Feminist detective fiction

Maggie Humm

pp. 237-254

in: Clive Bloom (ed), Twentieth-century suspense, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

Tautologically, detective fiction like any other fiction, uses tropes of gender to represent social and moral values. Unlike other fiction, detective novels express attitudes towards individualism, relationships, geography, time and language in such a way that complex sexual and social anxieties are denied in favour of gender stereotypes. A new group of novels by women is now challenging the gender norms of detective writing. American and British writers, in particular Rebecca O"Rourke, Sara Paretsky, Gillian Slovo, Barbara Wilson and Mary Wings, question the social limits to women's contemporary experience by questioning the limitations of detective fiction itself.¹ They explore ways in which women can have power in male environments by exploiting, not necessarily having to discount, the feminine. The invention of such strategies which rupture formulaic conventions is what I call "crossing the border".