Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology brings together the most cunning, resourceful, and brilliant female sleuths in mystery fiction. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. For the first time ever, Otto Penzler gathers the most iconic women of the detective canon over the past 150 years, captivating and surprising readers in equal measure. The 74 handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting P.I.s like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Linda Barnes, Laura Lippman, and many more.

The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester is about a female detective who expertly evades suspicion while cracking the hardest cases. Excerpt: "Who am I? It can matter little who I am. It may be that I took to the trade, sufficiently comprehended in the title of this work without a word of it being read, because I had no other means of making a living; or it may be that for the work of detection I had a longing which I could not overcome."

Written in 1864, this novel set in London depicts Victorian women under a new light thanks to "the initiative in works of progress" of the times, that challenged what was considered not to be "a woman's work". In this novel the English police started employing women in their task force as undercover detectives. Here in the Victorian London we meet Mrs. Paschal, a widow in financial trouble, who "verging upon forty" reinvented herself and "became one of the much-dreaded, but little-known people called Female Detectives". Under cover she bravely chases thieves to secret vaults full of gold, spies on an Italian secret society, solves crimes and rescues the day.

Finalist for the 2012 Edgar Award in the Best Critical/Biographical Category presented by the Mystery Writers of America In this extensive and authoritative study of over 300 films, Philippa Gates explores the "woman detective" figure from her pre-cinematic origins in nineteenth century detective fiction through her many incarnations throughout the history of Hollywood cinema. Through the lens of theories of gender, genre, and stardom and engaging with the critical concepts of performativity, masquerade, and feminism, Detecting Women analyzes constructions of the female investigator in the detective genre and focuses on the evolution of her representation from 1929 to today. While a popular assumption is that images of women have become increasingly positive over this period, Gates argues that the most progressive and feminist models of the female detective exist in mainstream film's more peripheral products such as 1930's B-picture and 1970's Blaxploitation films. Offering revisions and new insights into peripheral forms of mainstream film, Gates explores this space that allows a fantasy of resolution of social anxieties about crime and, more interestingly, gender, in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The author's innovative, engaging, and capacious approach to this important figure within feminist film history breaks new ground in the field of gender and film studies.

From the USA Today Bestselling author of The Magician's Lie "Macallister is becoming a leading voice in strong, female-driven historical fiction. Exciting, frightening, and unspeakably moving..."—Erika Robuck, bestselling author of Hemingways's Girl For the first daring female Pinkerton detective, respect is hard to come by, but danger and spies are everywhere. In the tumultuous years of the Civil War, the streets of Chicago offer a woman mostly danger and ruin—unless that woman is Kate Warne. As an undercover Pinkerton detective, Kate is able to infiltrate the seedy side of the city in disguises that her fellow spies just can't manage. She's a seductress, an exotic foreign medium, a rich train passenger—all depending on the day and the robber, thief, or murderer she's been assigned to nab. But is it only her detective work that makes her a daring spy and a clever liar? Or is the real disguise the good girl she always thought she was? As the Civil War marches closer, Kate takes on her most pressing job ever. The nation's future is at risk, and she's no longer sure where her disguise ends and the very real danger begins. With magnificent historical detail, Girl in Disguise brings the adventures of one turn-of-the-century woman to tense, page-turning life. Also by Greer Macallister: The Magician's Lie Woman 99

Whether a housekeeper, secretary, lodger, or pawn-broker in a seedy area of Victorian London, the woman detective's powers of observation and deduction are most effective in uncovering and resolving crimes. These 12 engaging mysteries gives us a glimpse of some of the most memorable characters ever created--such as Miss Marple, Carlotta Carlyle, Sharon McCone and other beloved heroines of the detective novel--by both men and women writers.