Women in mystery fiction were largely confined to little old lady snoops - amateur sleuths - who are nurses, teachers, whatever.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The funny thing is, though I write mysteries, it is the one genre in adult fiction I never read. I read Nancy Drew, of course, when I was a kid, but I think the real appeal is as a writer because I'm drawn to puzzly, complicated plots.
When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.
One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
Among my favorite half-dozen topics is the field of Victorian female explorers, the intrepid women who packed up their parasols and petticoats and roamed the world in search of adventure. Some were scientists, some artists, some unabashed curiosity-seekers who simply went out to see what they could see.
I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.
Anna Katherine Green wrote about a female inquiry agent, and there were a scattering of female investigators in the 1970s, authored by men, who just didn't ring true. So I thought, 'Well, there's an opening here for something.'
When I was about 8, I used to go into one of the rooms in the mansion, and I would open a magazine like the 'Ladies Home Journal,' and I would see these characters on the pages and then become them, talking back and forth.
The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.
When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.
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