Sex, violence and jogging

Charlotte Joll

Since the early 1980s the work of women crime writers has undergone radical changes. A new formula has emerged which looks set to take over the genre; it is symbolised by the transforma- tion of the female protagonist from the old pussy stereotype, epitomised by Miss Marple in Agatha Christie's work and Miss Silver in Patricia Wentworth's, to the feisty feminist heroines we now know and love such as Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone and Linda Barnes's Carlotta Carlyle. A distinctive feature of this new litera- ture is that the protagonists, unlike Harriet Vane coming across a body while walking along a beach in Dorset or Miss Marple observing domestic murder and mayhem from behind her net curtains in St Mary Mead, are involved in crime because it is their job. The essential premise is that now women can and do choose to work as private investigators, policewomen and journalists. This has changed the rules of the game and opened up new horizons for women crime writers.

The writing of crime fiction gives women a chance to portray members of their own sex as role models: self-sufficient, highly trained professionals who are competent and strong. In the old days many women crime writers found artistic fulfilment in creating desirable male fantasy heroes. No one has ever seriously disputed Dorothy Sayers's all-absorbing passion for Lord Peter Wimsey. Neither I nor Ngaio Marsh (who created him) would dream of kicking Roderick Alleyn out of bed. He is tall, dark, handsome and wonderfully sensitive. But just as women generally have moved from predominantly domestic and support- ive roles into more public and high-profile ones, so has it become possible for women in crime fiction to go from passive roles, in which they become involved in murders by coincidence, into active ones where they do it because they like it and it pays the rent. All of these women are private investiga- tors, although the nature of the work they do divides fairly distinctly between the American PIs (V. I., Kinsey and Carlotta), who tend to investigate commercial fraud and political corruption, and the English ones, such as Liza Cody's Anna Lee and P. D. James's Cordelia Grey, who are more Involved with domestic crime, missing per- sons or murders committed by relatives or friends. V. I., Kinsey and Carlotta are self- employed and work alone; Anna and Cordelia (initially) work for agencies run by men.

So what is distinctive about women as sleuths? Home plays an important role in the lives of all these women. They may not be house-proud in the conventional sense (V. I. often doesn't wash up for a week):

I left the breakfast dishes in the sink with last night's supper plates and those from a few other meals. And the bed unmade. And the clothes strewn around . .

but they live in places which they like and where they enjoy spending time. Home is a sanctuary where they return between the demands made by an exhausting and sometimes dangerous job. Kinsey's house is particularly enviable, being

like a pirate ship, all teak and brass fittings, a porthole in the door, a spiral staircase lead- ing up to a loft where I could sleep now beneath a skylight salted with stars.

Although these women live alone neigh- bours play a key role. V. I. has Mr Contreras living downstairs, who is a surro- gate father figure, who has saved her life on more than one occasion and gets upset if she forgets to tell him where she's going. Kinsey has a curiously similar figure, Henry Pitts, who, like Mr Contreras, provides (sometimes unwelcome) companionship and home cooking, after a hard day's detecting. Anna has a symbiotic relation- ship with Bea and Selwyn Price, who live in the flat downstairs. She mends their electri- cal appliances and Bea cooks her shep- herd's pie and banana custard.

This leads naturally on to the subject of food, which looms large in a way that is unimaginable in the work of male crime writers writing about male cops. We, and Raymond Chandler, neither know nor care what Marlowe eats for lunch. One of the most enjoyable things about Sara Paret- sky's novels are the detailed descriptions of every meal V. I. eats. This is often a cele- bration of the complexity of the American sandwich. The heroines usually have empty fridges and seldom cook for other people. If you're into exposing a massive auto insurance fraud or finding out why the son of a Cambridge scientist has committed suicide there isn't much time left over for giving dinner parties. The exception to this is Kay Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell's Virginia-based pathologist, who likes to cook Italian food.

V. I., Kinsey and Anna all eat junk food from time to time. They also drink quite a bit, especially V. I. (whisky and Italian wine), but they are far from irredeemable in terms of taking responsibility for their own health status, as they all jog. Carlotta Carlyle plays women's baseball three morn- ings a week. Keeping fit is essential to their ability to do what is often a physically demanding job, chasing suspects, climbing into buildings, warehouses or ships and wrestling with villains. None of the women I have mentioned has children. This is not coincidental. As a mother of three I can understand it. A life composed of stake-outs, anti-social hours, compulsive tracking down of suspects and clues, not to mention all this jogging, is not compatible with two school runs a day and hours pushing children on the swings. Cordelia, V. I., Anna and Kinsey show no great longing for motherhood. Kay Scar- petta is a surrogate mother to her niece Lucy, but she is too obsessed with her work to have room for much else in her life. Car- lotta Carlyle has a 'younger sister', Paolina, a Colombian girl for whom she acts as a role model in return for providing an outlet for her maternal feelings without the full- time commitment normally involved.

There is, however, another genre which features harassed housewives who manage to solve a few murder mysteries between dishing up the baked beans, washing their husbands' socks and committing the odd bit of adultery. Of this type I would thoroughly recommend Susan Isaac's early novels and Annette Roome's likeable heroine Chris. There is also the career-minded Francesca Wilson, who works at the DTI, is married to a policeman and manages to solve a murder investigation despite having a baby that never sleeps, in Janet Neil's Death among the Dons. But this is to digress back into the world of the amateur sleuth and away from the ice-cold professionals.

Kinsey, V. I. and Carlotta, as befits mem- bers of a gun-owning society, carry guns when necessary. They are shot at (often). They shoot others, sometimes kill them. Anna and Cordelia don't use guns, although Cordelia has been trained to do so. How shocking is this? How important is it that women should be seen to be more repulsed by violence than men are, or is it just a feature of the job?

Violence seems to be an unavoidable occupational hazard. V. I. ends up in hospital in most books; she is regularly beaten up, sometimes tortured. She is a mean fighter herself:

He got another good punch in, to my shoulders, just missing the jaw, before I wriggled away. He was stronger but I was in better shape and more agile, and I was on my feet way in advance of him, kicking him hard over his left kidney.

This villain ends up retching and swearing, having suffered several broken ribs and kidney damage. Kinsey Milhone has to shoot a man with whom she has been hav- ing an affair and who turns out to be the baddie in A is for Alibi. She muses:

The shooting disturbs me still. It has moved me into the same camp with soldiers and maniacs. I never set out to kill anyone. I'll recover . . . but I'll never be the same.

Anna gets several teeth kicked out. Kay is harassed by a serial killer. Hannah Wolfe, Sarah Dunant's heroine, is horrifically beaten up in her latest novel, Fatlands. The violence is not instigated by the women, but they retaliate in kind and there is an acceptance that anything is legitimate if it is done in self-defence. There is also a pride in giving as good as (or even better than) you get, which is about women com- peting against men and winning.

The typical woman detective may be a feminist but she is not totally averse to men. (In contrast is Barbara Wilson, who writes excellent mysteries with lesbian heroines). She displays the upfront healthy attitudes towards sexuality that you would expect to find among liberated women living in the last decades of the 20th century. Or does she?

V. I. has a long-standing on-off relation- ship with Murray (a journalist). She goes to bed with a number of other men she meets during the course of her investigations but the relationships tend to disintegrate when they start becoming over-protective or pos- sessive in any way. She doesn't like people trying 'to take over her turf. In the latest novel, Guardian Angel, she starts what looks like a promising romance with a black cop, Conrad Rawlings.

Kinsey also has a spasmodic relationship with a cop, Jonah Robb, who is constantly on the point of leaving his wife. Carlotta has a love-hate relationship with Lieu- tenant Mooney. Having friends in the force is a good idea if you're a PI, as you get access to the police computer thrown in.

In Stalker Anna Lee has an affair with a communications tycoon, Ian Olsen, but she

is not prepared to fight his formidable (and pregnant) wife for long-term ownership. As for Cordelia Gray, she is a woman of obvious good taste and fancies Adam Daglish but, so far, P. D. James has not chosen to develop this relationship.

DCI Tennison, the heroine of Lynda La Plante's phenomenally successful Prime Suspect books, puts her career at risk by

having a quick fling with a younger male colleague, but makes it clear that she was looking for thrills rather than security.

Hannah Wolfe reveals that she has slept with a total of 18 men but cannot give her boyfriend Nick the time and commitment he is looking for. It all comes back to aspi- rations and it is clear that husbands, live-in lovers or indeed anything more demanding than a half share in a labrador just gets in the way of any woman seriously committed to a career of crime-busting.

This is in sharp contrast to most of the mainstream male detectives, who are mar- ried, the only variation being whether their wives fulfil a totally traditional housewifely role (like Dora Wexford) or have career aspirations like Jenny Burden (teacher and mother) in Ruth Rendell's books or Joan Thanet (probation officer and mother) in Dorothy Simpson's novels.

Peter Pascoe, in Reginald Hill's stories, has the double-edged problem of a chau- vinistic male boss (Dalziel) and a ferocious- ly committed feminist wife (Ellie). Barbara Havers, a determinedly unattractive police- woman teamed with the aristocratic Thomas Lynley in Elizabeth George's nov- els, could clearly do with a house husband to care for her senilely demented mother to allow her to be as single-minded about her job as her male colleagues.

This seems a natural point at which to examine whether these women spend as much time fighting sexism as they do crime. All the heroines I have been considering have to cope with remarks about how inap- propriate their chosen job is. It is clear that institutionalised sexism looms large in the lives of all policewomen, fictional or other- wise. DCI Tennyson's staff may call her `Governor' as they would a male boss, but her peers and superiors constantly discrimi- nate against her on gender grounds.

Even women PIs have to cope with this. Bobby Mallory, who is an old friend of V. L's father, and works in the Chicago police, constantly says things to her like, `Oh nuts, Vicki, why can't you stay home and raise a family and just stay the heck out of this kind of mess?'

I can't endorse this sentiment and would be extremely disappointed if V. I., Kinsey, Anna or Cordelia ever decided to renounce their detective skills for a life of breast- feeding and helping their children with the maths homework. Leave that to people like me who do not have the courage and stamina to become feminist detectives, and who (despite Theodore Dalrymple) have happily settled for a career in health ser- vice management instead.