in the Glove eventually admits that he was only feigning interest in her in order to get closer to her richer, more attractive best friend . . . no wonder Dol doesn't like men.
Here is a list of Dol's appearances in print:
1937.....The Hand In the Glove aka Crime on Her Hands (her own novel)
Slow-paced murder mystery with most of the action taking place on a country estate in Connecticut, not too far from NYC. Stout creates a cast of mostly affluent characters with motives and opportunities to kill an industrialist but provides none of them with a solid alibi. Dol makes some good deductions concerning the murder method and is able to find a key piece of evidence using her keen observational skills. The plot, told in third-person narration, is no better or worse than a mediocre Nero Wolfe plot. The primary weakness of this book is the absence of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. Because Archie is not telling this story, snappy dialogue, breezy narration and humor are all absent. Had Stout condensed this wordy novel into a shorter novella format he would have made this a better story instead of the somewhat dull and meandering read it actually is. While the Dol Bonner character is serious, intelligent and courageous she is not strong enough to carry a full-length novel unless Stout provides her with a first-rate plot. He did not do so in this story. Even the presence of Nero Wolfe foil, NYC police Inspector Cramer, in some of the late chapters did not add any spark to the story. Most of the characters are unhappy people with serious romantic and psychological problems of their own creation . . . and this was all before any murders occurred. Interesting note: Stout two years later used a similar setting/family situation in his Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar.
1940.....Bad For Business (Tecumseh Fox novel): Have not yet read this one. I believe one of Dol's four female ops in this story is a very young and inexperienced Amy Duncan.
1956....."Too Many Detectives" (Nero Wolfe novella)
By 1956 Dol's agency has grown from two operatives in 1937 to four full time salaried ops and seven on-call free-lancers. Her wealthy original partner, Sylvia Raffray, seems to have departed the scene and Dol has moved her office from expensive Park Avenue to a more sensibly priced location on 50th Street near Madison Avenue. Sally Colt is her top op and women make up the majority of her staff (two of four full time and four of seven part time). Dol actually supplants Archie as Wolfe's #1 in this story as Wolfe solves a murder after being summoned to Albany as part of a state-wide investigation into wire-tapping abuses by New York's licensed private investigators. Archie mentions that Dol "is about my age" and Sally is a few years younger than he is. Since Dol was 24 in 1937 does that make her and Archie 43 in this story? Or, does Dol now fully enter the Wolfe/Goodwin "we don't really age" universe which would make her probably 34 or so.
1957.....If Death Ever Slept (Nero Wolfe novel)
A wealthy business man, who suspects his daughter-in-law of numerous nefarious actions, hires Wolfe to get the goods on her. Late in the novel Wolfe realizes he needs a canny female PI to find the key piece of evidence. Dol and her assistant, Sally Colt, do not disappoint and Wolfe collects his fee (presumably sharing some of it with Dol). Much to Archie and Fritz's surprise, Wolfe invites Dol to a private breakfast strategy session in his bedroom. Would like to have been a fly on the wall that morning in the old brownstone.
1959.....Plot It Yourself (Nero Wolfe novel)
A group of authors, dramatists, publishers and literary agents hire Wolfe to discover who is behind a complicated scheme to extract large amounts of money from publishers and authors based upon questionable but serious plagiarism claims. Early in the book Wolfe hires Dol and Saul Panzer to search two Greenwich Village apartments for a damaging piece of evidence. Then starting about midway into the book Dol and her main op, Sally Corbett***, aid the investigation further by performing various other detective type tasks for Wolfe. They each have several lines of dialogue and are both present in the old Brownstone for the climactic final scene when Wolfe names the murderer. Archie describes Dol this way: "...the only female owner and operator of a detective agency in New York."
***Stout changes the name of Sally Colt to Sally Corbett in this story. Did Stout just forget the last name of this minor but continuing character or had Sally gotten married between her last appearance in 1957 and this appearance in 1959. Archie just skims over this apparent name change as both he and Wolfe refer to Sally as Miss Corbett (not Mrs. Corbett or Miss Colt) throughout the story. Since Stout supplies no explanation I will supply my own: Sally did get married in 1958 but was widowed or divorced shortly thereafter. Either for professional or sentimental reasons, Sally prefers to keep her married name instead of reverting back to her maiden name of Colt.
1963.....The Mother Hunt (Nero Wolfe novel)
Wolfe needs a female op for a specific job and Archie chooses Dol Bonner's best op--Sally Corbett (nee Colt). Sally performs satisfactorily and helps Wolfe track down the missing mother of a mystery baby left on a young widow's doorstep. Archie foregoes his usual flirting with Sally either because she is now married and/or because he is currently romantically involved with client Lucy Valdon. Maybe Lucy should have hired Dol and Sally at the get-go because it takes Wolfe more than two months and more than $14,000 of Lucy's money to solve the case. Dol has moved her agency office yet again, this time from 50th Street near Madison Avenue to somewhere on 45th Street. Although Dol is mentioned, she does not actually appear in this story. Sally enters the plot about 60% into the novel and exits at about the 67% mark.
1938 Mary Carner Zelda F Popkin (1898-1983)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Blankfort's
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: GAD
Comments: Department Store Dick. That's how Sharon McCone got her start---guarding dresses.
1938 Carole Trevor Hugh Pentecost (aka Judson P Phillips)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Old Towne Detective Agency
Type: medium boiled Literary Classification: Pulp
Comments: She is assisted by her ex-husband, Maxwell Blythe.
1939 Anna Halsey Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Pulp?
Comments: Anna was a 240 pound middle-aged woman who ran a high-class detective agency in Los Angeles. She sub-contracts Philip Marlowe in "Trouble is My Business" to persuade/force a dangerous gambler's moll to "get her hooks out of a rich man's son." Anna's agency is too genteel to soil its hands with any rough stuff so she farms this perilous job out to Marlowe. Anna's receptionist/secretary is a tall beautiful blonde named Gladys who was "worth eighteen grand a year in divorce business" to Anna's agency. Anna gets very upset when Marlowe tries to date Gladys. Was that because Anna feared a loss of income if Gladys was unavailable for "honeypot" duty or was it because Anna was sweet on Gladys? Although Anna debued about the same time as two other fat female detectives, Sarah Watson (see above) and Bertha Cool (see below), Anna dressed very stylishly as opposed to the more slovenly appearance of these other two plus-size PI's. I wonder if Anna Halsey appeared in any other Chandler stories?
1939 Bertha Cool Earle Stanley Gardner, writing as A. A. Fair (1889-1970)
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: B Cool Confidential Investigations
Type: hardboiled Literary Classification: Comic, GAD?
Comments: Plus-size widow starts detective agency to earn a living. She is greedy and unethical.
Her junior partner is Donald Lamb who does all the legwork and much of the thinking. Cool and Lam appeared in 29 novels between 1939 and 1970.
1939 Hilea Bailey Hilea Bailey (psd of Ruth Lenore Marting)
Location: ?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification:
Comments: Appeared in What Night Will Bring (1939), Give Thanks to Death (1940), The Smiling Corpse (1941), Breathe No More, My Lady (1946). Worked for her disabled father and sometimes with boyfriend/newspaperman, Jake Jones. Colleen Barnett in Mystery Women classifies Hilea as more of a narrator/assistant than independent investigator.
1940 Amanda & Lutie Beagle Torrey Chanslor
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owners
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled Literary Classification: GAD & Comic?
Comments: The Beagle sisters inherit a detective agency from their brother Ezekiel. Their neice,
Mary?Martha?Marthy? Meecham narrates and Jeff Mahoney "does some of the legwork and all of the heavy lifting"
per T & E Schantz. The author was a children's book illustrator.
1941 Jean Abbott Frances Crane
Location: SF
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner?
Name of Agency:
Type: softboiled? Literary Classification: Pulp-Influenced
Comments: Former New Mexico shopkeeper marries a San Francisco based PI (Patrick "Pat" Abbott) and
assists him on some of his cases. According to Victoria Nichols & Susan Thompson in Silk Stalkings (1988)
this series of 26 books leans more to HIBK school than mean streets but Mike Grost considers her better classified as pulp-influenced.
1943 Miss Grace Pomeroy Anna Mary Wells (1906-2003)
Location: NYC?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Keene Agency
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Appeared as a secondary character/assistant in the first and third of three novels written by Wells in the 1940's. Grace was a former teacher who became a nurse to a psychiatrist, Dr. Hillis Owen. Grace acts as sort of a Della Street to her doctor boss and aids his investigation into after-effects of a murder case in the first book, A Talent for Murder (1942). While Dr. Owen is away in military service, Grace gets a job with a detective agency and on her own solves her second case in Murderer's Choice (1943). Grace apparently has a very minor role in the author's third mystery novel, Sin of Angels (1948). J F Norris on his site Pretty Sinister Books has a detailed review of Murderer's Choice showing the front & back covers of the Dell Mapback edition. CLICK HERE TO VIEW IT
1947 Gale Gallagher Gale Gallagher (aka Will Oursler & Margaret Scott)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Acme Investigating Bureau, G. K. Gallagher, principal.
Type: medium-boiled Literary Classification: Pulp & HIBK
Comments: Skip Tracer/PI. Maybe a precursor of Stephanie Plum (minus the smart mouth and kookie family)? Appeared in I Found Him Dead (1947) and Chord in Crimson (1949). Patsy Higgins (a young Brooklyn woman) is her secretary/assistant. Gale learned her investigative skills from her father, a NYC policeman who was killed in the line of duty when Gale was a teenager. Gale's mother had died in childbirth. Gale was educated in a convent boarding school. She is described as having light reddish brown hair and being about thirty or so years old in her first recorded case. Her agency's office is located on Fifth Avenue, no cross street mentioned but I gather that it must be in the Midtown area between 34th and 59th Streets). She lives in an apartment in the West Fifties, the northernmost section of the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood (which is now called Clinton by some residents). Gale is very concerned with fashion. She is constantly describing how she dresses and the reasoning behind each choice of outfits. Gale often re-freshens her make-up but she does carry a gun and thinks nothing of scrambling up fire escapes and trespassing to advance her investigations so her adventures were not solely aimed at a female readership. She acquires a handsome boyfriend in her first recorded case and my understanding is that she is still involved with him in her second case. Gale wears a lot of different hats during her investigations, not as part of various disguises but because they go along with all her different fashion outfits. She also smokes cigarettes and drinks hard liquor, in moderation. Oursler and Scott copied the Ellery Queen technique of pretending that the character's name is also the author's name.
1949 Miriam Birdseye Nancy Spain (1917-1964)
Location: England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Birdseye et Cie - detectives
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Comic
Comments: Miriam was a former actress turned detective according to Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind.
Appeared in 6 books:
Death Goes on Skis 1949
Poison For Teacher 1949
Cinderella Goes to the Morgue aka Minutes to Midnight 1950
R in the Month 1950
Not Wanted on Voyage 1951
Out, Damned Tot 1952
Spain was a British celebrity journalist who also wrote books about other detective characters besides Miriam and wrote at least 10 non-fiction books. Spain supposedly based Miriam's looks and personality on actress Hermione Gingold. K. G. Klein describes Miriam this way "...does very little detecting; she is too busy being clever and zany." Apparently Miriam opened her detective agency on a whim. Nancy Spain (and several others) were killed in an airplane crash while traveling to cover the 1964 Grand National horse race taking place near Liverpool.
1950 Eli? Donovan James L Rubel
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification: Paperback Original?
Comments: Appeared in No Business for a Lady.
1955 Mavis Seidlitz Alan Geoffrey Yates (aka Carter Brown)
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Secretary then op then partner then lone?
Name of Agency: Johnny Rios Detective Agency or Rio Detective Agency
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Paperback Original
Comments: Dizzy blonde bombshell. Prolific author wrote over 200 books using at least eight detective protaganists of which Mavis was the only woman, I think. As far as I can determine she appeared in 12 books between 1955 and 1974 as follows:
Honey, Here's Your Hearse (1955)
A Bullet for My Baby (1955)
Good Morning, Mavis (1957)
The Loving and the Dead (1959)
None But the Lethal Heart (1959)
Tomorrow Is Murder (1960)
Lament For a Lousy Lover (1960)
Murder Wears a Mantilla (1962, orig pub 1957 without Mavis)
The Bump and Grind Murders (1964)
Siedlitz and the Super-Spy (1967)
Murder Is So Nostalgic (1972)
And the Undead Sing (1974)
1956 Miss Flora Hogg Austin Lee (aka John Austwick, Julian Callender) 1904-1965
Location: England?
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: Ex-school-mistress according to Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975). Miss Hogg appeared
in nine books between 1955 and 1963.
1957 Honey West G G Fickling (aka Gloria & Forrest Fickling)
Location: LA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Paperback Original
Comments: Combines Marilyn Monroe's looks with Emma Peel's athleticism. Inherited father's
detective agency. Boyfriend/sidekick is Johnny Doom?
1959 Marla Trent Henry Kane (aka Anthony McCall, Kenneth R McKay, Mario J Segola)
Location: NYC b 1918
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency: Marla Trent Enterprises
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Paperback Original
Comments: Beauty & brains; sometimes paired with Peter Chambers. Appeared in Private Eyeful (1959) & Kisses of Death (1962) according to Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling Detective website.
1972 Cordelia Gray P D James (1920-2014)
Location: London aka Phyllis Dorothy James
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Pryde's Agency
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: 22 year old woman with an unusual childhood upbringing inherits a detective agency from
her friend and former business partner. Appeared in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982). James's other detective character, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector and later Commander Adam Dalgleish, has small but important appearances in both of Cordelia's novels and she is occasionally mentioned in some of Dalgleish's novels. There were two different British TV series according to Wikipedia, one in 1982 and the other 1997-2001. I wish James had written more adventures featuring Cordelia. She was an appealing character and an important figure in the history of female private detectives.
1973 Nicole "Nikki" Sweet Fran Huston (psd of Ron S Miller) b 1936
Location: Calif?
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification:
Comments: Michele B Slung in Crime on Her Mind (1975) notes that Nicole is a cop's daughter who seems to
be a female version of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Appeared in The Rich Get It All (1973). K. G. Klein says that Nicole herself is an ex-cop.
1974 Delilah West Maxine O'Callaghan (1937- )
Location: So Calif
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: West & West Investigations
Type: hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Former LAPD policewoman starts detective agency with her husband (also ex-LAPD) and then carries on
after his death. Delilah was a swimmer and gymnast in college. The prototype for all realistic, post-feminist era hardboiled female PI's? After husband Jack dies, Delilah eventually changes name of her agency to West Investigations. Her office is in the city of Santa Ana and most of her casework is based in Orange County, CA. One wonders how much more success would have come O'Callaghan's way had she finished and published the first Delilah West novel soon after the publication of the first Delilah West short story (1974). O'Callaghan would have then beaten Marcia Muller (see below) to the punch by about two years According to the Thrilling Detective website (which credits Victoria Esposito-Shea for her help) here is a list of Delilah's recorded cases:
1974-"A Change of Clients"-short story
1981-Death Is Forever-novel
1982-Run From the Nightmare-novel
1989-Hit and Run-novel
1991-Set-Up-novel
1994-"Bad News"-short story
1996-Trade-Off-novel
1997-Down for the Count-novel
????-"Deal With the Devil"-short short story
1998-"Diamonds Are For Never"-short story
????-"Somewhere South of Melrose"-short story
????-"Going to the Dogs"-short story
????-"Belling the Cat"-short short story
The four stories noted with question marks (instead of dates) appeared in Bad News and Trouble (Brash Books, 2014), the first complete collection of all seven of the Delilah West short stories. Ms. O'Callaghan wrote a one page introduction to this slim volume but only gives vague hints as to when each of the stories was written/first published. My guess is the undated stories were written in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Style-wise, O'Callaghan is closer to Grafton (minus the wisecracks) than to Muller or Paretsky, or is it more accurate to say that Grafton is closer to O'Callaghan than to Muller or Paretsky? Chicken or the egg? All four are wonderful detective story writers and I am a fan of them all.
1975 Angela Harpe James D Lawrence
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: African American PI. Former police officer, fashion model and call girl per Colleen A Barnett.
Appeared in four novels in 1975: The Dream Girl Caper, The Emerald Oil Caper, The Gilded Snatch Caper & The Godmother Caper. K. G. Klein considers the books as not much more than soft-core pornography. Kevin Burton on the Thrilling Detective website considers the series "racist, sexist, sadistic trash, etc."
1976 Madge L. Hatchett Lee McGraw
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/ Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary classification:
Comments: A female Mike Hammer? Appeared in one novel, Hatchett (1976) per Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling Detective website.
1976 Charity Bay Arthur Kaplan
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification: ?
Comments: Charity's one recorded case was in the novel A Killing for Charity (1976). From what I read around the Internet Charity is a most unpleasant character. "Definitely more Honey West than Sharon McCone" according to Dale Stoyer & Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling Detective website. At least Honey was a sort of nice person. Charity seems to have been a real mean b_ _ _ _. I only include her here because of her potential historical importance. Maybe Charity can be grouped with Madge Hatchett and Angela Harpe (see both above) as a bad girl side-shoot of the 1970's Feminist-influenced realistic PIs as represented by Cordelia Gray, Delilah West, Sharon McCone, Anna Lee, Anna Peters, Kinsey & V. I.
1976 (more accurately 1980+) Edwina Charles (aka Adele Herrmann) Mignon Warner
Location: England?
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Edwina is a 35 year-old, slim, attractive, blonde clairvoyant who has appeared in 14 books between 1976 and 2021. I believe that she became sort of a PI in the books published in the 1980s. The author is an Australian who now lives in the British Isles.
1977 Sharon McCone Marcia Muller (1944- )
Location: SF
Lone/Agent/Owner: First agent then owner
Name of Agency: All-Souls Legal Co-op then McCone Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced & Thriller/Rogue/Espionage in her later cases
Comments: First post 1970's feminist era realistic hardboiled female PI to appear in a novel written by a woman? Early job was in department store security----guarding dresses. Novels are uneven; short stories are generally top-notch. Novella, "The Broken Men" is a near masterpiece. Sharon is 5'6" (same height as Kinsey Millhone) and fairly athletic with straight black hair that gradually is turning gray as the series progresses. Thought she was more than 90% Scotch-Irish and a small % Native American but 2/3 into her series discovers she is 100% Native American (Shoshone). Muller is the best ss writer of the Big Four.
1978 Helen Keremos Eve Zaremba (1930- )
Location: Canada/US
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: First lesbian PI? Appeared in six novels between 1978 and 1997 as follows: A Reason to Kill (1978), Work for a Million (1986), Beyond Hope (1987), Uneasy Lies (1990), The Butterfly Effect (1994) and White Noise (1997)
1978 Judith (never Judy) Eve Bernstein Singer Sharpe Susan Isaacs
Location: Long Island, NY
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: NA
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced & Comic
Comments: Really does not belong on this list because Judith Singer is technically an amateur sleuth (but she most likely did receive a $5,000 reward posted by a regional dental association for solving the murder of a local periodontist, so that does make her a professional, sort of). Judith has appeared in four recorded cases (two novels and two short stories) as follows: Compromising Positions (1978), "Compliments of a Friend" (2000), Long Time No See (2001) and "After Lunch" (2008?). Judith is a 34 year old suburban housewife and mother of two when the series begins and ages throughout the saga. She is a blunt-spoken, sharped-tongued, warm-hearted, intelligent Jewish woman who has managed to involve herself in four murder investigations that occurred in her Long Island bedroom community of Shorehaven, NY. Her indepth knowledge of the inhabitants and customs of her suburban community combined with a keen intelligence is what allowed her to solve these murders. She is usually aided in her investigations by three continuing characters; a sexy homicide detective, her best friend Nancy (who is a borderline alcoholic and serial adulterer) and her annoying, empty-headed friend, Mary Alice (nicknamed Malice). The stories are bitingly satiric and hilarious funny; the detection is not bad, either. I can only wish that Susan Isaacs would stop writing mainstream novels and concentrate on producing more Judith Singer tales. For more about Judith click HERE
1979 Anna Jugedinski Phyllis Swann
Location:
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency:
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Street smart former cop?
1979 Barbara Arenas Lourdes Ortiz
Location: Spain
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Rogue/Espionage
Comments: Sort of a female James Bond type in a Telenovela type story titled Picadura mortal (1979). The author was a well-respected mainstream writer in Spain but wrote this book as a rush job.
1979 Arlette Sauve van der Valk Davidson Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003)
Location: Strasbourg, France
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Arlette van der Valk, Counsel & Aid: Personal & Family Problems
Type: Softboiled? Literary Classifiction: 1970s-Feminist Influenced & Thriller
Comments: The widow of Dutch policeman Piet van der Valk has moved from Amsterdam to Strausbourg, in her native France, after tracking down her husband's killer. Her three children are grown and out of the house. Living fairly well on her widow's pension is not enough to cure empty nest syndrome. Arlette goes back to school and receives a degree in physical therapy (or perhaps she already had gotten this training in Holland). Helping mostly teenagers walk again after falling off motorbikes does not relieve her boredom. University professor Arthur Davidson, an Englishman who works for a European bureaucratic agency as a behavioral sociologist (he also has connections to Strasbourg University and the local police because criminal behavior is one of his specialties) meets the 50 year old Arlette as a patient then woos and marries her. He convinces her to open an Advice Bureau/quasi detective agency to better utilize her mental talents (and to aid him in his sociological research). Arlette receives the blessing of the local police commissioner, acquires a gun and some physical defense training, opens a consulting office in a partitioned-off section of the foyer to her and her husband's apartment, inserts ads in local papers and soon gains a few clients, some of whom actually pay her. Arlette is described as a tall, long-legged blonde (now going gray), hazel-eyed, plain-looking, with a somewhat voluptuous figure. She grew up in the South of France in a small town located between Marseilles and Toulon to a petit-bourgeois family. Her father was a struggling bookseller and an amateur linguist. She met Dutch policeman Piet van der Valk while attending university in Paris, married him and moved to Amsterdam where they had two sons and adopted a daughter. Besides French, Arlette speaks English, Dutch and some German and Spanish. In addition to appearing as a recurring secondary character in ten or more van der Valk novels she has appeared in three novels on her own as a detective character: The Widow (1979) and Arlette (1981). Arlette, although often argumentative, generally has a fairly easy-going personality and has realistic views of herself, marriage, child-rearing and her fellow human beings. Her first book features three cases which she resolves with varying degrees of success while facing some dangerous situations. It also tells the story of her difficult transition from widowhood to a second marriage. This book acts as almost a travelogue of her current home city of Strasbourg wherein Freeling describes the history and various neighborhoods of this not-quite-French, not-quite-German city situated a short distance from the Rhine River in eastern France. In her second book Arlette treads similar ground as her first. She takes on multiples cases and is able to resolve some of them reasonably well. One point where Arlette differs markedly from her contemporary PIs: Unlike Cordelia and Kinsey and Sharon and VI, Arlette rarely lies to further her investigations or to protect herself from danger. I count maybe two small lies in her first two books whereas Kinsey seems to almost gleefully tell a falsehood every twenty pages. Arlette also appeared as a secondary character in Lady Macbeth (1988) the 10th (of 16) book in Freeling's police detective Henri Castang series.
1979 Alison B. Gordon Walter Wager (1924-2004) aka John Tiger, Walter Herman, Lee Davis Willoughby
Location: Beverly Hills, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Gordon Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: Thriller/Espionage
Comments: Alison is a 5' 5" thirtysomething-year old widow with light brown hair, big brown eyes and a voluptuous figure. After college she was a CIA field agent for seven years in Africa, Vietnam and Thailand. She speaks five languages and is skilled with automatic weapons and knives. Her hobby is sculpting. She carries a .357 magnum, charges $400 a day plus expenses, smokes Sobranie cigarettes and drives a Porsche. Her agency, located on Wilshire Blvd near Rodeo Drive, has perhaps as many as twenty employees. She is clever, arrogant beautiful and ruthless. Alison has an older sister named Jan who lives in La Jolla with her husband and twin teenage daughters. Alison appeared in three books: Blue Leader (1979), Blue Moon (1981) and Blue Murder (1982).
These are not detective stories; they are action/adventure/espionage/thrillers. Alison is a Honey West/Emma Peel type heroine. Author Walter Wager wrote about thirty books between 1954 and 2002, nine of them novelizations of TV shows like I Spy and Mission Impossible under the psd. of John Tiger. The Alison Gordon books seemed to have been written with the aim of being sold to Hollywood but although Wager did not succeed in that goal three of his non-Alison Gordon novels were made into feature films: Viper Three (1975) was the basis for Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), Telefon (1975) was filmed as Telefon (1977) and 58 Minutes (1987) was adapted for film as Die Hard 2 (1990). These are plot-driven stories with plenty of action, large casts of characters but zero detection.
1980 Anna Lee Liza Cody
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Brierly Security
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Former cop. Works as a low level corporate drone for an agency that doesn't appreciate her skills.
Here is a list of Anna's novel-length cases:
Dupe (1980), Bad Company (1982), Stalker (1984), Head Case (1985), Under Contract (1987), Backhand (1991).
There was also a TV series in 1993.
1980 Anna Peters Janice Law aka Janice Law Trecker (1941 - )
Location: Washington DC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Executive Security
Type: Medium-boiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Anna Peters was featured in a nine-book series published between 1976 & 1997. Anna (a young woman with a somewhat shady background) worked for a big oil company as a researcher/troubleshooter in the first 3 books (1976-1978) and then went independent, opening her own investigation agency in the 4th book (The Shadow of the Palms) in 1980. The author aged Anna throughout the series. Had Ms. Law started Anna off as a PI in the first book, she would have beaten Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone to the punch by about a year or so. Law's writing style is very similar to Muller's. Anna Peters is a serious-minded woman just like Sharon McCone. Neither are prone to Kinsey Millhone-like wisecracks nor VI Warshawski-like over-the-top fearless recklessness. Both characters occasionally offer pointed social observations but are inclined to believe that most people have their faults and virtues and should generally be accepted for what they are (unless they commit serious crimes).
1981 Maggie Elliott Elizabeth Atwood Taylor
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Comments: Vassar grad appeared in 3 books between 1981 & 1992:
The Cable Car Murder 1981
Murder at Vassar 1987
The Northwest Murders 1992
1982 Kinsey Millhone Sue Grafton (1940-2017)
Location: So Calif
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: Millhone Investigations or Kinsey Millhone Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Former cop. Novels are generally strong, short stories vary in quality. Along with Marcia Muller
(see above) and Sara Paretsky (see below) author is considered among the "Big Three" of current female detective fiction writers.
Sadly, Ms. Grafton died in late December 2017. I enjoyed her work and thought she was the most consistent of the post-feminist era female PI writers. There will be no "Z" Kinsey Millhone mystery novel. Y is for Yesterday was Kinsey's last case. RIP Sue Grafton.
1982 V(ictoria) I(phigenia) Warshawski Sara Paretsky (1947- )
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: Warshawski Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Though author's short stories vary in quality, overall they are stronger than Grafton's but weaker than Muller's. Novels tend to show author's ultra liberal-leaning beliefs but storytelling is not hurt by this. Seems to write fewer but longer novels compared to Muller and Grafton. VI is 5'8" strong and athletic. Attended University of Chicago as an undergraduate on a basketball scholarship (power forward I imagine but I don't think U of Chicago had an intercollegiate woman's basketball team in the 1960s so I guess Vic attended college in the 1970s). Graduated from U of Chicago law school and worked in the Chicago public defender's office for a few years before becoming a PI. Was of Polish/Italian/Jewish heritage. Tends to specialize in white-collar and/or financial/corporate crimes. More strident and high-strung than her cousins West, McCone and Millhone.
1984 Kate Baeier Gillian Slovo (1952- )
Location: London?
Lone/Agent/Lone: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Books are reported to be political/left-wing/progressive. Kate has appeared in five books:
Morbid Symptons (1984), Death by Analysis (1986), Death Comes Staccato (1988), Catnap (1994) and Close Call (1995) per Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website.
1985 Apol.lunia (Lunia) Guiu Maria Antonia Oliver
Location: Spain
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: More realistic and less sexual than other Spanish detective Barbara Arenas (see above). Appeared in Estudi en lila in 1985.
1986 Emma Victor Mary Wings (1949 - )
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 5 books between 1986 & 1998.
1987 Carlotta Carlyle Linda Joyce Appelblatt Barnes (1949- )
Location: Boston
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: 6" 1" red-haired ex-cop now PI/cab driver. Carlotta appeared in 12 novels between 1987 & 2009 and two SS between 1985 & 1996 according the Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website. Carlotta is, I believe, is at least partly the inspiration for the character, Tess Monagham (see 1997 entry below).
1987 Caitlin Reece Lauren Wright Douglas (1947- )
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in five books between 1987 & 1994.
1988 Claudia Valentine Marele Day
Location: Sydney, Australia
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled?
Comments: Appeared in 4 books between 1988 & 1994.
1988 Mavis Levack Marele Day
Location: Sydney, Australia
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: Softboiled
Comments: A spinoff from the Claudia Valentine series (see above). Mavis appeared in a series of SS mostly written in the 1990's.
1988 Meg Lacey Elisabeth Bowers
Location: Vancouver
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium-boiled?
Comments: Meg is a divorcee with 2 children. She specializes in missing child cases. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website describes Meg as " . . . an all-together appealing character, satisfyingly down to earth and easy to identify with." Why Bowers only wrote 2 books about Meg Lacey is a mystery in and of itself:
Ladies Night, 1988
No Forwarding Address, 1991
1988 Catherine Sayler Linda Grant aka Linda V. Williams aka Linda Verlee Williams (1942- )
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner then co-owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium boiled Literary Classification: Thriller, 1970's Feminist-influenced
Comments: Catherine specializes in corporate security and white-collar crime according to the review posted on Amazon on 7/3/14 by Carl Brookins. Other online reviewers classify Catherine as a financial PI and/or a High-Tech PI. From my reading one book in the series I have gleaned the following info: Catherine is the daughter of a retired SFPD detective. Her ex-husband is a SFPD homicide detective. Her current live-in lover is also a PI with a separate business. Her office is located in a gracious Victorian house. 29 year-old Amy is her receptionist/secretary, Chris (female) is her assistant op, Jesse (an African-American man) is her partner. She keeps an office cat named McGee and a house cat named Touchstone. Grant/Williams wrote six novel-length adventures about Catherine, as follows:
Random Access Murder, 1988
Blind Trust, 1990
Love Nor Money, 1991
A Woman's Place, 1994
Lethal Genes, 1996
Vampire Bytes, 1998
Some Catherine Sayler short stories may also exist in anthologies published in the 1990's. The series seems to be written in the style of Muller/Paretsky. There is little humor in the narration or dialogue. Quite frankly, Catherine is sort of a "Debbie Downer" type. No wisecracks like Kinsey Millhone, no humorous situations line Stephanie Plum. I will try to read more of her books but A Woman's Place was not fairly clued. A typical reader will not be able to deduce the corporate prankster nor the poison email sender nor the killer from clues that the author provides in the story. Maybe Ms Grant did a better job in Catherine's other adventures.
1988? Kat Colorado Karen Kijewski (1943 - )
Location: Sacramento Calif.
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Appeared in 9 books between 1988 and 1998. Suspense seems to dominate over detection in this series.
Kat is 5'7" tall and once worked as a bartender.
1989 Clio Browne Delores Komo aka Dolores Komoroski
Location: St Louis
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Inherits her fathers PI agncy. Deceased husband was a cop. Appeared in only one book, Clio Browne, Private Investigtor in 1989. Clio was a middle-aged, African-American widow whose mother aids/hinders her investigations.
1989 Claire Conrad & Maggie Hill Melodie Johnson Howe (1943- )
Location: Los Angeles & NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium boiled? Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced?
Comments: Claire acts as the eccentric genius Nero Wolfe type and Maggie is the wiseacre Archie Goodwin type according to Kevin Burton Smith on the Thrilling detective website. Appeared in The Mother Shadow (1989) and Beauty Dies (1994).
After reading both books I have these comments:
Claire Conrad takes on the Nero Wolfe role as an eccentric private detective with a reputation for solving difficult cases. She is a 6-foot-tall, lean (not fat like Wolfe), blue-eyed, 50-something year old woman with silvery-white hair. Like Wolfe, Claire considers herself a genius and, on occasion, proves it. She was born in Pasadena but grew up in the great capitals of Europe so one assumes that her parents were involved in diplomatic service. Claire seems to have family wealth beyond what she earns from her sleuthing fees. Unlike Wolfe, Claire will travel about without major complaint when the situation calls for it. She always carries a fancy walking stick and considers herself an accomplished horsewoman. The death of her parents in a car explosion when she was young is the one mystery she has not been able to solve.
Maggie Hill plays the Archie Goodwin role. She is a 5' 6", 35-year-old divorcee who is Clair Conrad’s biographer and assistant. When the first book opens Maggie is an unsuccessful novelist, currently working temp jobs as a secretary/assistant to put food on the table. Her ex-husband is a LAPD detective. Like Archie, she was born in Ohio and eventually found her way to the big city (LA, not NY). Maggie has dark brown hair and eyes and full sensuous lips.
Boulton is Claire’s English butler/chauffeur/bodyguard who acts sort of like a combination of Fritz Brenner (Wolfe’s housekeeper/chef) and Saul Panzer (Wolfe’s best operative). Boulton will often help Maggie with her clue-gathering chores.
The Mother Shadow (1986) introduces Maggie to Claire and they investigate potential crimes involving a dysfunctional family who make Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald's fictional families seem like the Brady Bunch. Beauty Dies (1994), was a well-written yet somber murder mystery that explored the problems of inherited wealth, marriages of convenience, high fashion modeling/couture and the pornography industry. All the characters (including Clair and Maggie) are either depressed or unhappy or unfulfilled or dissatisfied with their lives. The book jacket of the edition I read had this to say
“. . . Claire Conrad and Maggie Hill answer Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with an original, witty, and distinctly female voice . . .” I agree with this description except for the word “witty”. There is little wit and virtually no humor in these books. Therein lies the key difference between Rex Stout and Melodie Johnson Howe . Stout usually imbued his Nero Wolfe stories with wit and humor and a certain joy/zest for life mainly exhibited through Archie’s breezy narration skills. Maggie’s narration style just does not attain the high Archie Goodwin standard so Howe’s fiction, like Stout’s non-Wolfe/Goodwin fiction, manages to be competent but somewhat dull and somber. Maggie comes across as a very sad and depressed woman. She whines about her life at the beginning of the first book something like this: (my words) Wah-wah-wah...my first novel did not sell, my marriage was a failure, my husband cheated on me, I have to live in a crummy Valley apartment instead of a fashionable Beverly Hills house, I have to take temp jobs for which I am overqualified...I don't have any money...wah-wah-wah. God only knows how depressing Maggie's semi-autobiographical novel, Cornsilk, must have been. Glad I don't have to read it. Howe seems to have abandoned her Hill/Conrad characters and now is concentrating on a series of short stories and novels about 40+ actress character Diana Poole who is trying to make a come-back in Hollywood while solving mysteries and crimes along the way.
1989 (Dr.) Kiernan O'Shaughnessy Susan Dunlap
Location: San Diego, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiied?
Comments: Kiernan once worked as a medical examiner (forensic pathologist) north of San Francisco but then turned PI after she was fired from/quit her job under a cloud. She was a gymnast (like Delilah West-see above entry for 1974) when younger. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website describes Kiernan as "...a high-priced private eye, specializing in cases with a medical background." Kiernan appeared in 4 books and 2 short stories between 1989 and 1998. She is 5'1" with short dark curly hair. She works out of her beach house duplex in the La Jolla section of San Diego. Brad Tchernak, a 6'4" 240 pound ex-football player, serves as her housekeeper, cook, dog walker (for their Lab-Wolfhound mix named Ezra) and love interest. Along with the Kiernan O'Shaughnessy saga, author Dunlap had two other mystery series running in the 1980s and 1990s but since 2006 has concentrated mainly on her Darcy Lott stunt double mystery series. Kiernan has a serious-minded, no-nonsense personality similar to Delilah West, Sharon McCone and Anna Peters. She is not a wisecracking Kinsey Millhone type nor a reckless/fearless V. I. Warshawski type. I find the Kiernan O'Shaughnessy character both annoying and unlikeable and although the two stories I've read featuring her were competently written, I probably won't go out of my way to track down additional titles but if happen across any, I'd read them.
1989 Phryne Fisher Kerry Greenwood (1954-
Location: Melbourne, Australia (actually St. Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne)
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Miss Phryne Fisher, Investigations?
Thype: Medium Boiled Literary Classification: Thriller, Cozy
Comments: Miss Phryne (pronounced FRY-nee) Fisher has appeared in 20 book-length adventures between 1989 and 2014. A British TV series titled "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" began in 2012 (I'm not sure if new shows are still beign produced). Phryne (inadvertantly named after a famous 4th Century BC Greek courtesan) is about 28 or maybe a bit older when the series begins in the late 1920s. I don't know if she ages throughout the series. The adventurous Phryne Fisher drives fast cars, flies airplanes, shoots pistols, fights and dances her way through high-society Australia. She enjoys plenty of sex with different partners while solving numerous cases. Although born poor in Australia, her father eventually inherits great wealth in England after several male heirs die during WWI. Maid/social secretary Dorothy (Dot) Williams, whose last name mysteriously changed from Bryant to Williams in the middle of my edition of Cocaine Blues (1989) is Phryn's main assistant. Some of her other "assistants" are Bert (Albert Johnson) and Cec (Cecil Yates), two shady but goodhearted and loyal Melbourne cab drivers. Phryne also adopts two teenage girls early in the series who sometimes are a part of the action. As often happens when an author creates a character set is an earlier time period, Phryne is given all the "good" qualities of a 1920's wealthy flapper but few of the "bad" views, opinions, prejudices, habits a typical woman of that time and class might exhibit. Phryne's boredom with life in high society and her success in cleaning up a cocaine ring and putting an end to the career of an illegal abortionist convinces her to open her own detective agency. Although Phryne is truely a professional investigator it is never clear exactly what she charges her clients and since she spends so much on bribes, tips, hush-money, and other business expenses during her investigations it's provident she is wealthy because I believe she loses money on every one of her cases. Phryne usually confronts and solves multiple mysteries in each book.
On the Phryne Fisher website Kerry Greenwood describes her creation as follows:
". . . Phryne is a hero, just like James Bond or the Saint, but with fewer product endorsements and a better class of lovers. I decided to try a female hero and made her as free as a male hero, to see what she would do. Mind you, at that time I only thought there would be two books."
I will attempt to read more of author Greenwood's books to gain further insights on this detective character.
1990 Michele (Mickey) Knight J M Redmann
Location: New Orleans
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 8 books between 1990 & 2013.
1990 Helen Black Pat Welch
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 10 books between 1990 & 2005.
1990 Gwenn Ramadge Lillian O'Donnell (nee Udvardy) (1926-2005)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner
Name of Agency: Hart Security and Investigation(s) aka Hart S & I
Type: Softboiled Literary Classificarion: ?
Comments: Gwenn is a 32 year-old 5' 1" petite, curly-haired blonde with green eyes. She inherited Hart S & I from her older friend, Cordelia Hart (who inherited it from her father many years earlier). Cordelia died from an unexpected heart attack three years before the start of the series. This echoes the P. D. James Cordelia Gray series (see 1970 entry above) not only because of the obvious double use of the "Cordelia" name but because of the mentor/student relationship between Bernie Pryde/Cordelia Gray and Cordelia Hart/Gwenn Ramadge. Like Cordelia Gray, Gwenn had no prior law enforcement/investigative experience when Cordelia Hart took her on as an office assistant and apprentice agent. Gwenn was born to a wealthy New York City couple who lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. Gwenn attended a prestigious prep school and graduated from Barnard College. She grew up playing tennis, skiing and horseback riding. In college Gwenn excelled in both swimming and track & field. Like Rex Stout's detective character Dol Bonner (see 1937 entry above) Gwenn's parents lost most of their wealth because of bad stock market investments. Her parents moved to an expatriate colony in Mexico in order to conserve the small amount of wealth they managed to retain. Cordelia Hart took pity on the near penniless, pregnant and husbandless Gwenn, hired her, trained her in PI work and encouraged her to get a New York investigator's license. Gwenn lost the unborn baby in a swimming accident but did manage to obtain her license just before Cordelia Hart's sudden death. In addition to the detective agency, Gwenn also inherited Cordelia's East 72nd Street apartment (located between Lexington and Third Avenues). The only current salaried employee of the agency is office manager/assistant/receptionist Marge Pratt, a plain-looking single mother who is a couple of years younger than Gwenn. Hart S & I hires freelance licensed investigators whenever Gwenn cannot handle the agency's workload alone. Their two room office is located on Lower Broadway near City Hall. Under Cordelia Hart (and her father before her) Hart S & I specialized in divorce work, insurance fraud and background checks. Gwenn's involvement in murder cases is something new for the firm making Gwenn's learning curve a driving factor in the story plots. Here is a list of Gwenn's recorded cases:
A Wreath for the Bride (1990), Used to Kill (1993), The Raggedy Man (1995), and The Goddess Affair (1996).
Lillian O'Donnell was born in Trieste, Italy. Her family moved to NYC when she was 5 or 6 years old. She studied the dramatic arts and had some small acting roles on Broadway and TV. Lillian eventually became a stage manager and director of Broadway plays. She left stage work sometime after her 1954 marriage and began her writing career with 10 undistinguished Gothic/Romance type novels between 1960 and 1972. She found her stride in 1972 with the publication of her first Norah Mulcahaney policewoman novel. She went on to write 16 more books in the series ending in 1998. Most critics believe her best work is found in that series. O'Donnell's 3 book Mici Anhult series published between 1977 and 1980 featuring a social worker/NYC Crime Victims Compensation Board investigator gets mixed reviews from critics. The Gwenn Ramadge books are generally not as good as those by Muller, Grafton and Paretsky but then again, during the 1990s not many authors were producing better female PI fiction than the big three just mentioned.
1991 Robin Miller Jaye Maiman
Location: San Francisco then NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 7 books between 1991 & 1999.
1991 Hannah Wolfe Sarah Dunant (1950- )
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: Hannah has appeared in 3 books according to Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website: Birth Marks (1991), Fatlands (1993) and Under My Skin (1995)
1991 Lauren Laurano Sandra Scoppettone (1936 - )
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 5 books between 1991 & 1998.
1991 Jeri Howard Janet Dawson (1949 - )
Location: Oakland, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner:
Name of Agency:
Type:
Comments: Jeri was a former paralegal who appeared in 12 novels & 5 ss between 1991 & 2017 according to Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective website.
1991 Veronica (Ronnie) Ventana Gloria White
Location: San Francisco
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Mexican/Anglo PI has appeared in 6 books between 1991 and 2007. Ronnie is the daughter of a notorious cat-burglar husband and wife team. Author is of Puerto Rican/Anglo descent.
1991 Devon MacDonald Nancy Baker Jacobs
Location: St. Paul, Minesota
Lone/Agent/Owner: Partner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled?
Comments: Devon appeared in 3 books: The Turquoise Tattoo (1991), A Slash of Scarlet (1992) & The Silver Scalpel (1993). She was a former elementary school teacher with a tragic family past. She becomes a partner in (father figure) Sam Sherman's Twin Cities detective agency.
1991 Vicki "Victory" Nelson Tanya Huff
Location: Toronto, Canada
Lone/Agent?Owner: Owner?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled? Literary Classification: Supernatural/Gothic
Comments: A former Toronto homicide detective Vicki appeared in 5 novels between 1991 & 1997 and one collection of short stories in 2008. Lifetime made a TV series based on the books in 2007. Vicki's cases seem to involve vampires, werewolves, mummies, etc.
1991 Laura Flynn Lesley Grant-Adamson, born Lesley Heycock, (1942 - )
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: Flynn Detective Agency
Type: Medium Boiled Literary Classification:
Comments: Laura is an attractive 30 year-old with long black hair of Irish descent living and working in the north central London district of Islington. Her "flat' is near Barnsbury Square, her office is in Upper Street on the second floor above a boutique shop and a women's gym where she works out regularly. Laura has been divorced for three years. Her only appearance is in Too Many Questions apa Flynn (1991). I believe the author intended to develop a series around this character but then seemed to lose interest. Perhaps the 12 or so new female PIs introduced between 1990 and 1992 (about half of whom were lesbian) overcrowded the field and Grant-Adamson felt she had nothing new to contribute. One of Laura's confidants is her former landlady named Anna Lee, a children's book author. I wonder if Grand-Adamson was paying homage to Liza Cody's PI Anna Lee in the naming her character. We are not given much background on what led Laura Flynn to become a PI other than she once worked for one of the big London agencies before setting up her own office and apparently had no police background. Americans are familiar with the Irish migration to cities like Boston and New York City but the Irish migration experience in London is largely unknown to us here in the US. It seems that the author was going to explore this issue had she continued this series. Lesley Grant-Adamson was a Fleet Street journalist who eventually became a full time writer. Her best known series features amateur sleuth/gossip columnist Rain Morgan (5 novels between 1985 and 1990). In total, Grant-Adamson published 18 books between 1985 and 2003, three of which were non-fiction. Laura Flynn can be thought of as a combination of Cordelia Gray, Anna Lee and Kinsey Millhone. Too bad no further books appeared about this character.
1992 Kate Shugak Dana Stabenow (1952- )
Location: Alaska
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled?
Comments: Kate is a 5'1" Aleut woman who morphs about 1/3? through the series from being an investigator for the Alaska DA's office to a PI. Alaskan born author Stabenow featured Kate in 21 books between 1992 & 2017.
1992 Nell Fury Elizabeth Pincus
Location: San Francisco
Lone/ Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 3 books between 1992 & 1995. Author was a former PI.
1992 Freddie O'Neal Catherine Dain (psd of Judith Garwood)
Location: Nevada
Lone/Agent/Owner: ?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Appeared in 7 books between 1992 & 1997
1992 Jenny Gordon & C. J. (Cinnamon Jemima) Gunn Jan Grape
Location: Austin, Texas
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owners/partners
Name of Agency: G & G Investigations
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: This detecting duo appeared in 8 or so short stories between 1992 and 1998. Jenny, the primary narrator, is the widow of a former police officer who resigned to open a detective agency. Jenny carried on his PI work after his death. C. J. is her partner and friend. Jenny's two cats, Nick and Nora, sometimes help the investigations. Ms. Grape seems to have concentrated on her police officer Zoe Barrow series of novels in the early 2000's rather than feature Gunn and Gordon in a novel of their own. The few stories I read were well written and entertaining. Jan Grape and her husband ran a mystery bookstore in Texas (Austin?) in the 1990's.
1992 Kate Brannigan Val McDermid
Location: Manchester, England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Kate appeared in 6 novels between 1992 & 1998. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website compares Kate to PI Anna Lee (see 1980 entry above) and wishes there were more books about her. Kate has kickboxing skills.
1993 Catherine "Cat" Caliban D. B. Borton psd of Lynette Carpenter
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Lone/Agent/Owner: Partner?
Name of Agency: Fogg & Caliban, Inc. (in the 7th book)
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy/Comic
Comments: 60 or so year old widow sells her suburban home and acquires and moves into a four unit apartment building (renamed "The Catatonia Arms" because Cat owns three cats that sometimes play important roles in the stories) in a dodgy Cincinnati neighborhood and dreams of becoming a private detective. The eight book Cat Caliban series was originally published during the 1993-2007 time period but the author is currently re-issuing the series starting with adventure #5 in ebook format. See below for my thoughts:
Five Alarm Fire (1996) is the 5th book in the eight-volume Cat Caliban mystery series created by D. B. Borton, the pseudonym used by author Lynette Carpenter. Catherine “Cat” Caliban is a pushy, blunt spoken, warm-hearted, inquisitive 60 year-old housewife/mother/grandmother/widow who owns an apartment building in Cincinnati inhabited by some quirky tenants. Cat’s numerous friends and tenants try to help but sometimes hinder her ambitions of becoming a private investigator. In Five Alarm Fire Cat becomes involved in some dirty-doings at the local arts center while taking a pottery class. Human remains discovered in a kiln, suspicious house fires, a missing collection of valuable Rookwood pottery once owned by a famous African American madam and the confused genealogical histories of some of the characters drive the plot in this cozy mystery.
Six Feet Under (1997) is the 6th book in the Cat Caliban series. The author creates a memorable young woman of mixed-race character named Roxanne "Rocky" Zacharias. Although Rocky (famous as the all-time jump rope queen of Cincinnati) appears in only a small number of pages of this book, her personality influences nearly every page and nearly every character in the story. Author D. B. Borton examines the plight of incarcerated women of little means and less agency in this semi-tragic tale of crime and detection. Why has the newly released Rocky broken parole, offloaded her three kids and disappeared? Cat Caliban and her retired policeman friend, Moses Fogg, try to find Rocky before something bad happens to her and her extended family. The sadness and heartbreak following Rocky since her birth is partly alleviated by the humanity displayed by those trying to help her and the humor generated by Cat during her investigation.
Seventh Deadly Sin (First pub in 2004, re-issued in 2021, action set in 1986)
Catherine “Cat” Caliban, 60 year-old grandmother, widow and aspiring PI, is asked to investigate the murder of a local high school football star. Is his death connected with several other Cincinnati teens recently reported missing or killed? But what can the connection be? Did the teens know each other even though they lived in different neighborhoods and attended different schools? Interest in computers, a controversial televangelist and a youth hotline are the only common threads that seem to run through the lives of the teenagers in question. Cat doggedly follows a series of clues that eventually lead her toward both answers and danger.
Fans of Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth, Miss Marple, Susan Isaacs’ Long Island sleuth, Judith Singer and Stuart Palmer’s schoolmarm sleuth, Hildegarde Withers will enjoy the Cat Caliban series. Since the author sets this humorous series in the mid-1980s the books have a kind of Sue Grafton/Kinsey Millhone vibe: plenty of pay phones, no smart phones, Internet and email are new concepts, etc.
Click HERE to visit the author's website.
1993 Sydney Sloane Randye Lordon
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium-Boiled
Comments: Lesbian PI who appeared in 7 books between 1993 & 2003. Sidney was a former police officer.
1994 Ling Wan-Ju "Lydia" Chin SJ Rozan
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Chin Investigative Services (or sometimes) Lydia Chin Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist-Influenced
Comments: Lydia is a twenty-something year old ABC (American Born Chinese) woman who lives with her mother in Chinatown and runs her agency out of a storefront office on Canal Street. Her sometimes partner is Bill Smith, a 40-something white PI who's interest in Lydia is more than avuncular. They appear together (and sometimes separately) in eleven novels and several short stories beginning in 1994. Lydia has a loving but prickly relationship with her mother who strongly disapproves of her chosen profession, not only because of its dangers but also because her detective work rarely brings her into contact with suitable potential marriage partners. Lydia has at least four older brothers who have successful "traditional" careers. Although the author does not clearly state that Lydia is strikingly beautiful, the way male characters tend to react to her (both overtly and covertly) makes it clear that she is one of the most attractive female characters in business today. Lydia is very petite but she is proficient in martial arts and does carry a gun, so she is a match for most of the criminals and lowlifes she runs into during her investigations.
Note: Lydia's mother made her detecting debut in a short story in the March/April 2015 issue of EQMM. She decides to spare Lydia from bother (and imagined danger) by taking on a case herself involving a ghost (maybe), gambling, a disappearing restaurant worker and loansharks. Not a bad story but I want to see more of Lydia herself. I don't think there has been a new Chin ss or novel since 2012.
1994 Tamara Hayle Valerie Wilson Wesley
Location: Newark NJ
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency: Hayle Investigative Services, Inc.
Type: Hard-boiled
Comments: Tamara is a 35 year old African-American, divorced single mother, ex-cop now working in the Newark/East Orange area. Tamara grew up in the projects of Newark but her parents moved the family to the close suburb of East Orange when she was a teenager (just after the riots of 1967). She currently lives in her old East Orange house with her young son and works out of an office located on the second floor above a beauty shop in a somewhat run-down three story building close to her home. Tamara worked as a cop for five years in the fictional nearby affluent suburb of Belvington Heights until the persistent racist and sexist behavior of most of her colleagues drove her to quit. Her one-woman detective agency barely breaks even because her caseload consists mostly of insurance fraud, disability scams, runaway teens and cheating husbands. Tamara sometimes contracts on with a bigger agency when money gets really tight but she prefers being her own boss. The four books I read were fairly-clued but a bit depressing. Like many (though certainly not all) female crime writers who began publishing in the 1990s, Wesley infuses no humor in these stories. At times Tamara Hayle comes across as a real "Debbie Downer". Valerie Wilson Wesley constructed good plots, created interesting characters and wrote gripping narratives but... an occasional well placed wisecrack or amusing situation or some wry humor could have made these books a bit more enjoyable for me.
Here is the complete series:
When Death Comes Stealing (1994)
Devil's Gonna Get Him (1995)
Where Evil Sleeps (1996)
No Hiding Place (1997)
Easier to Kill (1998)
The Devil Riding (2000)
Dying in the Dark (2004)
Of Blood and Sorrow (2008)
When Angels Mourn (2024?) This book is written but not yet released possibly because Wilson's publisher, Kensington Publishing Corp., wants to concentrate on her newer (2021-2023) Odessa Jones mystery series.
1994 Maddie Frost/Maddie Hughes Bruce Holland Rogers (1958- )
Location: Los Angeles then Eugene, Oregon
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: Maddie has appeared only in two short stories to date: "Hollywood Considered As a Seal Point in the Sun" (1994) and "Masked Marauders of the Mossbelt" (1998). In the earliest versions of the stories Maddie's last name was Hughes. Mr. Rogers changed her last name to Frost in later iterations of the stories because he felt Maddie Hughes sounded too similar to the Cybill Shepherd detective character Maddie Hayes from the Moonlighting TV series. Maddie Frost moved to the West Coast from the Midwest to become a screenwriter. When that career didn't pan out she became a PI. Both stories involve animals of one sort or another. "Mossbelt" was entertaining and fairly clued. I've not yet been able to read "Hollywood Considered". Maddie smokes cigarettes and eschews a healthy diet. Bruce Holland Rogers is a prolific author of short fiction in several genres; primarily, though not exclusively, Fantasy, Horror and SiFi. Lately he has concentrated on Flash Fiction. I wish he would write more Maddie Frost stories.
1994 Laura Principal Michelle Spring
Location: Cambridge, England
Lone /Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Aardvark Investigations
Type: Softboiled? Litarary Classification: 1970's Feminist Influenced & Psychological Suspense
Comments: Laura appeared in 5 books from 1994 to 2001. Co-owns agency with her lover, Sonny Mendlowitz.
1994 Angela "Angie" Matelli Wendi Lee
Location: Boston
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone?
Name of Agency:
Type: ? Literary Classification: 1970's Feminist Influenced & Comic?
Comments: Italian-American girl from East Boston returns from serving in the Marines and becomes a PI. Angie appeared in 5 novels and 4 short stories between 1994 & 2003. One reviewer compared Angie to Stephanie Plum.
1995 Holly-Jean Ho Irene Lin-Chandler
Location: London
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Hardboiled?
Comments: Bi-sexual Holly-Jean appeared in three books:
The Healing of Holly-Jean (1995), Grievous Angel (1996) & Hour of the Tigress (1999). She is the daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother. Her English name is Deirdre H. Jones but she prefers Holly-Jean Ho. Had a circus/martial arts background prior to opening her agency when in her 30's. Specializes in computer fraud crimes but often gets mixed up in violent international intrigue. Her office manager is Mrs. Howell-Pryce. Author Irene Lin-Chandler is Taiwanese. Most of this info is from Colleen Barnett's Mystery Women, 2010 edition.
1995 Madeline Moore Aya De Leon (1967- )
Location: Oakland, CA
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner/Lone
Name of Agency: M. Moore Investigations
Type: Medium Boiled
Comments: Appeared in one short story (so far) in Paula L. Woods 1995 anthology Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century. Woods describes De Leon as "an Afro-Latina writer of mystery fiction and other prose." Woods mentioned that De Leon was working on a novel-length adventure for Madeline but it was never published, as far as I can determine. Starting in 2016 De Leon has written four books in her Justice Hustlers Feminist Heist series. Madeline is a 6' tall slim African-American woman in her 30's. Her mentor is Liz Rowe who hired and trained Madeline in her Front Rowe Investigations agency before Madeline went solo. I agree with the Thrilling Detective site...De Leon should write more Madeline Moore stories...I liked her one effort.
1996 Lupe Solano Carolina Garcia-Aguilera
Location: Miami FL
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: ?
Comments: Lupe is Cuban born and owns her own agency in Miami. Author is/was a real-life PI.
1996 Lucy Trimble Brenner Eric Wright (1929-2015)
Location: Ontario Canada
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Apparently Lucy is a librarian/hotelier who inherits (like Cordelia Gray and the Beagle sisters) a detective agency. In this case it was from her cousin. Appeared in:
Death of a Sunday Writer (1996)
Death on the Rocks (1999)
1997 Theresa Esther "Tess" Weinstein Monaghan Laura Lippman (1959- )
Location: Baltimore
Lone/Agent/Owner: Investigator for a lawyer then co-owner of an agency
Name of Agency: Keyes Investigation(s) Inc. or
Keyes Investigations or
Keyes Inc. or
Keyes Private Investigations, Inc.
Type: Medium Boiled?
Comments: Tess is a single 29 year old unemployed reporter with long brown hair (often kept in a braid down her back) and hazel colored eyes when we meet her in the 1997 novel, Baltimore Blues. She is tall and strong with muscular legs and broad shoulders who stays in shape by rowing, running and lifting weights. She scrapes by with various part time jobs (including some detective work) while wondering whether she will ever return to journalism. She is of Irish and Jewish descent and has appeared in 12-13 novels (I can't seem to get an accurate count) and a few short stories between 1997 and 2020. Tess seems to be modeled after Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski: A tall (5'9", one inch taller than V.I.), athletic, physically strong woman who is deeply involved in all aspects of her home city. Tess is sometimes described as "Amazonian" and other times as "lanky" and it is implied that she has a great figure a sleight overbite, a barely visible widow's peak and a few freckles. She does not wisecrack like Kinsey Millhone but is often blunt-spoken and sharp-tongued like V.I. Warshawski. Family members and close friends sometimes call her "Tesser" a nickname she coined for herself when she was a child. It combines parts of her first and middle names (Tess + Esther = Tesser). Other nicknames for Tess are: "Testy", "Baltimore's hungriest detective" and "the accidental detective". Tess attended Washington College, located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland almost directly across Chesapeake Bay from her beloved city of Baltimore. Tess is a loyal Orioles fan and therefore hates the NY Mets because of their humiliating defeat of the Orioles in the 1969 World Series (even though that occurred when she was barely a year old). By her third book (Butchers Hill, 1998) Tess has moved out of temp space at her friend's law firm and opened an office in the ground floor of an old row house in a dicier neighborhood north of her Fells Point residence. She has acquired a carry permit for a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun and gone into partnership with retired Baltimore cop, Edward Keyes, although Keyes just supplies the Investigator's license and collects a small percentage of the agency's profits. Tess's official corporate title is "Vice President" but she claims to be just an "Associate" when it seems expedient to avoid responsibility for some of her actions. In addition to VI Warshawski, I believe Lippman also based Tess on the character of Carlotta Carlyle (see 1987 entry above). Both characters:
Had Irish fathers and Jewish mothers.
Are tall (6"1" Carlotta vs. 5"9" Tess)
Have an important aunt character in the stories.
Live in big East Coast port cities (Carlotta-Boston, Tess-Baltimore)
1997 Margaret Ann (Meg) Darcy Jean Marcy, psd. of Jean Hutchison & Marcy Jacobs
Location: St. Louis
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Miller Security
Type: ?
Comments: Lesbian detective Meg Darcy has appeared in 4 novels: Cemetery Murders (1997), Dead and Blonde (1998), Mommy Deadest (2000) & A Cold Case of Murder (2003). She was former Military Police and works for her uncle's security agency. (Some of this info was gathered from The Gay Detective Novel by Judith A. Markowitz).
1998 Precious Ramotswe Alexander McCall Smith
Location: Gaborone, Botswana
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Recently divorced Precious Ramototswe starts a detective agency using an inheritance from her beloved father. She appears to be in her mid-30s at the start of the series and seems to barely age as the series progresses
(20 books and a few short stories between 1998 and 2021). She re-marries about 1/3 through the series. She is described as a "traditionally built" (meaning full-figured), attractive woman who is kind, wise and a pretty good detective. Each book touches on a different aspect of life in the landlocked African country of Botswana and usually multiple mysteries are solved or at least investigated in this warm-hearted series.
1998 Grace Makutsi Alexander McCall Smith
Location: Gaborone, Botswana
Lone/Agent/Owner: Secretary, Assistant Detective, Associate Detective, eventually Partner
Name of Agency: No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Grace (top graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College), a tall, thin, somewhat plain-looking woman in her mid-20s starts out as secretary to Precious Ramotswe and eventually works her way up to a partnership. She is the almost the exact opposite of Precious not only in looks but also in personalty. Grace is judgmental, outspoken, prickly, overconfident and temperamental (but also loyal and faithful). She reminds me of a combination of school-marm sleuth Hildegarde Withers and Parker Pyne/Hercule Poirot's efficient secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon. Grace eventually marries about 1/2 way through the series.
2000 Estelle Aiden (Woody) Woodhaven Amanda Cross psd of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone/Owner?
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Softboiled
Comments: Woody is a plus-size PI in her 30's. She lives in Brooklyn and has an office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan where her part-time receptionist, Octavia, aids her investigations. She either drives her motorcycle or takes mass transit/taxis to get around town. She was a former Legal Aid (Public Defender) lawyer (like VI Warshawski) before deciding to become a PI. Her only recorded case to my knowledge is in Amanda Cross's Honest Doubt, the next to last book in the Kate Fansler detective series. Woody teams up with Kate to solve a murder at a small New Jersey college. She self-describes herself as fat but does not see that as a disadvantage in solving cases. She is an intelligent and meticulous investigator. I wish Cross had lived to write more of her cases.
2001 Gretchen O'Brien Laura Lippman
Location: Baltimore then Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone then owner?
Name of Agency: SnoopSisters Digest?
Type: Medium Boiled?
Comments: Gretchen is a secondary character introduced about halfway into the Tess Monaghan series (see 1997 entry above). She is similar to Tess in both appearance (tall and strong) and attitude/personality (pushy, stubbron) They both grew up in working class Baltimore neighborhoods and were forced to change careers at about 30 years old. Gretchen had to resign from the Baltimore police force because she could not prove her innocence from a false charge. She became a PI and sort of teams up with Tess in In a Strange City (2001). Gretchen later moves to Chicago and starts up a networking group/website/blog linking independent female PI's throughout the US. SnoopSisters Digest helps out Tess during her case recorded as The Last Place (2002).
2004 Eve DeHaas Tracy P. Clark aka Tracy Clark
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Lone
Name of Agency: ?
Type: Medium Boiled?
Comments: Eve is a 5' 8" African-American former Chicago cop who now earns her living running a one person agency. Only appearance was in a 2004 short story titled "For Services Rendered". Ms. Clark states "Eve DeHaas is an earlier version of the character Cass Raines eventually became. "For Services Rendered" was my practice run." See below for Cass Raines's 2018 entry.
2004 Kylie Kendall Claire McNab aka Claire McNab Carmichael (1940- )
Location: Los Angeles
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner
Name of Agency: Kendall & Creeling Investigative Services
Type: Medium-boiled?
Comments: Australian Kylie Kendall inherits 51% of a Los Angeles detective agency from a father she never knew. The beautiful 49% co-owner, Ariana Creeling, tries to buy-out her unexpected partner but Kylie refuses and goes into training to become a licensed detective. Kylie is infatuated with Ariana but the attraction is not reciprocated. Kylie and Ariana have appeared in five novels:
The Wombat Strategy (2004)
The Kookaburra Gambit (2005)
The Quokka Question (2005)
The Dingo Dilemma (2006)
The Platypus Ploy (2007)
Kylie appeared solo in the 2007 short story "Animal Act". Author McNab is a dual citizen of Australia and the U.S. and currently resides in Los Angeles. She has written over 50 books and has authored two other lesbian mystery series in addition to the Kendall/Creeling series.
2009 Kate (Catherine) Shackleton (nee Hood) Frances Brody, aka Frances McNeil
Location: Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: (no formal name)
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: The author sets the Kate Shackleton series in 1920s England. Kate is a 30 year-old war widow (her surgeon husband Gerald was reported MIA in 1918) who decides to embark on a PI career in 1921. She often handles missing-person cases. Kate, who ages throughout the series, has appeared in 11 novels and one short story between 2009 & 2019. After reading one recent volume in the series here is some further info: Kate employs a former policeman, Jim Sykes, as her main op. She also uses her housekeeper, Mrs. Sudgen, as an investigator/assistant. Her niece Harriet sometimes involves herself in investigations. In book 10 they acquire a bloodhound, Sergeant Dog. Kate was adopted as a baby by Mr. and Mrs. Hood. Her adoptive father is a local police officer who sometimes aids in investigations. Through her adoptive mother, Virginia, Kate is socially well-connected. In book 11, Kate collaborates with London PI Mrs. Annette Kerner who dubs herself "The Mayfair Detective". Mrs. Kerner draws her clientel from high society and often travels in diplomatic circles somewhat like Oppenheim's Clara Linz (see above 1932 entry). The real Mrs. Kerner did own a London detective agency in the 1920s and was active as a private detective at least through the 1940s. She was sometimes nicknamed "The "Queen of Disguises" and/or "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes". Kate was trained as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse and was a suffragette. She is a photography buff.
2012 Jane Lawless Ellen Hart (1949- )
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-Owner
Name of Agency: Nolan & Lawless Investigations
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Lesbian/Feminist?
Comments: Multi-award winning author Ellen Hart has written 27 books in the Jane Lawless mystery series between 1989 and 2020. Jane transitioned from amateur sleuth to licensed PI in the 20th book of the series Rest for the Wicked (2012). Jane was about 35 years old when the series began and is about 45 in her latest book so author Hart ages her character about one year for every three calendar years. Jane is a divorced lesbian restaurateur who started out using her keen crime solving skills to help friends and fight injustice. Eventually a retired Minneapolis police detective becomes Jane’s mentor and encourages her to study and apprentice for her Minnesota Private Investigator’s license. Jane is a serious-minded, no-nonsense woman (more of a Sharon McCone-type rather than a wise-cracking Kinsey Millhone-type). The books could potentially be dull reads because of Jane’s serious nature but the author avoids dullness by including a highly entertaining pair of sisters in her continuing cast of characters. Cordelia Thorn, who appears in most if not all the books, is Jane’s best friend and a successful theatrical manager. Octavia Thorn-Lester, appearing in some of the books, is a diva actress whose string of ex-husbands just about matches the combined total of the Gabor sisters. When one or the other of these two characters makes an appearance, humor and wit abound. When the two sisters appear together; anything from darkly comic humor to hilarious action can ensue. I don’t quite understand why this author has not attained the fame and respect that her numerical output and quality plotting would suggest. Note: Ellen Hart wrote a second series of mysteries about food critic/amateur sleuth Sophie Greenway that ran to eight books published between 1994 and 2005.
2012-13 Veronica Gianni Alex Fiano (aka A. R. Fiano, aka Alex Rian Fiano)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Co-owner/partner
Name of Agency: Gotham Investigations
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Veronica is a 36 year-old bisexual woman who is a partner/co-owner with gay PI Gabriel Ross in their Manhattan based firm, Gotham Investigations. Prior to their partnership Veronica worked as a part-time PI for a large agency. Author Alex Fiano is a LGBTQ+ advocate and an artist in addition to being the author of the Gabriel's World series of thriller/detective stories. Books in the series are: The Hanged Man (2012), Two-Faced Woman (2013), The Book of Joel (2014), Dead for Now (2016) and Hardcore (TBP 2020?).
2013 Geneva Lennon Alex Fiano (aka A. R. Fiano, aka Alex Rian Fiano)
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: Gotham Investigations
Type: Hardboiled
Comments: Geneva is a transgender woman who works as a part-time op for gay PI Gabriel Ross and his partner Veronica Gianni and is one of the continuing characters in the author's Gabriel's World series (see above entry). She once was Gabriel's client and is a former U.S. army weapons expert.
2013 Lana Luna Robert J. Schneider
Location: NYC
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: The Pringle-Luna Literary Agency
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Cozy
Comments: Lana's only recorded case (to date) is "Greenpoint Girls", a self-published novella currently available as an ebook from Amazon's Kindle book site. The 35 year-old former investment analyst inherited a struggling Manhattan literary agency from her uncle. The previous tenant of an empty office suite down the hall was a detective agency so occasionally people show up needing a detective, not a literary agent. Lana's helpful and curious nature (and her plentiful free time due to a lack of author clients) draw her into investigations. Lana is assisted in her detecting efforts by her receptionist/office manager and sole employee, Monica McCool. Since Lana is not a licensed private investigator, she does not accept money upon the successful completion of a case but she will accept gifts from grateful clients. Technically, Lana Luna does not qualify for inclusion on this site but I am making an exception for her. Click HERE to read an excerpt of "Greenpoint Girls" The complete Greenpoint Girls ebook is available from Amazon/Kindle (usually for $2.99 or sometimes even less). You do not necessarily need a Kindle device to read it. You just need an Amazon account to download the ebook to your computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Click on the above link or visit my speedymystery.com site and click on the Greenpoint Girls page for more details.
2014 Yung Hee Tyson Hugh Davidson
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent
Name of Agency: The Mike Tyson Mystery Team
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Comic
Comments: Yung Hee is the adopted daughter of retired boxer Mike Tyson in the Warner Brothers animated TV series Mike Tyson Mysteries shown on the Adult Swim cable channel. Her Korean mother left her on Mike's doorstep as an infant for financial reasons. Mike took a liking to Yung, adopted her and raised her (including home schooling her) as his own daughter. Yung has been solving mysteries on her father's team since the series debut in 2014. She was born in 1998 and is 5'2" and 105 lbs. Other members of the team are Pigeon (an alcoholic/sex-addicted former human named Richard who was turned into a pigeon by his beauty queen/sorceress ex-wife because of his constant infidelity. The third member of Mike's team is the ghost of John Sholto Douglas the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (1844-1900) who was instrumental in devising the rules of modern boxing. Deezy acts as the Mystery Team's agent but rarely gets any gigs for them. Technically he is a member of the Team but rarely goes on mystery assignments. His team mates don't respect him and generally find him a moocher and an annoyance. His team sweatsuit color is red as opposed to Mike's blue and Yung's pink The TV series is sort of an adult version of Scooby-Doo with Yung acting as the Velma Dinkley character (serious, intelligent, down-to-earth, somewhat naive). The Mike Tyson Mystery Team rarely satisfactorily solve the mysteries they take on (and often make bad situations worse) but the episodes are hilarious anyway. Mike doesn't seem to charge fees for services rendered but I consider Yung a professional detective because she earns her keep by helping her adoptive father attempt to solve his cases. It was revealed in Season 4 (2020) that Yung's biological parents are Michelle (a Korean woman) and Mystery Team member Pigeon (before he was magically changed from a human named Richard into a pigeon by his jealous ex-wife, Sandra). Yung also has a twin brother who Michelle kept to raise herself. Yung is unaware of her family history and it is expected that further episodes will delve into this mystery.
2015 Holly Rachel Gibney Stephen King (1947- )
Location: A disguised and fictionalized Cleveland, Ohio
Lone/Agent/Owner: Agent then Owner then Co-owner?
Name of Agency: Finders Keepers Investigative Agency
Type: Softboiled Literary Classification: Horror/Suspense/Thriller/Supernatural
Comments: Holly is a middle-aged (40-ish maybe 50-ish) woman who has appeared as either a supporting
or main character in six of Stephen King's books. She exhibits obsessive-compulsive tendencies, has a serious inferiority complex, is often socially awkward and is very detail-oriented. She began her investigative career by working for retired cop Bill Hodges' detective agency then eventually inherits the agency after Bill's death. By the latest book, Holly (2023) she has taken on retired cop Pete Huntley as a partner and a couple of other employees have joined the firm. Events in Holly eventually lead to the agency finding itself on a solid financial footing and hopefully Holly will continue to investigate crimes, both natural and supernatural, for many years. Here are the books/stories she has appeared in:
Mr. Mercedes (2014)
Finders Keepers (2015)
End of Watch (2016)
The Outsider (2018)
"If It Bleeds" (2020) novella
Holly (2023)
2018 Cassandra "Cass" Raines Tracy Clark aka Tracy P. Clark
Location: Chicago
Lone/Agent/Owner: Owner
Name of Agency: Raines Investigations
Type: Hardboiled Literary Type: Thriller?
Comments: Cass is a 34 year old 5'7" 130 pound African-American former Chicago Police homicide detective. She is a later rendition of PI character Eve DeHaas (see 2004 entry above) about whom author Clark wrote a short story in 2004. Cass was orphaned at age 12 when her mother died and her father soon after abandoned her. She was raised by her grandparents, graduated Univ of Illinois (English degree), worked in the Peace Corps. for two years then graduated from the police academy. Several years into her career she quit the Chicago Police Dept after accidentally shooting to death a teenager due to the rash ineptness of a fellow cop. She turned in her "star" once she recovered from her own gunshot injuries stemming from this botched arrest attempt. She bicycles around Chicago to exercise and stay in shape. Cass's recorded cases so far are: Broken Places (2018), Borrowed Time (2019), What You Don't See (2020) and Runner (2021). She lives on the third floor of a small apartment building she owns in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's Southside. She operates a one-woman agency out of a nearby office building. Cass's adventures lean more toward thriller-like V. I. Warshawski cases rather than more straight detection as found in Kinsey Millhone and early Sharon McCone cases. The author has started a new series featuring Chicago PD homicide detective Harriet Foster: Hide (January 2023), Fall (December 2023) and a third TBA novel in 2024. Although both Cass and Harriet live and work in Chicago, Harriet, according to author Tracy Clark, "does not exist in Cass's universe. They are not acquainted and there are no immediate plans to bring them together, although that might make for an interesting short story at some point." After the third Harriet Foster book is published in 2024 the author is not sure if Cass or Harriet or something completely different will emerge from her pen/typewriter/computer.
Click below link to visit the author's website:
tracyclarkbooks.com/
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Some sources I used:
Crime On Her Mind
1975
Michele B. Slung
Mystery Women: An Encylopedia of Leading Women Characters in Mystery Fiction
2001, Volume I (1860-1979) Revised
Colleen Barnett
(This book has become a favorite resource, I must try to track down some of the other volumes and revised editions)
The Woman Detective, Gender & Genre
1988
Kathleen Gregory Klein
This is a scholarly book containing in depth analysis of a selection of characters and authors. A quote from the book jacket "The Woman Detective examines how gender and genre restrictions affect the outcome of nearly 300 novels written between 1864 and 1987." Klein has opened my mind to viewing certain books from a different perspective than I initially approached them. At times I believe Ms. Klein reads more into the words of these authors than really exist in them...but because her intellectual approach to the subject matter is at a level much higher than mine, I defer to her analysis (for the most part).
Victor A. Berch (1924-2015) was for many years the Special Collections Librarian at Brandeis University. He was a bibliographer, collector of Dime Novels, Pulp Magazines and other forms of popular literature. He was expert in many fields of study. Out of the blue one day he emailed me with information concerning the actual first publication date of a Clarice Dyke (see above 1882 entry) short story. Although we only exchanged a couple of emails several years ago, I was astonished that a great scholar like Victor would take an interest in this small website endeavor.
RIP Victor Berch.
Michael E. Grost has given me several tips on improving my website, see below
Mike Grost's comprehensive website: A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection mikegrost.com/classics.htm
Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition
1999
Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones
A fascinating scholarly book covering mostly the 1970s-1990s
Mystery author D. B. Borton has a fascinating site at dbborton.com. Here is a partial quote from her bio:
"D.B. Borton has published eleven mystery novels in two series, the Cat Caliban series and the Gilda Liberty series, in addition the mysteries Smoke and Bayou City Burning and a humorous science fiction novel, Second Coming."
Ms. Borton has extensive knowledge of "Girl Detectives" (defined as unmarried female detectives under the age of 22) and has read many more Dime Novels than I have. I especially enjoy the Girl Detectives blog section of her website.
Click HERE to visit her site.
