SOURCE: Reddy, Maureen T. “The Feminist Counter Tradition in Crime: Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson.” In The Cunning Craft, edited by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer, pp. 174-87. Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1990.

In the following essay, Reddy examines the genre of the feminist crime novel, focusing on four major novelists—including Grafton—within the genre, and considers the genre's potential new directions.

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 decades.¹ Heilbrun was doubly important in what has...