SOURCE: Sandels, Robert. “It Was a Man's World.” Armchair Detective 22, no. 4 (fall 1989): 388-96.

In the following essay, Sandels explores the characterization of Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski in several of her novels, noting that, despite Warshawski's feminist tendencies, she has much in common with her male counterparts.

Contemporary writers such as Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller are only a few of the growing number of female authors who have developed female private eye characters in recent years. Lady detectives are, of course, nothing new. Nor is the feminism implicit in their choice of profession new. What is new, of course, is the imitation of the violent and cynical male hardboiled detective. Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Amanda Cross represent a more genteel tradition of female detection which stretches back into the nineteenth century and the writing of Anna Katherine Green. That tradition reminds us, however, of...