Customer Reviews

Twelve Women Detective Stories (Oxford Twelves)

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3 star:		(1)
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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.