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Mary Hadley's book BRITISH WOMEN MYSTERY WRITERS reads like a very capable PhD dissertation spruced up for print. In many ways it is a period piece, but it provides some intriguing insights into a number of female crime novelists. Hadley has chosen to concentrate on P D James, Jennie Melville, Val McDermid, Susan Moody, Joan Smith and Lisa Cody. Unless you are a devotee of either British crime fiction or books written by women writers over the past 20 years, one or two of those names might not be terribly familiar to you. It's a range of writers that interests me, as I covered 1980s and early 1990s writers in my own post-graduate dissertation. But further down the road, Melville, Moody and, to some extent, Cody and Smith haven't stood the test of time terribly well. Melville's Charmaine Daniels series now seems prim and class-ridden -- and Hadley gives Melville a fairly gentle ride in relation to her comments on the lack of black or Asian characters in her books. Moody, whose main character was Penny Wanawake, a privileged and glamorous black photographer, seems more aware of the issues around her creation. Those books today come across as a sort of alternative James Bond. I have to admit I never cared at all for Lisa Cody's two series -- PI Anna Lee, who was a rather weedy girlie-girl PI, and wrestler Eve Wylie, a fairly unlikely token working class creation. An American ear might not have picked up on the clunky and bizarre dialogue and slang, but it was always one of the reasons I could never warm to the books. Hadley devotes a chapter to each of the writers, and adds a summary chapter at the end with reference to several other writers, including Judith Cutler, Denise Mina, Michelle Spring, Scarlett Thomas and Nicola Williams. These choices seem almost arbitrary and tacked on, and have apparently been chosen by Hadley on the recommendation of the authors interviewed elsewhere. Thomas, for example, is not a particularly significant writer, and as far as I am aware, Williams has only ever written one crime novel. The book's strengths are its clear and lucid arguments, and the fact that Hadley has taken the trouble to interview the main authors, all of whom provide interesting insights into their work. She identifies some key thematic differences between the UK and US writers and markets -- but, as an American, also misses others. Most glaring omission to British eyes would probably be the political nature of McDermid's Lindsay Gordon series and Joan Smith's Loretta Lawson books. For those living through Thatcherism, the subversive nature of some of those 1980s crime writers made it a fraction more bearable!
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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