Their MO: Follow That Woman

Linda Barnes, a writer of mystery novels in nearby Brookline, spent years thinking about writing a series with a female detective.

“But everyone told me that a woman, especially the kind of woman I envisioned, who was not a Miss Marple type, would not work,” Barnes said.

American mystery readers were conditioned to a diet of tough, male detectives, she was told. They expected this tough-guy hero to rescue women, not to work alongside them. A female detective, Barnes was told, “would not sell.”

Her first four books featured a male detective. But on the side, in 1983, she wrote a short story about a private investigator named Carlotta Carlyle.

Three years later, when the story was finally published, Carlotta Carlyle “got a lot of attention,” Barnes said. “She took off.”

In short order, Carlotta Carlyle found herself in good--and increasingly crowded--company. While women mystery writers have long toiled in this country, their central characters were seldom of their own sex. And with notable exceptions like Elizabeth Peters and Mary Roberts Rinehart, many of those American women who did write mysteries, watched their published books slip into obscurity.

“I wrote for years,” said Carolyn G. Hart, a detective writer who lives in Oklahoma City. “I had a bunch of hard-covers published, and they just disappeared from view.”

Now Hart has six paperback mysteries in print and a seventh coming next year. She is an active member of a group called Sisters in Crime, an umbrella organization for women mystery writers. Founded five years ago, the group now numbers 880 members.

The change seems to have begun less than 10 years ago. In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, writers like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky created tough women detectives--”hard-boiled,” to use the parlance of the trade--that appealed equally to male and female readers.

The same year, 1982, that Grafton and Paretsky were first published, other mystery writers, like Julie Smith of Berkeley, introduced female characters who did not mirror the hard-boiled private investigators who were the heroes of so many mystery books written by men.

“It was sort of parallel to the whole women’s movement and changing consciousness,” said Smith, whose books often feature a San Francisco lawyer named Rebecca Schwartz. “Women did not want to read any more about women being rescued by men. We wanted to rescue ourselves, and we wanted that reflected in our escapist fiction.

“For me, when I read the books written by men, the old P.I. (private investigator)-type story, well, I didn’t believe them,” Smith said. “They were so caught up in fantasies of saving the world, beating the system, telling people off.”

Linda Barnes agreed, saying, “What I was seeing in books did not reflect reality. Women actually were becoming cops. They were private investigators and lawyers. And the detective literature still had women as victims, as supplicants or as hookers.”

The female characters of this new sub-genre of mystery writing tend not only to be believable, but also smart, sensitive and often very, very funny, said Joe Blades, an editor of mystery books at Ballantine in New York.

“I’m not absolutely certain why, but clearly the manuscripts that come across my desk in crime fiction have always been better by women,” Blades said.

“For me, I don’t need the dozenth hard-boiled, fist-in-the-face, knee-in-the-crotch male detective,” Blades said.

Women mystery writers, he said, “sort of cast the net a little wider in terms of what they pursue with story lines, setting, milieu. They’re not so rigid in how they construct the plots, as in ‘There must be a dead body by the end of Chapter II.’ ”

“I think the writing is stronger in a lot of the women’s books,” said Sara Ann Freed, a senior editor at the Mysterious Press in New York.

As an example of the quality of writing she was describing and of the recent burgeoning of mysteries written by women, Freed cited Marcia Muller, a Sonoma, Calif., writer who is credited with creating the first contemporary female detective character.

“She has been writing this kind of book for a long time,” Freed said, adding that “next year, we will be doing her 12th book.”

Muller’s books always had a “nice following,” Freed said, “but in the last three or four years, people have really found her.”

A major element in Muller’s writing is that “the character grows in each single book,” Freed said. “The author intends for her to age. And in the cases that she gets involved with, there is a sense of resolution, there is caring about the people involved. That is just not the case in books written by men.”

The recognition of Muller and other female mystery writers may have grown tremendously in recent years, but Freed, for one, questions the notion of a surge of mysteries written by women.

“I think these books were being written, but they didn’t have the same audience,” Freed said. “The publishers didn’t give them the same push.”

In San Diego, Phyllis Brown, owner of a mystery bookstore called Grounds for Murder, took much the same position. “We have always had excellent women writers of mysteries,” Brown said. “They just didn’t get the attention.”

But Brown would not underestimate the influence of the new generation of women writers on the mystery genre.

“There has been a lot of change,” she said. “The private eye is more of a person. The characters are more developed.”

Women writers of mysteries, said Brown, “develop their characters more fully. They give them friends, families, the whole support networks which women today are depending on.”

Like mystery editors Freed and Blades, who noted the importance of milieu in many mysteries written by women, Brown said also that these new mysteries provide “an ideal vehicle for social commentary.”

In fact, said Brown, “I’m convinced that if Jane Austen were alive today, she would be writing mysteries.”

That pronouncement would no doubt be encouraging to Sharyn McCrumb, a former journalist who “decided I wanted to write mysteries the way Jane Austen wrote novels. If I kill somebody, then I can do all this social commentary and still give somebody a plot,” McCrumb said. McCrumb’s stories deal with politics, as well as relationships between the sexes.

Readers of these new mysteries tend to have “some kind of post-college education,” McCrumb said. “They are lawyers, physicists, judges, physicians, and they are men as well as women.”

Using figures compiled by the Sisters in Crime, McCrumb said the women mystery writers represent “something like 41% of the writers of mysteries today.” But, she complained, “we get 18% of the reviews.” As a result, the writers are not necessarily getting rich.

“To some extent,” McCrumb, who writes in Shawsville, Va., said, women who are writing mysteries today can trace a part of their legacy to Agatha Christie. Christie perfected the “English, rural, urbane” school of mystery writing, said McCrumb.

And, said writer Carolyn G. Hart, “in Christie, you have a woman who had 1 billion books published. I think the publishing world has come to realize that.”

But the reclusive Christie wrote alone, with little contact with other writers. American women mystery writers today, said McCrumb, are a kind of overgrown extended family. “The mystery community is really a small town,” McCrumb said. “It’s the size of Twin Peaks.”

“You should see our phone bills,” Julie Smith said. “We’re on the phone all the time.”

At least some of the conversation among these writers must involve a collective sense of satisfaction that, as Linda Barnes put it, “suddenly we’re hot.”