cambridge-crime-fiction

maureen t. reddy
her hapless partner committed suicide and bequeathed her the failing detective
agency and a gun. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman combines a mystery
plot with the structure of (female) bildungsroman, asthe novel interweaves
the story of Cordelia’s development into an adult professional detective with
the investigation she is hired to handle. Like the male hardboiled detectives,
Cordelia is solitary and alienated from her surroundings; also like them, she
repeatedly encounters resistance to her investigation and challenges to her
authority. Unlike them, however, these conditions result directly from her
gender, a fact that the novel’s title underscores. Various characters question
Cordelia’s right to work as a detective, insisting that such work belongs to
men; Cordelia herself is plagued by doubts. By the end of the novel, however,
a more mature and confident Cordelia than the one we meet as the novel
opens asserts her right to investigate and indeed to choose whatever work
she wishes, relying in part on fantasies of her long-dead mother’s approval.
This novel has all the hallmarks of a first book in a planned series, but in
the event James did not return to Cordelia Gray for ten years, publishing the
second book in the series, The Skull Beneath the Skin,in1982. The Cordelia
we find in Skull differs radically from what readers might expect based on
the final chapters of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Inthe second book,
Cordelia makes silly mistakes, gets herself (and others) into dangerous situations
due to her foolish miscalculations, and even fails to solve the novel’s
central mystery. By the end of this book, Cordelia retreats into finding lost
pets, a speciality more suited than solving murders to conventional ideas
about appropriate work for young women. James herself, apparently happily,
turned away from Cordelia and back to her main series character, police
detective Adam Dalgliesh. Feminist critics have offered a variety of explanations
for this disappointing end to a promising new series, with Nicola
Nixon’s argument that Cordelia’s diminution parallels James’s own retreat
from feminism most persuasive. 6
The brief, disappointing history of the Cordelia Gray series may explain
why James is so seldom acknowledged as the creator of the first modern female
private eye, a distinction usually given to Marcia Muller, whose Sharon
McCone series begins with Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977). James published
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman when feminist ideas were just beginning to
gain popular attention and wide currency through such vehicles as Ms magazine.
By the time Muller’s first book came out, liberal feminist ideas had
seeped into public consciousness, with the dominant ideology adjusting everso-slightly
to accommodate some of those views. For example, women had
begun to enter the workplace in positions previously held exclusively by men
and there was general, if grudging, agreement that equal work deserved equal
pay (not that there was any agreement about what constituted equal work or
196