Twelve Women Detective Stories (Oxford Twelves) [Paperback]

Laura Marcus (Compiler), Chris Willis (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1998 | Series: Oxford Twelves

Whether a housekeeper, secretary, lodger, or pawn-broker in a seedy area of Victorian London, the woman detective's powers of observation and deduction are also her most effective in uncovering and resolving both crimes and mysteries. Twelve Women Detective Stories is an entertaining anthology that gives us a glimpse at these female sleuths in twelve engaging mysteries.
The woman detective is as prominent in stories written by men as in those by women. The detectives here may be young, educated and independent, or elderly and unmarried, illustrating the writers abilities to both use and subvert feminine stereotypes in fascinating ways. Included here are stories by Fergus Hume, Robert Eustace, Baroness Orczy, and Agatha Christie, to name a few. There are also less well-known stories which keep the reader guessing right down to the last sentence.
Miss Marple, Carlotta Carlyle, Sharon McCone--the heroines of the detective novel are certainly some of the best loved and most memorable characters ever created. In Twelve Women Detective Stories, Laura Marcus presents some of the best ever written, in an absorbing tour of the world of crime, detection, and retribution.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

About the Editor:
Laura Marcus lectures in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192880365
• ISBN-13: 978-0192880369
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,189,896 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars AN ANTHOLOGY WITH A QUALITY-CONTROL PROBLEM, March 10, 2011

By 

David R. Eastwood (Long Island, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twelve Women Detective Stories (Oxford Twelves) (Paperback)

TWELVE WOMEN DETECTIVE STORIES (1997) is part of a series put out by Oxford Univ. Press, with at least 5 more volumes in it, including TWELVE AMERICAN DETECTIVE STORIES (1997), TWELVE ENGLISH DETECTIVE STORIES (1998), and TWELVE AMERICAN CRIME STORIES (1998). Although numerous anthologies are devoted to short stories solely about female detectives, most contain works written during the last 50 or 60 years. Only a few, like this one, contain works from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Laura Marcus (Birkbeck College, London), with assistance from Chris Willis, has brought together a moderately good group of early stories.

Arranged almost in chronological order, following Marcus's Introduction, the dozen stories are (1) W. S. Hayward's "The Mysterious Countess" (1864?; attribution uncertain); (2) Catherine Louisa Pirkis's "Drawn Daggers" (1893); (3) Fergus Hume's "The First Customer and The Florentine Dante" (1897); (4) Grant Allen's "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" (1898); (5) L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "Mr. Bovey's Unexpected Will" (1899); (6) Baroness Orczy's "The Man in the Inverness Cape" (1910); (7) Hugh C. Weir's "The Man with Nine Lives" (1914); (8) Anna Katherine Greene's "An Intangible Clue" (1915); (9) Arthur B. Reeve's "The Clairvoyants" (1916; aka "The Veiled Prophetess"); (10) F. Tennyson Jesse's "Lot's Wife" (1931); (11) Gladys Mitchell's "A Light on Murder" (1950); and Henry Cecil's "On Principle" (1948).

In my view, this anthology suffers from a quality-control problem. If I were assigning letter grades to them, I would give two stories an "A-" (the tenth and twelfth), two stories a "C" and a "C+" (the first and ninth, respectively), one story a "D+" (the seventh), one story an "F" (the fifth), and each of the remaining six stories a grade in the "B" range. Most of these stories are Fair-Play Puzzle Stories, although some are Adventure-Puzzles (with enough clues for us to make good guesses), and some are Successful Adventure Stories where we readers just tag along without clues. Several are very skillfully written, while others are stylistically terrible. One has first-rate psychological analysis but also has a detective with supernatural abilities going FAR beyond "feminine intuition." And one (authored by a man) has a female "Watson-Figure" who not only is shallow and rather dull-witted, but who at one point tells her detective companion, " . . . you are a woman. . . . What you need is a good cry!"

If you are unfamiliar with Loveday Brooke, Lois Cayley, Constance Dunlap, Solange Fontaine, Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk of Scotland Yard, Hagar Stanley of the Pawnshop, or Violet Strange, then Marcus's TWELVE WOMEN DETECTIVE STORIES is one place you could become acquainted with any and all--and a few others as well.

However, one of the reasons I have rated this book only 3 stars (for a "C+") is that two much better anthologies cover most of the same ground and even contain several of the very same stories: THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES: THE GREAT WOMEN DETECTIVES AND CRIMINALS, ed. Ellery Queen (1943), and CRIME ON HER MIND: FIFTEEN STORIES OF FEMALE SLEUTHS FROM THE VICTORIAN ERA TO THE FORTIES, ed. Michele B. Slung (1975). Another reason I lowered this book's overall rating is that Marcus's 3-page introduction reveals key factors about several stories, thus "spoiling" some of the surprises their authors carefully put in them for us readers. Finally, the proofreading was a bit cursory, which can make it difficult to understand several passages, especially where some quotation marks have been left out.