Although I am a man, I am jealous of the reputation of women in mystery.
In particular, I want women to be portrayed as real people in mystery stories. I have to say, I am more often disappointed than not.
Take your average spy thriller (which is a sub-genre of mystery). Usually you have a rugged, handsome ex-CIA or ex-Mossad or ex-MI5 (which I always thought was a band from the late 60s) agent, a man with a Past, a man who likes good whiskey but doesn’t drink anymore after that incident in which he shot a child while drunk on Chivas. He’s tortured by the death of that child, by his Mother’s death of cancer three years ago, by his ex-wife who still loves him (and comes by to help him through lonely nights) who couldn’t handle the Life of a Spy.
Usually the author gives this guy a girlfriend. (The willing ex-wife somehow doesn’t count.) And what does the girlfriend do? She makes him dinner. She gives him sex. She tells him she loves him. She worries about his dangerous mission. She engages in witty repartee with him. To make her seem like an accomplished woman, the author usually makes her a brain surgeon or a famous opera singer or an etymologist. But the story never deals with whatever her high profile profession might be.
She’s window dressing. She’s a shop dummy with a pretty dress. She’s a tool.
Even when the main detective is a woman, often the author will trivialize her into unbelievability. I don’t know how many times I’ve read a story featuring a female detective whose main problem was a broken heel on her pumps. Or whose main goal was not so much solving the crime as doing it without hurting the ego of the stunningly handsome man who she works with. Or who goes into a house full of gangland assassins worried about whether little Suzy got her Science project in on time.
These things are supposed to humanize the detective. Instead, they make her seem small. They make her seem a “typical female” who’s weaker, softer, more unfocused than the man.
Or the writer goes the other way. He makes his girl detective hard and uncaring, her heart sheathed in iron, her emotions tightly in check so that she has no real sense of humor. Except when, inevitably, she falls in love. Then she goes all gooey.
None of these characters are like the women I’ve known in my life. Women lawyers, in particular, are a strong bunch of women who know when to worry about little Suzy and when to ask the devastating question of the child molester on the witness stand. Yet in books they’re often portrayed as High Bitch or Low Whore.
Thus, dear reader, you might notice an abundance of strong and intelligent women in my stories. From Minerva James, the most notorious lawyer in 1962 Sacramento http://www.philsp.com/homeville/cfi/t53.htm#A900 to Amy Bailey, the young woman Jackson James falls in love with in “Sparrow’s Blood,” to Ariel Gustafson, the investigator for John Carlson in the Elysium series of mysteries, my women do not act like cream puffs. They don’t break their heels. They have kids and lives, but they also do their jobs with professionalism and a minimum of fuss.
Because I think women are fascinating, and not merely in a sexual way. I think women should be portrayed as they are in real life. I think we need to respect and love our mystery women and not treat them like they exist only to make our male characters feel good.
You may disagree, dear reader. But you would be wrong.
Mark Bruce, Writer 