When people talk about great fictional detectives, there are classic names that come to mind: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot; Sam Spade; Phillip Marlowe; and Columbo trip easily off the tongue. In the modern era there’s even Batman, whose cool gadgets are second only to his skill as a deductive genius (he did debut in Detective Comics, we sometimes forget). But there is a hugely popular subset of super-sleuths who don’t need the police (or men in general) to help them solve a twisty mystery.
Where women excel in mystery fiction (and especially in cozy mysteries) is their ability to take advantage of society’s tendency to overlook the presence of women, especially women in traditionally feminine roles. This is not a new phenomenon, and it’s something that Agatha Christie employed with tactical cleverness, and continues to be used by today’s cozy authors with exceptional success.
When Agatha Christie introduced Miss Jane Marple in 1927’s Tuesday Night Murder Club, a collection of interconnected short stories, audiences met a new kind of detective. Christie had brought Hercule Poirot to life some seven years earlier, and while Poirot was ostensibly retired, he was world-renowned to the point that foreign police would invite him to sit in on interrogations. Miss Marple was a doddering old woman, prone to losing count of her knit stitches. What Miss Marple was, however, was an absolute marvel at observing human behavior. She paid attention to everything around her, and her pinpoint awareness helped her draw deductive conclusions in even the twistiest crimes. Miss Marple was a never-married spinster, but Christie emphasized her ability to use the prejudice of younger characters to ignore, overlook, and speak freely in front of an old woman (and from time to time letting her get away with stumbling into the “wrong” hotel room). Who better to overhear or witness important details of a case than the person that everyone forgets is in the room?
Entertainment changed a great deal from the 1920s to the 1980s, but women’s roles in media didn’t evolve at the same pace as media itself. When Murder She Wrote debuted in 1984, the other hit shows of the year were Dynasty, Dallas, and The Cosby Show. Series where women’s’ roles were to be the dramatic vixen or a wife. Jessica Fletcher bucked the trend. She was a retired widow who turned to writing fiction as a way to keep herself occupied now that she was alone. Over the course of the series, Fletcher was often overlooked in the same way as Miss Marple, due to her being middle-aged, widowed, and a woman. Her success as a writer granted her financial independence and a level of respect within the publishing industry, but she was often treated as a background object, allowing her the freedom to investigate and solve crimes unfettered by the interference of men. That Murder She Wrote was a top ten rated show in the US for most of its run and is still streamed heavily today proves that there was hunger in an audience to see strong, capable, independent women step out of the usual roles they were shown in. And an older woman, no less, when popular media usually idolized youth.
This hunger never went away. In 2012 when Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries debuted, the charming Australian production became a massive hit with audiences, enough so that the fanbase rallied to fund a feature film after the premature conclusion of the television series. The show, set in 1920s Australia, featured Phryne Fisher, a never-married heroine in her forties, insatiably glamorous, self-sufficient, and smart as a whip. The local detective for the area was so besotted with her that he invariably let her help him on cases and struggled to keep from falling in love with her. Phryne was wealthy, well-traveled, and didn’t mind being a little scandalous for the era. Her fabulous clothing and chemistry-laden banter were a balm in a year when NCIS, Two and a Half Men and Castle were trending shows with mostly male casts, and women still filling roles of mother, nagging wife, or police partner to the male lead. What Miss Fisher represented was less a woman who shrank into the background to solve crime, but one who was unafraid to unabashedly defy the expectations of the era on her sex and marital status. It was a refreshing reminder for female audience members that one could be remarkable without the aid of a partner.
This overlaps with the modern era of cozy mysteries, which are largely focused on female sleuths, a remarkable number of whom are single. Cozy mystery heroines often find themselves recently widowed or divorced, which in many cases has pushed them not just into a new phase of life metaphorically, but often physically as they return to their small hometowns, or move to a new place to begin anew. These heroines with great frequency have or take on a job that is traditionally feminine: baking, candle-making, running a florist shop, bookshop, tea shop. You name it and a cozy heroine has a punily-named shop of it with a cute animal sidekick. The refreshing thing about these women, and what makes them fit into the long lineage of female detectives before them, is that they are shown to excel at life without needing a husband’s support either emotionally or financially. In Diane Kelly’s Getaway with Murder, heroine Misty is in her fifties, her sons are in college, and she has used her divorce settlement to buy a mountain lodge. In Ellie Alexander’s Bakeshop Mysteries, heroine Jules has separated from her husband and come back to her hometown to work in the family bakery. In Catherine Bruns’ Penne Dreadful heroine Tessa gets a job in an Italian restaurant after the death of her husband. These women are all navigating a world in which they are newly responsible for all their own life choices, and also for the success or failure of their business ventures. What they represent, to readers, are people with real emotional weight, learning to be self-sufficient in new and meaningful ways. They can wake up, work, pay bills, juggle the everyday dramas of life and then also solve a murder mystery. If they can keep a business afloat and also figure out whodunit, all while being frequently underestimated (or sometimes considered suspects), they prove that there’s nothing a single woman can’t do if she needs to.
From Miss Marple overhearing little details of tell-all conversations, to Jessica Fletcher and Phryne Fisher ruling the airwaves, to the new wave of single cozy sleuths, the message is clear: audiences love to see a woman use her wits to prove how capable she is, even when society seeks to diminish her. So let’s hear it for the spinster sleuth in all her glory.
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