Let’s Hear It For the Ladies – Part I: The Classic Detectives and Their Women

The classical detective story revolves around the fates and foibles of the great detective. Other characters, notably women, play a secondary role. Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as intellectually detached from any romantic interest. Women in the Holmes novels are supporting characters with no real personalities of their own. Irene Adler was a possible exception, but she is described as a brilliant adversary, as flat as Holmes himself. And there is only the hint of a relationship.

Neither is written in the first person, so their thoughts are hidden from readers. Inscrutability is the cardinal characteristic of Holmes and the dominant feature of the detective genre. The reader does not know what’s going on until the great detective reveals it

Hercule Poirot is another example. Poirot is depicted as a man dedicated to his work, a softer version of Holmes, and like Holmes is attracted to only one woman in the span of over thirty novels. Countess Vera Rossakoff is a flamboyant version of Adler, but again, while there is a stronger love interest, it is limited because she is a criminal adversary.

As far as the rest of the ladies go, they are spear carriers.

Contemporary film and streaming producers have added backstories to round out both Holmes and Poirot. Later detectives have girlfriends, but they are still not independent personalities in their own rights. That’s about it.

The followers of this tradition are passionate.

When I wrote The Cleopatra Caper and The Stolen Goddess. I conceived Petrie and Pettigrew as slightly incompetent young men who were forced to grow up by their profession. I was excoriated by a reviewer who complained that my detectives were not “flat,” and if readers wanted good detective literature, they should read Conan Doyle and Christie. “Amos’ work,” she thundered, “was fit only for grade schoolers.” But even here, my treatment of the women in these novels was pale and inadequate. As my daughter put it, “Dad, your women are just guys with wigs.”

The breakthrough from this rather cold tradition comes with The Thin Man series. Nick and Nora Charles were a married couple who treated marriage as a partnership of equals, both in search of excitement. Their relationship revolved around the excitement of the chase, boodles of martinis, and lots of sarcastic banter.  The older, stodgy detectives gave way to fast-paced action and quick crosstalk, and the detective story became fun. Petrie and Pettigrew are modeled after them, albeit in a different setting: martinis were replaced with cognac, and 1930s America was transformed into Edwardian England.

But they still left the problem of women characters unsolved. Nora Charles, brilliant as she was, was still presented in third person; the reader wasn’t allowed to get into her thoughts and feelings.

And that takes us to my struggles as a writer. Tough enough converting from a linear, rational style with lots of historical detail to the words of sensory feelings, now I was expected to get into the heads of the opposite sex.

Well, it’s been slow going.

Inji in The Cleopatra Caper was Cleopatra’s avatar and an impressive figure who dominated the two young detectives. But it’s a little tricky to get into the head of an avatar. The best I could do with my fledgling skills was flashbacks. I’m redoing Cleopatra now, to cure some of its early faults.

Gazelda in The Bones of the Apostle did at least develop from a goofy retired witch to a glamorous and very effective intelligence operative. But again, she is portrayed through the eyes of Flinders and not in her own right. Be of good cheer, Gazelda comes back in The Return of the Jinn as a first-person narrator, and her development is stunning.

There are now two new female leads, Lady Mountjoy and Gertrude.

Lady Mountjoy in The Little Village that Slept plays off against Pettigrew and his giant former flame who   has returned to “renew their love.” Lady Mountjoy is a wonderful villain with a penchant for burying people in her rose gardens “for better blooms.” I modeled her after Fatima Blush of the James Bond series, but unlike Fatima who is dark and corrosive, Lady Mountjoy is a lustrous blonde with a sense of humor. There is a backstory that explains her motives, but she is still presented in third person. I have difficulty getting inside a villain’s head, no matter how wonderful she is. But as far as female villains go, Lady Mountjoy is going to be quite memorable. A young composer has even offered to write a tango for her.

And that brings us to Gertrude.

She is the sometimes daughter of Pettigrew and Gertrude Bell, an affair that started in Bones and developed into a full-blown romance. Gertrude has grown up not really knowing who her parents were and has become a newspaper reporter. She is tasked with interviewing Pettigrew in his retirement in When the Sphinx Awakens and then The Man Who Never Was. I had originally planned to write her story as that of a female John Watson, relating the further adventures of Petrie and Pettigrew. Gertrude was to be more relatable; John was a little stodgy and predictable. That was the idea, and I thought it was a good one.  

But Gertrude had other ideas and simply took over the narrative, much to my delight.

She just sparkles off the pages.

I think I have introduced a full-blown female character with a persona of her own. I say introduced rather than created, because my characters tend to do their own thing regardless of what I originally planned, and usually the books come out the better for it.

So let’s take a closer look at Gertrude next time. I think you will find her impossibly charming and smart as a whip.

I certainly did, and she will be back for a couple of encores.