SOURCE: “Marele Day's ‘Cold Hard Bitch’: The Masculinist Imperatives of the Private-Eye Genre,” in Journal of the Narrative Technique, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 121-35.

In the following excerpt, Littler analyzes how feminist writers, including Paretsky, have dealt with the requirement of violence in the detective genre.

I

… Most fiction using women private eyes as central characters and usually as narrators has been published in the U.S. since the 1970s. The earliest exceptions to this period, according to Kathleen Gregory Klein, in The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre are Gale Gallagher's I Found Him Dead (1947) and Chord in Crimson (1949). P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, published in London in 1974, predates M. F. Beal's Chicana private eye, Maria Katerina Lorca Guerrera Alcazar (‘Kat’), and Marcia Muller's Amer-Indian private eye, Sharon McCone, by three years. Eve Zaremba's private eye from Vancouver, Helen Keremos, appeared in 1978. But it...