SOURCE: “The Feminist Counter-Tradition in Crime: Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson,” in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, edited by Ronald Walker and June Frazer, Western Illinois University, 1990, pp. 174-87.

In the following essay, Reddy analyzes how Amanda Cross's A Trap for Fools, Sue Grafton's ‘F’ Is for Fugitive, Barbara Wilson's The Dog Collar Murders, and Paretsky's Blood Shot all use feminism to redefine the crime genre.

When Carolyn Heilbrun published her first mystery novel under the name Amanda Cross in 1964, she began the revival of the feminist crime novel, a literary form that had been moribund since the publication in 1935 of Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. In the Last Analysis, the first Amanda Cross book, appeared just a year after Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique brought feminist issues back to public attention, following Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex by nearly two...