INTRODUCTION

Female detectives make their first appearances surprisingly early in the history of crime fiction. The 1860s was not a decade in which women in real life had much scope to forge independent careers for themselves, particularly in the field of law enforcement, but, in the pages of novels and short stories, they were already busy solving crimes and bringing villains to justice. Andrew Forrester’s 1864 bookThe Female Detective (recently republished by the British Library) introduced readers to the mysterious ‘G’, a woman enquiry agent employed by the police who sometimes goes by the name of ‘Miss Gladden’. There had been women who turned detective in fiction before. Wilkie Collins’s short story entitled ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, for example, was published in 1856 in Dickens’s magazineHousehold Words, and has a heroine who investigates the suspicious circumstances of a friend’s death. However, Forrester’s character seems to have been the first professional female detective in British fiction. Like ‘Miss Gladden’, ‘Andrew Forrester’ was a pseudonym. The author’s real name was James Redding Ware (1832-1909), a novelist, dramatist and writer for hire in Victorian London who produced books on a wide variety of subjects from card games and English slang to dreams of famous people and the lives of centenarians.The Female Detective consists of a number of ‘G’’s cases, narrated by herself, in which she deploys her deductive and logical skills to reveal the truth.

The Female Detective, and other titles such as WS Hayward’sRevelations of a Lady Detective which appeared at about the same time, were published as ‘yellowbacks’. These were cheaply produced books, so called because of their covers which often had bright yellow borders. They were sold mostly at the bookstalls which had recently sprung up at railway stations across the country, and were intended as easy, disposable reads for train journeys.

For nearly twenty-five years, Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal, the heroine of Hayward’s book, had no real successors in English fiction. The third woman detective did not put in an appearance until 1888 when Leonard Merrick (1864-1939) made Miriam Lea, a former governess turned private investigator, into the central character of his short novelMr Bazalgette’s Agent. Employed by Mr Bazalgette’s detective agency, Miriam pursues an embezzler halfway across Europe in what is a charming, skilfully written narrative. Unfortunately her creator, Leonard Merrick, who was in his early twenties when he wroteMr Bazalgette’s Agent, came to hate it. He went on to become a well-respected novelist whose admirers included HG Wells, JM Barrie and GK Chesterton. George Orwell enjoyed his novels and wrote a foreword to a new edition of one of them. In later life Merrick clearly saw his detective story as an embarrassment – ‘the worst thing I wrote’, he called it – and made every effort to cover up its existence. He took to buying up copies of the book and destroying them which explains why only a handful now remains in existence. Luckily, the British Library republished it in their ‘Crime Classics’ series in 2013 so readers today can see that Merrick was unjustly severe on his own work.

By 1890 there had only been a very small number of pioneering women detectives in crime fiction but that was about to change. Two phenomena dictated that change. One was the astonishing increase in the number of magazines and periodicals in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Between 1875 and 1903, that number nearly quadrupled from just short of 700 to more than 2,500. Not all of them, of course, carried crime stories but a significant proportion did. The market for all kinds of what would later be called ‘genre’ fiction, but especially crime stories, grew exponentially.

The other factor was the advent of Sherlock Holmes. The great detective’s debut inA Study in Scarlet, published inBeeton’s Christmas Annual for