SOURCE: Shuker-Haines, Timothy and Martha M. Umphrey. “Gender (De)Mystified: Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction.” In The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy, pp. 71-82. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Shuker-Haines and Umphrey explore the respective characterizations of Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, drawing some conclusions about the general attributes of feminist hard-boiled fiction.

What should we make of the recent emergence of the female hard-boiled detective? In a literary-historical sense she is an oxymoron, standing outside the gendered traditions of both the classic female detective and the tough-guy dick. The classic archetype, a Miss Marple or a Jessica Fletcher, generally operates within the domestic sphere, solving drawing-room crimes and reestablishing harmony through a combination of skillful listening, good sense, and intuitive judgment about character.¹ She uses her...