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 of these detectives recalls the tradition of Sam Spade more...