The enduring popularity of the detective novel in its variant forms is a testament to the cathartic comfort it brings in a perceived unstable and shifting world in which values and morals seem to be declining.

The sense of maintaining society's standards is just as relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century and the detective remains the hero who returns the chaos to order. While O Is for Outlaw does not portray justice and criminality as clearcut, it does offer closure at its end, in contrast to the trend in recent fiction toward the open ending which replicates society's uncertainties. As far as feminism is concerned, Grafton's alphabet novels are problematic, for although their feisty, witty, sexy and intelligent hero might prove an admirable role model in some respects, her deployment as exorcist of corrupt individuals conceals the corrupt mechanics of patriarchal society as...