Paretsky, Sara - Maureen T. Reddy (essay date 1990)
Maureen T. Reddy (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: “The Feminist Counter-Tradition in Crime: Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson,” in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, edited by Ronald Walker and June Frazer, Western Illinois University, 1990, pp. 174-87.
[In the following essay, Reddy analyzes how Amanda Cross's A Trap for Fools, Sue Grafton's ‘F’ Is for Fugitive, Barbara Wilson's The Dog Collar Murders, and Paretsky's Blood Shot all use feminism to redefine the crime genre.]
When Carolyn Heilbrun published her first mystery novel under the name Amanda Cross in 1964, she began the revival of the feminist crime novel, a literary form that had been moribund since the publication in 1935 of Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. In the Last Analysis, the first Amanda Cross book, appeared just a year after Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique...
[The entire page is 7539 words long]
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