Trailblazing Crime Writers in the Spotlight

Agatha Christie has the honor of being the bestselling mystery author in the world, but before she began her forty-year literary career back in 1920, women had been writing crime fiction for some seventy years.

In his anthology, “In the Shadow of Agatha Christie,” Editor Leslie S. Klinger showcases trailblazing women, who published crime stories between 1850 and 1917. Mostly unknown to today’s readers, these writers deserve recognition for their contribution to the crime and mystery genre. And thanks to Klinger, sixteen authors step out into the spotlight once again.

Many of the short stories in this anthology are out-of-print. However, a few names might be familiar to readers of classic mysteries. Elizabeth Gaskell, Carolyn Wells, and Baroness Orczy are still read. Baroness Orczy, whose contribution in this volume is “The Regent’s Park Murder,” is the author of the adventure novel “The Scarlet Pimpernel” which also enjoyed success as a play as well as two motion pictures, one produced in 1934 and a remake in 1982.

Here is a complete list of short stories in the anthology

Catherine Crowe – “The Advocate's Wedding Day”
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell – “The Squire's Story”
Mary Fortune – “Traces of Crime”
Harriet Prescott Spofford –“ Mr. Furbush”
Ellen Wood – “Mrs. Todhetley's Earrings”
Elizabeth Corbett – “Catching A Burglar”
C. L. Pirkis – “The Ghost of Fountain Lane”
Geraldine Bonner – “The Statement of Jared Johnson”
Ellen Glasgow – “Point in Morals”
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace – “The Blood-Red Cross”
Baroness Orczy – “The Regent's Park Murder”
Augusta Groner – “The Case of the Registered Letter”
M. E. Braddon – “The Winning Sequence”
Anna Katherine Green – “Missing: Page Thirteen”
Carolyn Wells – “The Adventure of the Clothes-Line”
Susan Glaspell – “Jury of Her Peers”

Klinger, an authority on Sherlock Holmes, has also edited “In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes” and “In the Shadow of Dracula.” Both feature authors whose works predate their more famous successors.

Quotable Quotes

Raymond Chandler

"If in doubt, have two guys come through the door

with guns."
RAYMOND CHANDLER

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York
City. New York City is itself a detective story."
AGATHA CHRISTIE

Ross MacDonald

"The detective isn't your main character, and neither is 

your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective's
job is to seek justice for the corpse. It's the corpse's story,
first and foremost."
ROSS MACDONALD

Sue Grafton: A Grand Master Lives on in her Novels

Sue Grafton belonged to an elite group of writers who created gutsy, independent, smart, and sassy female protagonists who knew how to solve crimes.

Sadly, Grafton left us in 2017 before completing the last book in her Alphabet series, but her iconic private investigator Kinsey Millhone, the thirty-something, twice-divorced Californian, lives on.

It is no accident that Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series first became a smash hit in the 1980s. Kinsey was the right protagonist at the right time. The eighties were an era in which women were not only entering the workforce in large numbers but also breaking into nontraditional roles in law, medicine, law enforcement, and finance.

Women were smashing old stereotypes, and Grafton's Kinsey crashed into the once male-dominated detective genre. Kinsey showed women and men that she could handle herself on the street, outsmart the bad guys and cope with whatever adversity life threw at her.

In an interview with the New York Times in 1985, Grafton said: “Most of the hard-boiled male detectives go through murder and mayhem, and it has absolutely no impact on their personalities. I find it more interesting to see what the constant exposure to violence and death really does to a human being.” In the first novel in the series, A is for Alibi, Kinsey tells readers: “The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.”

In her Kinsey Millhone series, Grafton dealt with the ramifications of violent crime, giving Millhone the complexity of a real woman. And she gave her readers a character that they savored throughout the 25-book series and which they can come back to again and again well into the future.

For her work, Grafton was honored in her lifetime with the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America. She once wrote to readers on her website: “These novels take incredible focus, ingenuity, energy and imagination.”

And she managed to sustain all those qualities for more than thirty-five years of writing. Brava.