Customer Reviews

A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Private Eyes

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The book's title pays homage to P.D. James' 1972 novel, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, featuring fictional female PI, Cordelia Gray. McDermid has written an entertaining book comparing and contrasting real, live female PIs in the U.S. and Great Britain with those created by mystery authors like herself. McDermid's book is replete with interviews with women earning their living as private investigators who share their techniques and attitudes and occasional invasion-of-privacy law suits.

One of McDermid's chapter headings is "Wonder Women" in which she concludes that "women do make better detectives." After reading A suitable Job for a Woman, I'm convinced!

By the way, amazon.com is inaccurate in including Nevada Barr as a co-author. All she contributed was a page and a half "Forward." So don't get sucked into buying the book for the wrong reasons; it's worth the price on its own merits. Certainly, McDermid is as good a writer as Barr and doesn't need any phony crutches.

Good non-fiction read. I enjoy learning about jobs that most woman only think about doing.

"A Suitable Job for a Woman" contains 16 chapters written in the author's pen (which incorporates various female detective's interviews) and 16 short episodes recorded directly from their voice. The book also contains 14 pages of an interview with the author Val McDermid, which reveals concisely her writing career till now. A short list of Val MacDermid's works is also included.

If "A Suitable Job for a Woman" can be proud of anything, it is absolutely the fascinating depiction of the real female detevtives' world. It is utterly intriguing to listen to their episodes that range from a repo-man mission in Watts, LA to take back a truck, to finding out an old boyfriend for an aged, perhaps dying lady, which sounds like, the detective herself says, "a real Mills and Boon story." It is also surprising to know that many of them are not only married but also got children and even grandchildren, and their ways of landing on the present jobs are as various as you can imagine. After reading these professionals' interviews, P. D. James' Cordelia Gray story does not look entirely fictional.

However, this book has two shortcomings. One is that as the author didn't have any interviews with male counterparts, it is hardly possible for us to figure out to what degree these portrayed activities of them represent characteristics of "female" detectives. Some jobs they do must be done by male detectives as well. (And it is very regrettable that the writer didn't go further to interview these female detectives' husbands and children, whose viewpoints would have enlarged the scope of the book.) The other problem is that though the author succeeds in describing female detectives' diversity and professionalism, their stories go almost unchecked. It is obvious and understandable that they would not talk about their failed jobs, but the interviewer seems content just to listen to the episodes they are willing to talk about. If I might add another drawback of the book, the voice of Val McDermid sounds sometimes hostile to male detectives (with whom she didn't interview, as I said) to champion female counterpart. It is totally unnecessary, even damaging, considering the already impressive accounts the female detectives submit here.

For all the author's previous career as a journalist, it is a book written by a fiction writer. If you're looking for P.D. James's scrupulous pen that could have revealed minutely every detalis of this unexplored world, you might be disappointed. Readable, well-written, but as a personal journal. This world deserves much more thorough research.