Books
Top 7 Women In Crime Fiction Who Deserved Their Own Novel
Some of crime fiction’s most fascinating women never get to tell their own stories. They are the suspects who outwit the detective, the criminals whose motives remain obscured, the victims whose lives are reconstructed by strangers and the outsiders who see what everyone else misses. These seven characters come from celebrated crime fiction by male authors. Their original stories may be complete, but each leaves behind a compelling question: what would the story have looked like if she had been at its centre?
Wilkie Collins gives Rosanna Spearman one of the most haunting supporting roles in The Moonstone. A former thief working as a servant at a Yorkshire country house, she falls in love with Franklin Blake and becomes entangled in the mystery surrounding the stolen diamond. Her own history, shame and desperate loyalty are gradually revealed through other people’s accounts, while the full emotional weight of her story remains largely hers alone. A novel from Rosanna’s perspective could turn a celebrated detective mystery into a devastating story about class, secrecy, obsession and unrequited love.
Arthur Conan Doyle gave Irene Adler just one appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon, but she achieved something few characters manage: she outsmarted Holmes himself. In A Scandal in Bohemia, she recognises the detective’s disguise, anticipates his plan and escapes with the evidence that could have ruined her. She is intelligent, resourceful and entirely capable of running her own affairs, yet we learn remarkably little about the woman behind the victory. A full-length story following Adler through the criminal and political worlds of Victorian Europe would be an irresistible proposition.
In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Ida Arnold is an unlikely detective: a music-hall entertainer with a taste for life, a strong sense of justice and an almost supernatural confidence in her own instincts. When she becomes convinced that a young man has been murdered, she pursues the truth with an energy that the police struggle to match. Her cheerful defiance of the criminal underworld makes her a striking contrast to the novel’s darker characters. Ida could easily carry a crime novel of her own, bringing a very different kind of intelligence to the genre: intuitive, persistent, sociable and impossible to intimidate.
James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is narrated by Walter Huff, the insurance salesman who helps Phyllis Nirdlinger murder her husband for the payout. We see her through the eyes of a man who is attracted to her, complicit with her and increasingly terrified of her. Yet Phyllis has a past that suggests the plot we are reading may be only one episode in a much longer history of manipulation and violence. A version told from her perspective could explore the making of a calculating criminal, rather than leaving her motives trapped inside the testimony of the man who helped her.
Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely begins with the search for a missing woman, but Velma Valento turns out to be far more than a disappearance to solve. Once a nightclub performer, she has reinvented herself as the wealthy Mrs Grayle and built a new identity that she will do almost anything to protect. Her transformation, the people she leaves behind and the crimes committed in her name suggest a whole life of reinvention that Philip Marlowe only glimpses. Velma’s story could be a superb noir novel about ambition, survival and the dangerous cost of becoming someone else.
In Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Vesper Lynd is introduced as the enigmatic British Treasury representative assigned to work alongside James Bond. She is intelligent, guarded and difficult to read, with loyalties that prove more complicated than Bond first imagines. Her fate becomes one of the defining events in his life, but her own story is largely sacrificed to his. A novel following Vesper before and during her assignment would offer a different perspective on espionage: the pressure of living a double life, the compromises of loyalty and the personal cost of operating in a world where trust is a weapon.
Carmen Sternwood is the dark secret at the heart of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. The wealthy young woman appears at first to be spoiled, reckless and rather helpless, but Marlowe eventually discovers that she is responsible for a murder that has haunted the Sternwood family. Her behaviour is filtered through the detective’s judgement, and the novel offers little understanding of the experiences, illness and neglect that lie behind it. A story told from Carmen’s perspective could become a disturbing psychological crime novel about privilege, vulnerability, violence and the people who decide that a difficult woman is best kept out of sight.
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