The First Fictional Female Detective

Who was the First Fictional Female Detective in Literature?  Speed City Sisters in Crime Member Crystal Rhodes Investigated. Here's what she found.

As a member of the Indiana Chapter of Sisters of Crime and a history buff, I became curious as to who was the first female detective in literary fiction and who invented the character.   So, I went online to do some research. 

According to the website Crime Fiction Lover (www.crimefictionlover.com) the- character’s name was Mrs. Gladden, featured in a series of serials called The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester.  Mrs. Gladden was an undercover police agent who employed “subterfuge and logical deduction” to solve cases.  Set in London, England the serials were published in 1864.  The work was definitely fiction since women weren’t recruited to London’s Metropolitan Police until 1923.

The website states that a few months later a second English writer, William Stephens Hayward, wrote another series of serial adventures featuring a woman protagonists named Mrs. Paschal.  In Revelations of a Lady Detective, Mrs. Paschal was a cigarette smoking, gun toting sleuth who takes her crinoline petticoat off to go down a sewer.  That was racy stuff in 1864.

It wasn’t until 1888 that the first British novel featuring a female protagonist was published.  Described as a poorly written work of fiction, the name of the book was Mr. Bazalgette’s Agent, by Leonard Merrick.

It was a female author, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, who wrote the first full length detective novel in America. Published in the 1860s, ironically, her protagonist was a young attorney named Richard Redfield, a man.  It's with Redfield's help that a legendary detective from New York City--another man--solves a crime.  Go figure.

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C.V. Rhodes is a member of the Speed City Sisters in Crime chapter and co-author, with L. Barnett Evans, of the Grandmothers, Incorporated cozy mystery series.  Visit their website at www.grandmothersinc.com