The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

Kestner, J. A. (2017). Sherlock’s sisters: The British female detective, 1864–1913. New York: Routledge.

The monograph of the American scholar Joseph A. Kestner is devoted to Victorian novels and stories that feature a female detective protagonist. The author introduces a large volume of little studied texts written in the period from 1864 to 1913, which he explores to follow the process of the female detective character taking shape, noting its specific structural and sociocultural traits as well as features of narration. As a literary example and a starting point, the author considers the character of the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes: it is in comparison and polemic with him that the character of a female detective is formed in the subsequent literary tradition. In recognizing realistic prose as documentary evidence, the author painstakingly reconstructs the historical context, mostly in the area of gender issues. This enables him to shed a new light on the origins of English detective writing, while not without certain limitations.

Trauma, Motive and the Post-Troubles Psychopath in The Fall

This article discusses the depiction of the serial killer, Paul Spector, in the BBC/RTÉ television series The Fall (2013–2016). It complements existing scholarship on the series’ female detective by considering how Spector’s construction as a Gothic villain and victim of institutional abuse inflects The Fall’s positioning as a transnational genre production. It focuses on the use of Belfast as a setting, taking into account its historical positioning as a “Noir” city, and discusses the series’ spatial politics in the context of the city’s more recent history of sectarian divisions. It places the “explanation” for Spector’s criminal activities in the context of the narrativization of clerical sexual abuse as specifically associated with the Irish Catholic church, and outlines the narrative turns the series is forced to take to reach its generically inflected conclusion. The discussion focuses on seasons one and two of The Fall as the most significant in terms of meaning-making.

Dysfunction, Deviancy, and Sexual Autonomy: The Single Female Detective in Primetime TV

As the number of single women has grown within Anglo-American society, there has been a proliferation of discourses around single women within popular culture. At the same time, there has been a resurgence in female-centered media representations of detectives. This article asks what cultural work the convergence of the single woman with the unconventional figure of the detective performs, and what this means for contemporary feminine subjectivities, exploring how she is constructed in three primetime TV crime dramas: The Bridge, The Good Wife and Fargo. I argue that while the single female detective foregrounds discourses of professionalism, rationality, and sexual autonomy, she simultaneously reinscribes patriarchal discourses of heteronormative coupledom and normative femininity through her social dysfunction, vulnerability and deviance, rendering the single woman a threat to femininity. Yet, at times, her liminal positioning allows her to occupy a more transgressive feminine subjectivity and subversively trouble the gender binary.

“The Harder I Swim, the Faster I Sink”

This essay considers the role that Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (BBC/SundanceTV, 2013) and Top of the Lake: China Girl (BBC/SundanceTV, 2017) play in the post-network television landscape. Situating the series among the globalized genre of serialized post-network crime shows that feature female detectives, this essay argues that Campion reworks the genre’s fascination with victimized women from her auteurist and Antipodean perspective. While the characterization and actions of the female detective resonate with other programs’ protagonists, Campion challenges dominant discourses of victimized women by intervening in the global circulation of women’s bodies on television. By drawing on Zoë Sofia’s work on female bodies and container technologies, this essay argues that Campion’s use of pregnant victims and her exploration of a female detective’s history as a survivor of sexual assault allow her to interrogate the typical treatment of female corpses within crime television. Through circuitous investigations that leave enough narrative space for detours like the settling of Paradise, where women transform shipping containers into domestic spaces for struggling women, Campion provides a countermodel to crime television focused on forensic progress through a case. Campion similarly takes the container of serialized crime drama that circulates the globe in a post-network television landscape and creates space for women’s stories from the Antipodes. Pausing the narrative to indict the treatment of female victims, Campion also unearths the melodramatic underpinnings of serialized crime dramas that resonate with her own filmography.

THE FEMINISTIC COMPONENT IN THEFEMALE DETECTIVE NOVEL: THE COMPARATIVE ASPECT (ON THE BASIS OF WORKS BY IRENE ROZDOBUDKO “THE DOUBLE GAME IN FOUR HANDS” AND “GAUDY NIGHT”BY DOROTHY SAYERS)

The article deals with the feminist component in the detective novels «The Double Game in Four Hands» by I. Rozdobudko and «Gaudy Night» by D. Sayers. Its dominant features are distinguished: original female images and women's writing which is manifested through the detailing and usage of parenthetical constructions. The common and distinctive features of the use of the feminist component in the Ukrainian and English female detective discourse are described. The similarity and difference in the images of Musya Gurchyk and Harriet Vane who are the expressions of the creative method of detective writers are analyzed. The emotional and detailing functions of the parenthetical constructions are described. It is emphasized that the feminist component plays an important role in the creation of the genre of the female detective novel.

The female detective as the child who needs to know. Saga Norén as an example of potent yet dysfunctional female detectives in contemporary Nordic Noir

The global popularity of Nordic Noir, such as the Danish/Swedish production Broen, The Danish production Forbrydelsen, its U.S. and U.K. remakes, the Danish/Swedish production The Millennium Trilogy seems to depend on its insistent interest in a set of maladjusted female detectives. The by now seven seasons of the U.S production Homeland have a similar focus. In this essay, we argue that the struggle these female protagonists endure between extreme potency on the one hand and shameful psychic problems on the other is linked to how these female detectives represent the female position in film in general. Turning to traditional and ongoing discussions in feminist film theory, and combining queer studies and sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives with recognition theory (Felski/Coplan), we ask how we as spectators relate to these women in terms of recognition. In line with that, we ask whether these female detectives should be considered feminist icons who challenge traditional gendered poses on film, or whether, due to their dysfunctionalities, they came to represent some kind of otherness that we sympathize with but also fail to identify with.

‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories

This essay examines the adventures of Richard Marsh’s female detective and lip-reader Judith Lee (1911–16). The short-story series offers a powerful example of the cross-fertilisation of the genres of detective, Gothic, New-Woman and science fiction through Marsh’s ambivalent construction of his protagonist as a potentially progenerate being with seemingly supernatural communication skills. Lee is a liminal heroine who is simultaneously resistant to and complicit with the normalising taxonomies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class commonly associated with detective fiction. However, while the stories’ conformist position as scientifically minded crime fiction is complicated by their apparent tolerance of deviance, Lee’s expertise as a teacher of the deaf undermines counter-hegemonic readings because her profession aims to ‘cure’ a disability, deafness. Lee’s adventures show how popular fiction synthesised disparate discursive frameworks drawing on criminology, eugenics, science, communications technology and psychical research.