Contemporary Women’s Historical Crime Fiction

Abstract

In Reading in Bed, her inaugural lecture as Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, Hermione Lee notes that “the history of reading contains within it a conflict which recurs over and over again, in different formulations, between what one might call vertical and horizontal reading: the first regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical, and productive, the second unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous, and anarchic. The contrast between public and private, licensed and unlicensed, social and solitary reading has never been straightforward” (3). She invokes the image of Virginia Woolf, whom she describes as “one of the great advocates of disreputable reading, junk reading, serendipitous reading, dream-reading, reading while looking out of the window, reading while running a high fever” (19). Lee’s images suggest one explanation for the power of the historical crime writers under consideration here: their crime novels belong to the worlds of both horizontal and vertical reading. With the pleasures of the crime novel working in concert with the knowledge base of the authors’ historical research, a great deal is achieved. A scholarly study of how this subgenre achieves its success draws well-deserved attention to the significant achievements of feminist historical crime writers since 1990.