When you’ve read thousands of mysteries, it’s not easy to pinpoint the handful that you would consider your Greatest of All Time. But there are some that I keep coming back to, time after time, during different phases of my life. They’re the ones that I’ve learned from, wanted to emulate or just enjoyed hanging out with over the years.
As an objective qualifier, I considered only female sleuths that have appeared as the major protagonist in at least three books. This means the author has developed their character over time. The rest is purely subjective – and it turns out my GOAT are all tough, smart, independent women determined to live on their own terms. What about yours?
The list is in order of publication, because the first sleuths on the list paved the way for the rest. Here’s the short list but please read on to learn more about each:
- V.I. Warshawski, a PI in Chicago.
- Kinsey Millhone, a PI in Santa Theresa, California.
- Tess Monoghan, a PI in Baltimore.
- Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist in Norfolk, England.
V.I. Warshawski
Sara Paretsky’s first novel about her tenacious ex-public defender turned PI, Indemnity Only, came out more than 40 years ago, in January 1982.
Set in Chicago, V.I. or “Vic” is in her 30s, lives alone and likes it, and enjoys good whiskey. She’s repeatedly told to back off her investigation – by police, by her client, by her new lover, by some ham-fisted mafia goons – but Vic is not willing to let justice slide, particularly when she’s feeling protective of two young women at the center of the case. She’s brash, sarcastic, and stubborn as she’s chased, abducted, beaten up and shot at throughout the Windy City.
If V.I. sounds like a female Phillip Marlow or Sam Spade, you’ve got it right. Paretsky, in interviews and on her website, said she created V.I. to change the narrative about women in detective fiction, who were largely portrayed as vamps or victims. Initially, she followed the conventions of those American noir novels she loved. Consider the opening scene of Indemnity Only, with its atmospheric language, as V.I. meets a client late one night:
“The night air was thick and damp. As I drove south along Lake Michigan, I could smell rotting alewives like a faint perfume on the heavy air … On shore traffic was heavy, the city moving restlessly, trying to breathe. It was July in Chicago.”
There are some uses of “girl” and “broad” in the book, which as Paretsky points out in her introduction to the 30th anniversary edition, is thankfully outdated. But she also notes that, “The year I published Indemnity Only, and with it put the first hard-boiled woman PI out on the mean streets, was also the first year women could be members of the regular police in Chicago, instead of matrons confined to juvenile work and the woman’s jail.”
Kinsey Millhone
Sue Grafton’s A is for Alibi featuring Kinsey Millhone was published just four months after Indemnity Only.
Like V.I., Kinsey is a loner in her 30s who refuses to give up on her cases and has a soft spot for underdogs. She’s a former cop in the fictional town of Santa Theresa, California, whose closest friend is the elderly neighbor who owns her tiny garage apartment. Like V.I., she’s been married before but found it didn’t suit and she relishes her single life. She drives a dented VW bug, owns a single indestructible black dress and her cooking repertoire is limited to cheese-and-pickle sandwiches eaten standing up at the sink.
Grafton and Paretsky are credited with launching a new kind of female private detective and there are certainly similarities between Kinsey and V.I., which the authors discuss in this interview. But there are key differences in addition to setting: V.I. is passionate about social and political issues, as is her creator, and her focus tends to be on white-collar crime and corruption. With Kinsey, Grafton focused more on how PI work would affect an investigator whose cases tend to be more domestic in nature. Note her opening lines in A is for Alibi:
“My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I’m thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.”
Readers embraced both Kinsey and V.I. Grafton wrote 25 books in her alphabet series over 35 years, ending in 2017 with Y is for Yesterday. Grafton died of cancer before she completed the final book, which she planned to title Z is for Zero. Paretsky is slated to release the latest in V.I.’s adventures in April 2024 with Pay Dirt. It will be Paretsky’s 22nd book starring V.I. over 42 years.
Tess Monoghan
When we first meet Tess, she’s been laid off from her job as a newspaper reporter and is living above her aunt’s bookstore in Baltimore while she tries to figure out what’s next.
The only sure things in her life are her 11-year-old Toyota and her love of rowing. When a friend asks her to follow his fiancée at the thrilling rate of $30 per hour, Tess reluctantly agrees – and stumbles into a career as a private investigator. Turns out, her investigative reporting skills are a good fit and her fitness regime while unemployed have her in shape to confront the bad guys.
Laura Lippman released Baltimore Blues, her first Tess Monoghan book, in 1997 while Lippman was still working at a newspaper reporter. Lippman’s background as a journalist of 20 years shines through in her books about Tess, who uses her reporting skills and newspaper contacts throughout the series of a dozen books – so far. In Lippman’s last book featuring Tess, Hush, Hush, published in 2015, the accidental PI is the mother of a young girl with a supportive partner, a home they share and her own detective agency. Tess, like Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski before her, stubbornly refuses to give up a case until she’s figured out whodunnit.
“I feel like there’s a fuck-it feminist spirit to pretty much everything I do,” Lippman told The Guardian in July 2023.
And Lippman has done a lot: Her stand-alone suspense thrillers now outnumber the Tess Monoghan series. Still, she’s not done with Tess: “She’s gonna come back,” Lippman said. “I need to figure out how to write her a proper ending.”
Ruth Galloway
Ruth Galloway is the only sleuth on the list who’s not a PI. Instead, she’s a forensic archeologist and university professor who lives with her two cats in a remote cottage near Norfolk, England. She’s a loner who wears black to conceal what she considers her larger-than-ideal weight and despises the schmoozing her boss advises to get ahead.
In Crossing Places, Elly Griffith’s first novel in the series, Ruth is asked by police to consult on the discovery of a child’s bones on a desolate beach near her cottage.
Griffiths published Crossing Places in 2009 and wrote 15 books in the Ruth Galloway series, ending with The Last Remains in 2023. The author says it’s the last in the series for the foreseeable future. Not many writers stop a popular series, but Griffiths’ books have taken off; she also writes another mystery series, the Magic Men, and has released several bestselling standalone novels.
The popularity of the Ruth Galloway series is due in part to the archaeological details Griffiths wraps around her novels. In fact, Griffiths – whose real name is Domenica de Rosa – is married to an archaeologist. Each book features a different type of prehistoric discovery as well as a steady cast of friends, including Ruth’s sometime-lover Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, her daughter Kate and a Druid friend named Cathbad.
Honorable mention goes to Cordelia Gray, the inexperienced private investigator sleuth at the heart of P.D. James’ 1972 mystery, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. James, who also created Scotland Yard’s Adam Dalgliesh, wrote only two books starring Gray.
FemaleSleuths.com 
Leave a comment