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Coleman’s first five years were a nightmare, and when Dinah first meets her,
Coleman reminds her of a baby bobcat—wild, fearless, snarling. Coleman trusts
few people, and has vowed never to rely on a man, never to fall in love, never
to marry. She wants power, and control over her life; she dreams of
becoming a business tycoon. She likes to watch fifties movies starring
Katherine Hepburn
and Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. Although she may not acknowledge them,
her mottos are “I’ll show them,” and “Damn the Torpedoes.” She’s fearless,
reckless, tough. She’s small and blonde and cute, but she secretly wishes she
looked like Audrey Hepburn, mostly because she’s clothes crazy. She’s designed
and made her own clothes since she was a school girl.
Can these two women carry the weight of all the problems of women of our day?
No, of course not, but they have help from a good friend, Bethany Byrd, a
neighbor in the rural area of North Carolina where they grew up. As Bethany
tells another character in the book, she’s technically black—she had slaves as
ancestors—but her people have intermarried with American Indians and whites,
maybe Creoles, maybe Asians, and today the Byrds are golden brown. Her family
has customs that go back to Africa, and they move to a very different music. In
the course of the book, the cousins and Bethany encounter yet another powerful
woman, Rachel Ransome, who runs an art gallery in London, and has a strange and
secret history.
I tell you all this background because I’m informed by more than one literary
agent that the female dominance of my novels hurts their marketability. Dinah
marries and Coleman has lovers, as do other women in my books, but there’s no
question that the women in the book are more important than the men. Some
people think that’s not a good thing.
Have there been other mystery novels with two
female protagonists? Yes, indeed. The most recent of these is probably a
series by Simon Brett, the first of which is The Body on the Beach,
2001. The books are designated the “Fethering” series for the West Sussex
seaside village where they take place, although a more appropriate title might
have been “the new odd couple” series, since that’s how a critic described
Brett’s protagonists, as an “odd couple” with a “sweet twist.” The two women
who make up the “odd couple” are the uptight, early fifties divorcée, Carole
Seddon, retired; and her next-door neighbor, and hippie partner-in-detection,
the mysterious and secretive Jude Nichols.
When I first encountered these women, who have
nothing in common except proximity, too much time on their hands, and curiosity,
I thought they’d turn out to be lesbians. Not so. Carole has an affair with a
local bartender, and Jude apparently has multiple lovers. That either of them
attracts anyone is surprising: Carole is described as having gray hair seriously
short for ease of care, and wearing unfashionable glasses to go with her too old
for her, dull, sensible clothes. In fact, Carole is “happy to look older than
her age.” (Wow. I never met anyone like that.) Jude is overweight, slovenly,
and dresses like a gypsy.
I don’t think I was the only person who
anticipated a romance between the two women; a reviewer wrote that “the yin-yang
relationship of the women is both mysterious and wholly believable.”
In fact, most of the reviewers’ comments on the books that I read seem to focus
on the relationship between the women; the characters are generally praised as
“larger than life,” having “surprising depth,” “strongly drawn,” and “true to
life.” One might infer that it’s the novelty of two women as
protagonists that enthralls readers and reviewers. But the Fethering pair are
not the first of their kind.
Anne George (no relation to Elizabeth, as far as I
know) wrote an eight-book series with two women protagonists, the first of
which, Murder on a Girls’ Night Out, 1996, won an Agatha. The books, the
“Southern Sisters Series,” are mostly set in Birmingham. Mary Alice, 65,
divorced, giggly, and beloved by men, is known as “Sister,” or “Aunt Sister.”
Patricia Anne, 60, nicknamed Mouse, is a retired teacher, married, and the
narrator of the books. (Other titles are Murder on a Bad Hair Day,
Murder Makes Waves, and Murder Boogies With Elvis.) The
characters are described by critics as “the cleverest set of sister sleuths in
history,” and “Anne George’s sunny Southern sisters are like comfort food, as
good as grits, almost better than biscuits.”
A couple of years before
Anne George’s “Southern sister sleuths” made their first appearance, Annette
Meyers launched a series featuring two women in The Big Killing, 1989.
Meyers’ books, the “Smith and Wetzon” series, are about a pair of executive
recruiters, or “headhunters.” The character Leslie Wetzon narrates The Big
Killing, sometimes in the first person, sometimes drifting into the third,
as in her several paragraph description of her partner and herself, which
contains a number of third person sentences in the middle of a first person
narration, like, “They were an odd couple.”
The Big Killing is
written in an unusual style. Examples: “What [Wetzon and] Smith did was
mysterious, in the best sense of the word, and therefore it was glamorous…”
“The clients were not ordinary business people, they were the movers and the
shakers of the all powerful financial community. The Street, with a capital
S.” And, “they were women in a man’s world.”
I’m fairly knowledgeable about the
financial world, since I was connected to “The Street” in one way or another for
a lot of years, including writing about it, but I found Meyers’ Wall Street
milieu unfamiliar. The book is full of “insider” expressions neither I nor my
husband (who was in the financial business for more than forty years) ever
heard.
The copy on the book covers contains
phrases like “They seek out Wall Street’s top guns and steal them away from
their employers. They’re headhunters—they go for big game...” Nevertheless, no
matter how unusual the writing style, it is a mystery series with two
female protagonists.
I can’t be sure I’ve rounded up all
the contemporary “Two Female” mystery books, but the point is, they’ve been
around a while, and they must have some kind of appeal. Indeed, the latest—the
Brett series—seems to have appeal because of its two female leads;
certainly the Cagney and Lacey series did. Maybe there’s an opportunity here,
not a problem? But wait till you hear my experience with a male agent about the
issue of two women as protagonists.
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