I love mysteries- of any flavor – TV, book, audiobook, radio show, play, whatever.

And especially I love a certain kind of mystery – those of the GOLDEN AGE .  Starting with Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and continuing thru Agatha Christie, and PD James (and yes some moderns too). 

And so its interesting to read about those authors; today I came across a review of recently published critical survey

Critical Survey of Mystery & Detective Fiction

Below is an excerpt of one of the articles in the Five Volume set.

Women Detectives: An Overview

The title of P. D. James’s novel An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) describes the often-expressed view of the female detective in both fiction and reality. Literary critics tend to regard detective fiction as a genre supportive of patriarchy, even when that fiction is written by women. They tend to dismiss women detectives in these works as second-rate versions of their male counterparts. During the late 1920’s, the distinguished mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers complained about the depictions of women detectives in fiction when she wrote introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime (1928):

There have . . . been a few women detectives, but on the whole, they have not been very successful. In order to justify their choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to destroy that quiet enjoyment of the logical which we look for in our detective reading.