SOURCE: “New Women Detectives: G is for Gender-Bending,” in his Gender Language and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 127-40.

In the following essay, Irons discusses how Paretsky and other women writers have altered detective fiction through their use of strong female protagonists.

Detection à la femme has been extant since the inception of the detective genre. Not long after the publication of ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ Mrs Paschal appeared on the scene. She precipitated a tradition of ‘female sleuths’ who, with the possible exception of Jane Marple, have lived for some time under the shadow of their male colleagues. The majority of female detectives—known disparagingly as ‘knitting spinsters’—while at least as individualistic, daring, and stalwart as their male counterparts, have until recently been dismissed by (mostly) male critics of the genre as ‘lady detectives,’ an epithet that itself seemed disparaging enough...