Wicked might be the most familiar sister-skeptical story right now, but crime fiction about whether your sister has got your back, or is carefully plunging a knife in it, has been with us for a long time.
Saying that sisters are important in crime fiction is about as groundbreaking as noting that there are a lot of orphans in literature, or that a popular series sleuth will somehow survive numerous attacks to tell the next tale. Sisterhood is low-hanging metaphoric fruit for examining women’s lives and what we do and should mean to one another. It is equally unsurprising that there are countless angry women in crime fiction, especially in recent years as the moral arc that would bend away from patriarchy has seemingly flatlined.
But it did surprise me, when I returned to Audre Lorde’s classic 1981 essay “The Uses of Anger” as I sorted through my distress in the wake of Trump’s first election, to find it largely about white women. I’d recalled it being about female anger toward men, and, to be sure, the patriarchy that spreads “war and death” around “this globe like a diseased liquid” is the target at the end of the shooting range. But Lorde reserves some anger and reveals serious skepticism towards her white sisters, whose “guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we will all perish.”
I can only imagine what Lorde would say if she were alive today, in the first month of a second Trump administration brought to us at least in part by a significant number of white women voters. If after 2016, we white women understood the mission was to “go and get our cousins,” it is clear that, even after Dobbs, we failed. The famous second-wave slogan “Sisterhood is powerful” was never the full story. Lorde’s essay is a clear-eyed analysis of a fraught sisterhood, one shaped by differences across class, race, religion, education, and ability. Such skepticism also undergirds Toni Morrison’s 1979 commencement speech to Barnard women, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters,” in which she reads the fairy tale as “the story of a household of women gathered together and held together in order to abuse another woman.” It was a skepticism I felt from the Black woman seated next to me on my flight right after the election. Her guarded expression spoke volumes: after all the chances I was one of them was 50%.
Female crime fiction is increasingly drawn to violence, and reflects a skepticism towards the kinds of female solidarity across differences that is necessary to deliver a more just world. This is often expressed through the sister relationship, and some of the most influential recent works in this genre, unsurprisingly, are written by women of color. They, like Lorde, provide tough love on how to find our way out of the forest.
Is a sister someone who comes to your rescue, who helps you hide the body? Or is she part of the trauma that honed your detective skills in the first place? Does powerful sororal identification lead to justice, or to rumination and destruction, like in the rape revenge film Promising Young Woman? If you are looking to do something with the funky mix of frustration, anger, and mourning stemming from the election (our Black sisters took a much-deserved National Day of Rest), here are some important categories of crime fiction that ruminate on the problems and potential of sisterhood:
Domestic Noir
There is a special place in the twisted sister pantheon for domestic noir. With its largely white authors and characters, this genre exposes the fraught history of feminism’s imbrication with individualism and capitalism, and of angry women who turn patriarchy on themselves. The girl on the train meets postfeminist train wreck. Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, about a toxic cheerleading squad (oh, and a murder) is about the violence women do to one another under the cover of teamwork, but almost any entry in this category has women mostly looking away from the wolf at the door and behind them at their girlfriends around the kitchen table.
With Friends Like These…
These books take the hiding the body to the next level: here sisterhood is about who helps you dismember the body. An early entry here, signaling a shift in tone for female crime fiction more broadly, is Kirino Natsuo’s Out. Though the book jacket touts female friendship as fellow factory workers join forces to cover up a murder, the descent into violence and is matched only by its lack of faith in female solidarity. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer is narrated by a nurse whose OCD and pathological need to care drives her into being an accomplice to her sister’s crimes. This dark comedy cannot figure out where the trauma of family ends and supportive sisterhood begins. To root for their teamwork is to watch them all go down with the ship.
Missing Sister Metaphor
A sister has gone missing, and the remaining sister (sometimes a professional sleuth, sometimes a civilian) is called to duty. But if a sturdy second wave storyline might imagine a sister keeping the faith, more recent novels make the missing sister the impenetrable center of an only partially-solved mystery in families that have more than their fair share of violence and secrets. Suki Kim’s The Interpreter is full of the mixed feelings and dissociation that is characteristic of these complicated novels. As the narrator, estranged from her older sister, begins to unravel the mystery of her parents’ murder, all roads lead to her inscrutable sister. Steph Cha’s Juniper Song embarks on a career of detection as a partial trauma response to the death of her sister. As Song’s journey stretches out over three novels, we grasp that sisterhood is a state of suspended atonement.
Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, set in the raggedy end of the Cold War, centers on an FBI agent living in Harlem. As Marie grapples with the curious death of her sister, who worked for the CIA, the mysteries of American foreign policy pale in comparison to what drove her sister’s appetite for violence and spy craft. Kellye Garrett’s Like A Sister, set in New York City decades later, follows a sister’s hunt for the answer to her celebrity half-sister’s death. Whether or not one ever really knew one’s sister, in a world that pits women against each other, and in which families harm each other as much as they help, is the mystery these stories attempt to solve.
Light on the Horizon
Not all sister stories are as bleak as on the ones above, but even those works that imagine female solidarity have to work through some trust issues to get there (I’m looking at you, Glinda and Elphaba). My two favorites: Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You” and “True Detective, Night Country” (Season 4). Both these limited series explore legitimate distrust between and betrayal of other women as they try to figure out whodunit. In the former, Bella (Coel) tries to solve the mystery of her own sexual assault, in which her sister-friend, Terry, plays a murky role. In the latter series, the first all-female detective duo in the celebrated franchise explores the death of a native Alaskan woman (and eight men). The dead woman’s actual sister is a state trooper, played by Kali Reis, who warily joins forces with the white local police chief, played by Jodi Foster.
The tensions between them, across racial and cultural differences, throw into the relief the problem women have trusting each other, but also underscore that such teamwork is essential to bringing justice to other women. Both these crime narratives investigate what part of justice involves forgiveness. And so they must have their eyes wide open about, in Morrison’s words, “the violence that women do to one another.” But as they look that skepticism in the eye, they dare to believe. If we don’t want female solidarity to be a fairy tale, reserved for Oz, we can’t afford to look away.
