The Old Guard in the mid-1990s: Muller, Grafton, and Paretsky

Abstract

Like the next chapter, which will do the same with regard to male crime writing, this first chapter on female crime writers will link the not-so-distant past with the present. While the other chapters will examine truly contemporary crime writing, that is, crime writing of the 1990s, these first two chapters will make a modest attempt to chart the passage from the great renaissance of crime writing of the 1970s and 1980s to where we are now. The attempt will be modest because instead of the larger picture, which we hope will emerge from the discussions of the new developments in crime writing that will follow in the later chapters, we will offer discussions of a small number of writing careers. Needless to say that such a strategy runs the risk of resulting in a one-sided and unrepresentative picture. Much, then, will depend on the writers which will come under scrutiny. For that reason it seems a good bet to go with writers of an undisputed status, writers who by both readers and by their crime writing colleagues are seen as absolutely major figures, and as having made seminal contributions to the genre.