Contemporary Literary Criticism | Paretsky, Sara - Ann Wilson (essay date 1995)

Ann Wilson (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: “The Female Dick and the Crisis of Heterosexuality,” in Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction, edited by Glenwood Irons, University of Toronto Press, 1995, pp. 148-55.

[In the following excerpt, Wilson discusses the protagonists of novelists Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Sara Paretsky, concluding that “Female hard-boiled fiction offers a mild challenge to the dominant social order but not a radical assault on it.”]

In recent years, critics have hailed the work of three American writers—Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Sara Paretsky—as revising, perhaps even renewing, the tradition of the hard-boiled detective novel. Each of the writers has created a detective who is a single woman in her mid-thirties, and who works as a licensed private investigator. Physically and mentally tough, willing to take tremendous personal risks as she negotiates the treacherous underworld of urban America, each...

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