Clues 42.2: BIPOC Female Detectives in a Global Context.

Clues, vol. 42, no. 2 (2024)—a theme issue on BIPOC female detectives in a global context guest edited by Sam Naidu (Rhodes University, South Africa)—has been published. Contact McFarland to order the issue or a subscription. Abstracts follow below.

Update, 8 Mar 2025—Ebook versions now available:
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Introduction: BIPOC Female Detectives in a Global Context / Sam Naidu

The guest editor discusses the rationale for and content of this Clues theme issue, including articles on the TV series Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the work of Eleanor Taylor Bland, Oyinkan Braithwaite, K’im Ch’aehŭi, Maria L. M. Fres-Felix, Pauline Hopkins, Tiffany D. Jackson, Vaseem Khan, Angela Makholwa, Marcia Muller, BarbaraNeely, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kwei Quartey.

“Or my name ain’t Venus Johnson”:
The Birth of Pauline Hopkins’ Black Female Detective in Hagar’s Daughter
Andrea Tinnemeyer

Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter (serialized 1901–03) meditates on detective fiction’s potential to offer agency and self-created potential for a Black woman in Jim Crow times. The result is a liberating use of genre that not only celebrates the prowess of its detective, Venus Johnson, but also affirms the knowledge that flows from Black women and their communities.

Night Girl and the Nate-Rock:
Material Feminisms and Double Consciousness in BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam
Lisa Koyuki Smith (CUNY Graduate Center)

This study focuses on BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992), exploring Neely’s material feminisms avant la lettre, their connection to W.E.B. Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, narratological understandings of the detective genre, and narratives of racial passing that express the discursive and material complexity of race relations in the United States. 

Listen to the Silence:
Reconsidering Race in Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone Hard-boiled Detective Novels
Alexander N. Howe (University of the District of Columbia)
This article examines the development of the Native identity of Marcia Muller’s female private eye, Sharon McCone. McCone initially is identified with one-eighth Shoshone heritage. In Listen to the Silence (2000), McCone learns of her adoption and the membership of her birth parents in the Shoshone Nation. The series’ second half explores McCone’s Native identity, and contemporary Native experience, with increasing nuance and detail. 

“You are a Symbol, Persis”: The Complexity of Postcolonial and Feminist Progress in Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House Series
Sophie-Constanze Bantle (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House series presents 1950s India as rife with opportunity and difficulty. Post-independence feminist and postcolonial emancipation is portrayed as a complicated and ongoing process, mirrored in discussions around Persis’ status as a symbol. Persis combats her society’s social problems, providing an example of agency in the face of oppression.

First modern female PI in US mysteries.

Read my letter in the December 7 Washington Post regarding the first modern female private investigator in American mystery fiction (sorting out the debuts of Delilah West, Sharon McCone, V.I. Warshawski, and Kinsey Millhone).

Exhibition: SF in crime fiction.

The exhibition "Bullets across the Bay: The San Francisco Bay Area in Crime Fiction" at UC Berkeley's Doe Library is on display until February 29, 2012, including authors such as Anthony Boucher, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, and Julie Smith. Article about the exhibition here.

Ink in their blood: Five female mystery authors from the fourth estate.

• Edna Buchanan. Miami Herald journalist Buchanan received a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting in 1986 and discussed her coverage of crime in The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (1987) and Never Let Them See You Cry (1992). Her journalist-sleuth Britt Montero appears in Contents under Pressure (1992); the Edgar-nominated Miami, It's Murder (1994); Suitable for Framing (1995); Act of Betrayal (1996); Margin of Error (1997); Garden of Evil (1999); You Only Die Twice (2001); The Ice Maiden (2002); and Love Kills (2007).

• Carole Nelson Douglas. As a college senior, Douglas was a finalist in Vogue's Prix de Paris writing competition (along with future fellow mystery novelist Marcia Muller). She was a reporter and feature writer for the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press for more than 15 years and received several awards from the Newspaper Guild of the Twin Cities and a second-place award in newswriting from the Minnesota Associated Press. Today, Douglas has a busy mystery writing life, with her Irene Adler, Midnight Louie, and Delilah Street paranormal series.

• Gillian Linscott. Linscott was a journalist for the Liverpool Daily Post, the Birmingham Post, the Guardian, and the BBC for nearly 25 years. A versatile writer, she has penned historical mysteries featuring intrepid suffragist Nell Bray (such as the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger winner Absent Friends) and standalones such as The Garden. Today, she writes a mystery series set in the Victorian era under the pen name Caro Peacock.

• Eve K. Sandstrom. Inspired to pursue journalism by reporter-sleuth Beverly Gray, Sandstrom was a reporter and columnist at the Lawton (OK) Constitution for more than 25 years. She published several mysteries with Sam and Nicky Titus as well as reporter Nell Matthews, was an Agatha and Anthony nominee for her short story "Bugged" in Malice Domestic 5, and now features chocolatier Lee McKinney in her mysteries under the pen name JoAnna Carl.

• Celestine Sibley. A distinguished journalist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for more than 50 years (she covered the James Earl Ray trial, among her other assignments), Sibley published her first mystery novel, The Malignant Heart, in 1957, followed by five others with journalist-sleuth Kate Mulcay: Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991); Straight as an Arrow (1992); Dire Happenings at Scratch Ankle (1993); A Plague of Kinfolks (1995); and Spider in the Sink (1997). She died in 1999 and was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007. Edgar winner Phillip DePoy adapted her memoir, Turned Funny, into a play in 2006, and Sibley Fleming reflected on her grandmother's life in Celestine Sibley: A Granddaughter's Reminiscence (2000).

Marcia Muller on favorite books received from Santa.

Marcia Muller discusses the past books she has received as Christmas gifts on Bookreporter.com.

Happy birthday, Marcia Muller.

MWA Grand Master Marcia Muller, the creator of groundbreaking PI Sharon McCone, turns 63 today. It's hard to believe that McCone, the first modern female PI in a novel (Maxine O'Callaghan's Delilah West precedes her in a 1974 AHMM short story), celebrates her 30th anniversary in print this year; her debut, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, was published in 1977. It's even harder to believe that a writing instructor told Muller, according to her Web site, that "she would never be a writer because she had nothing to say." McCone's latest outing is The Ever-Running Man.

Go here to see a Webcast of Muller's 2005 appearance at the National Book Festival.

Photo credit: Tom Graves