Women have always been in the vanguard of crime fiction as both writers and detectives. As Adrienne Gavin comments, ‘from Victorian originators through twentiethcentury godmothers of crime such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and P.D. James and on to rebellious goddaughters like Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell, a female and feminist vision of crime became a clear norm’ (Gavin, p. 258).
One of the most interesting early professional women detectives is the eponymous heroine of Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s short-story collection Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910). While many of her criminal antagonists seem stuck fast in the typical melodramatic Gothic clichés of the mid-nineteenthcentury sensation novel, Orczy’s heroine is neither a classic villain like Lucy Audley, the pre-Raphaelite psychopath of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) nor a typical victim like Laura Fairlie, spiritless dupe of The Woman in White (1859–60). Instead, in a twist on the old adage ‘set a thief to catch a thief’, Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk heads up Scotland Yard’s Female Department, unmasking mainly female criminals from across the social hierarchy. As related by Lady Molly’s former maid and later assistant Mary Granard, the 12 linked tales are ‘clearly modelled on the pattern of the Sherlock Holmes stories’ with an ‘admiring narrator tell[ing] a series of encapsulated mysteries solved by legwork, disguise and deduction’, notes Ellen Burton Harrington (Harrington, p. 25).
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
