Back in the day when I rode my bike 100 miles to school – in the snow – barefoot – I learned that there were competing ideas about who was the first real fictional detective. Edgar Allen Poe gets first dibs as his short story, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” arrived in 1841. There are those who argue that it should be Wilkie Collins with his mashup of Poe’s original detective trope with Dickens’ world in The Moonstone. Little did we know there is one dark horse entry, “The Mystery at Notting Hill,” that some claim as the first. The author used a pseudonym, Charles Felix, and it took years to reveal his name as Charles Warren Adams whose serialized the story in 1862 for Britain’s “Once A Week” magazine.
These mysteries and their investigators were all male. I began to wonder who were the first fictional women detectives. I drew forth my literary research shovel and began to dig. Here’s what I found.
In 1864, James Redding Ware, authoring under the penname, Andrew Forrester, delivered The Female Detective.
It was a collection of detective stories narrated by “Mrs. Gladden.” Mrs. Gladden, while seen merely as a dressmaker, investigated for clues, used deductive reasoning and her own knowledge of medicine. She called herself a professional detective. What’s more, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s epitome of observation and deduction, Sherlock Holmes, used these same techniques much later in 1887 when he published his first Sherlock story, “A Study in Scarlet.”
Mrs. Gladden, like most PIs, thought the police a bit dim at connecting dots. This is a trope that has endured to this day; the private detective is always smarter than the cops. In her mysterious murder-solving, she is as dogged and detailed as C. Auguste Dupin in Poe’s “Rue Morge”. She rifles the dead man’s pockets. She observes the hair and skin of the victim to deduce he was murdered by a foreigner.
Mrs. Gladden set the model for all fictional private detectives that came after: observation and hypothesis, followed by deduction and solution.
The lady as sleuth took off in the Victorian England. In 1880 William Stephens Hayward created Mrs. Paschal for his 10-part series, Revelations of a Lady Detective. Mrs. Paschal was far more daring than her predecessor. She smoked. She carried a handgun. She would even rip off her crinoline to descend into a sewer to search for clues. A widow, left in dire financial straits by the death of her husband, Mrs. Paschal was certainly not considered as performing “a woman’s work.” In these stories, she works with the official police force, though she also occasionally makes herself available as a private detective.
The rest, as the cliché rolls, is literary history. A man may have created our first female sleuth, but quickly others followed. The Victorian era bookstores soon exploded with new women investigators.
There was Mollie Delamere, another fictional detective, appeared in 1899. She was a young widow employed as an international pearl broker who had to outsmart the countless burglars after her wares. In 1900, Hilda Wade arrived. She was a brilliant nurse solving medical mysteries to get close to the physician who framed her late father for murder and who ends up on a globetrotting adventure to catch him. Dora Myrl, who first appeared the same year, was a youthful woman in ankle-showing skirts with an advanced degree in mathematics from Cambridge – a medical doctor who couldn’t find work as a physician, she begins working as a private eye. There were also many more ladies saving the day: Loveday Brooke (1893), Lois Cayley (1899), Hagar Stanley (1899), Florence Cusack (1899–1900), Judith Lee (1911–16). American counterparts included Laura Keen (1892), Amelia Butterworth (1897), Frances Baird (1906), Madelyn Mack (1914), Violet Strange (1915), and Millicent Newberry (1917).
The detectives above are but a small selection of women who got it done as they charged the boundaries of male sleuthing. They slipped the bonds of female stereotyping and we’re going to keep on reading their adventures. For fans of historical fiction and champions of women’s competence, I encourage you to explore these lady investigators. You will be richly rewarded. There’s good reason their stories are still in print.
When I had my first inklings of writing a detective novel, I considered that my main character would need a posse. Every detective has a posse. So what sort of people would comprise Rita Mars’ inner circle? They had to be fun, trusted, effective. I discovered over time that some of the most knowledgeable and effective folk didn’t always look the part.
And what is the part of Rita Mars’ assistant and work confident? That role had to be someone Rita would trust when her natural approach to anyone was keeping her distance. Rita Mars does not often ask for help. She does not assume a person is a friendly just because they
present as such. She relies on those she knows have been through the fires of battle, whether that battle is prejudice or war or plain old garden variety bigotry players in the Rita Mars saga.
When I considered Beverly Hills as a character I thought of a good friend I worked with so many years ago. Larry was a gay, black man. In 1967 he was attending Boston University. On his way to class one day, he drove through Boston’s Roxbury district where he was surrounded by a mob, dragged from his car and thrown through a plate glass window. It took more than a year for him to walk again. He emerged from his trauma strong and determined not to let haters dictate his life. I knew he would be the right model for Rita’s right hand.
In The Rita Mars Series, Bev meets Rita as she’s working on a serial case where gay men are stalked and killed in a Baltimore at a notorious “meat market” park in a very upscale part of Baltimore. Rita is determined to find the killer when she mistakes Bev for the murderer as he’s presenting himself for bait to try and catch the killer himself. In the backstory from my first book, DRIVEN, Rita and Bev team to successfully solve the case.
Beverly Hills served his country in Afghanistan when he was known as Charles Tyrell Wheatly. As a kid from the projects in Baltimore, his opportunities had been limited so he joined the Army. Bev served admirably in her tours in Afghanistan. She had taken IED shrapnel when she tricked a suicide bomber into prematurely detonating his explosives vest which saved a platoon. For th0se heroics the Army awarded Bev a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross.
When she returned home, she not only had PTSD to manage but that notion that she had fought all her 30-some years. The time in hospital for her wounds made it impossible for her to stuff the idea that while her body might be male, her head was definitely not. Bev has not yet chosen transition. That idea remains a chasm to leap for her. In the meantime, she’s dressing as it pleases her and the hell with the haters.
Teaming with Rita on the serial killer gave her not only an accepting friend but gave Bev a safe place to work as she considers where decision and circumstance takes her. She is devoted to Rita and often acts as her bodyguard. It is Bev who keeps the office running for her adrenalin-fueled friend and boss.
So why did I tap Larry as my main model for Beverly Hills? Like Bev, he stood up to hate with strength and dignity. He was never out-of-control angry; something it took me a long time to understand. However, he was also not going to allow the prejudice of others to shape his character. Bev, like Larry, is a person of courage, of loyalty and one never swept away in the grip of hate. She will always be one of my most favorite players in the Rita Mars saga.
In the upcoming monthly posts, I’m going not only to present the profiles of my thriller cast, I want to share how they got to be who they are.
IN THE BEGINNING…
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Me – I need to create make-believable characters. Not as hard, one would think, as I only had to personify the traits from which each player operated. These would be traits I wanted to exploit or explore. And, while I wasn’t going literally to breathe them into the physical world, I knew that I had to make them real.
RITA MARS
If I told you that I am not a part of Rita Mars, you’d know I was full of it. I think of each book’s protagonist as a construct incorporating the author’s view point, a bit of the author’s personality, hunks of author ideology and her larger-than-life response to the main character’s challenges. In thrillers and mysteries, we get to be the protagonist as hero in the end. (Of course, I love this bit!).
Where did Rita Mars come from?
This author has been a rebellious sort forever. I was the bane of my mother’s social senses. I spent a good deal of my youth protesting wars and racism and hate in general. Rita, therefore, is that woman who will charge like the Light Brigade if she believes in the cause. She views people in high places as simply another human who puts their underwear on same as everyone else. Rita speaks her mind and sometimes gets away with it and sometimes she doesn’t. She’s just not going to stop speaking out when she disagrees. Rita will always let the chips fall . . ..
In my career of developing law enforcement and security applications, I had the most instructive education ever in work with federal agencies as well as local authorities. I was honored to work with people who were dedicated. They were smart. They understood the stakes.
I soaked up the war stories from these men and women. They taught me the nuances of surveillance. They recounted the cases that haunted them, the murders, the disappearances, the deaths they could not prevent. Theirs was a passion for holding the line. The toll it took in broken families and splintered relationships could be enormous. Nonetheless, they believed in their mission and they carried their grief and fear in silence. Their stories are part of Rita’s.
Her father had been one of those whose beliefs carried him into the Viet Nam war. It was not the fear of battle that shattered his sense of place in the universe, it was the disillusion borne of his awakening to the savage stupidity of war and the absurd idea that we must coerce everyone to our personal projection of what is right. In the end Robert Mars released himself from his loss of faith. The blow from that escape left Rita Mars clear-eyed about the evils of judgement. It also engendered a stance to keep that small, vulnerable flame of self-belief guarded; to shun intimacy and embrace emotional armor.
The last I’ll say about Rita – it is the wall of self-preservation that hampers Rita’s attachments. While not a battlefield veteran, she’s witnessed the ugliness of betrayal, the infinite appetite of greed, the foundational loss of those we have loved. Underneath her willingness to step into the cage, Rita Mars harbors the belief in a just world and that she will forever nurture the internal spark of that belief against what may come.
In psych thrillers, it’s always a dark and stormy night. As thriller readers, we love that brush with evil, that threat that cannot touch us. We’re safe from the likes of a Hannibal Lecter, but boy, do we love the intrigue, the danger and suspense. Since March is definitively the “Madness” month, I offer you some of the best of the self-published psychological thrillers that will make the hair on your neck stand up and deliver the chills we crave!
It’s February, and groundhogs aside, the fame of this month belongs to Cupids, heart-shaped boxes of cheap chocolate and flowers scooped up at the last minute from the grocery. So, what the heck do those things have to do with books, you ask?
I couldn’t make that leap so I decided to have a little imaginative fun – and very stingy on the imaginative, I might add. I’m an author I said to myself. Use your writer brain. What would a valentine from Romeo to Juliet say or Cleo to Antony? I squandered quality writing time concocting Valentines that some of fiction’s best loved lovers might have sent to their object of affection.
I had a birthday recently. One terrific gift was a cake, announcing in lavender icing “Happy Birthday Valerie.” Did I mention the icing was buttercream? I loved all the bright colors on that bright white field of sugar. I called it the Cake of Good Hope.
Why name a cake? And why that name? It is my response to the 2024 national elections. I was dismayed by results. Yeah, I thought of karma and her “bitch” persona. A huge number of the people who voted have no idea of this country’s history or what they bought for themselves.
They forgot their white forebearers came here, killed the native inhabitants, destroyed their culture and stole their land. No amount of lying changes that. But now, there are folk of color entering the country and some descendants of the white invaders are inflamed with righteous indignation that people of color should dare to want to live a better life.
We were astonished that people who called themselves Christian began trying to snuff out anyone who was not made in their image. They apparently do not believe in their own god. They’re so scared, they feel they need to protect themselves from new arrivals by stealing their children, placing them in camps and shipping them out of the country. I haven’t heard any of them praying about what to do or saying they believe their god will protect them. “Christian” is just a name they chose because it used to mean a person who tried to live a life philosophy like their New Testament Jesus. Surely Jesus would not recognize his teachings in any of these people.
I digressed. Cake of Good Hope is my sticking point. I will continue to act in good faith in a country founded on the principle of equal treatment for all. I will resist mandates of hate and violence and I will act against it. I will speak out when I see injustice and I will do that without hesitation. We all know what evil requires to sprout and grow – for good people to do nothing.
I started looking at German resistance efforts in the 1930s. One of the most interesting was “The White Rose” movement started by a brother and sister team who were attending the University of Munich. They were surprised that so many of the educated in Germany supported Hitler. Hans and Sophie Scholl, aided by friend, Christoph Probst, began to print anti-Nazi leaflets and painted slogans like “Freedom!” and “Down With Hitler!” on walls of the university. There were creative resisters, like Oskar Schindler who hired Jews to keep them from Nazi hands and Dutch teacher, Johan van Hulst, who used bicycle delivery as a way to sneak Jewish children out of the country. Swiss diplomat, Carl Lutz, issued official Swiss protection papers to safe houses in Budapest. As thousands of Jews were forced to walk to concentration camps in Austria and Germany, Lutz, with his wife, pulled as many people as they could from the march and provided them protective documents.
And we have the American, Virginia Hall, the most daring and Reich-feared spy – a Maryland native, I’m proud to add. In 1941, posing as a NY Post reporter, Hall appeared in Paris with a fake id and forged papers. She radioed troop movements and other military info back to U.S. intelligence. She recruited agents for the French resistance.
Hall eventually had to flee the country. She escaped with Spanish guides across a treacherous 50-mile trek over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. No mean feat, pardon the pun, when the woman had suffered an amputated foot as a result of a hunting accident years before.
Virginia returned to France a few months before D-Day via a British torpedo ship. She roamed the French countryside disguised as a 60-year-old peasant woman, organizing sabotage missions against the German army. The Office of Strategic Service (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, credited Hall’s team with derailing freight trains, destroying a number of bridges, killing 150 Nazis and capturing 500 more.
Hall was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, one of the highest U.S. military honors for bravery in combat. She was the only woman to receive the award during World War II.
Meanwhile, back to The Cake! None of us are going to parachute behind enemy lines and blow up infrastructure. We are not Virginia Hall. We do not own a factory where we can hide folk. And I, for one, have no diplomatic powers to employ. But I have faith in the community of decency and the common good. We will not be silent and we will not be silenced.
Originally the point at the southern tip of South Africa was Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms). We know that years ahead of us will be stormy and our work to preserve a decent way of life will work at times, fail at others. It was much later that John II, king of Portugal, renamed the cape. He called it the Cape of Good Hope to reflect the optimism for new trade routes.
I’m nurturing my optimism; it will need care and feeding. We may get tired, like a boxer keeping his gloves up in a protracted and bitterly contested ring match. Then again, we will definitely have successes. We will go the distance and we will never, ever be those good people who do nothing.
Valerie Webster and Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller in the spotlight via Author of the Day interview.
Make your next book club event an author event with a writer who’s lived the cases, developed the crime fighting technologies. Contact Valerie Webster today.
