Some 'Female Detectives'

In quotes at the top there because the preface or Editor's Note or whatever it is of Mr Bazalgette's Agent by Leonard Merrick provides a very short history and speculation about who got the first Female/Lady/Woman Detective into print, and into a full length book. It seems it depends how you define detective and anyway Leonard Merrick may have been just pipped to the post by an American.

Miriam Lea, our heroine, is not a detective when the book begins. She is twenty eight, and has been a governess and an actress. She is very funny (the book is in the form of a diary) about how she found she was unsuitable for these posts, and manages to be quite stoic about the fact that she has failed to find anything else and soon won't even be able to live in her currently uncongenial surroundings. Then, with much soul searching, since the occupation is even less respectable than acting, she applies for a job at a detective agency. And gets it!

Everything then becomes extraordinarily easy. The man she is pursuing is likely staying in the best hotels, so must she as well, and with the right sort of clothes to carry conviction. Expenses are provided for transport to search in the cities of Europe, a maid/assistant sent along (partly to keep an eye on her, I suspect) and good wages beside. 

The job is very simple -get close to this man and find one of the bonds he stole so they can prove he's the thief.

It's not a book to take too seriously. I had to suspend my disbelief about her keeping a diary while living in the same hotel as the man she's pursuing, and about the resources (money and time) that her employers allow her, and ended up with the conviction that Miss Miriam Lea is absolutely not detective material (I think she'd agree with me there) but keeping company with her a while was rather fun. 

The other book I've recently read is The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson. Stella Darnell is also not a detective when the book begins, but a successful young(ish) woman who owns a cleaning company. 

Then her father, Terry, who was an equally successful police officer but who she's drifted apart a bit from, dies of a heart attack while pursuing a cold case that happened not far from where he lived in Hammersmith. 

It's not easy to see where Stella's coming from at first. She tells herself she doesn't care and remembers the bad times (all the times her dad let her down because the job came first, the negative things her mother said about him when they split up), but she starts to pick up the case her Dad left, and the reader (this reader anyway) eventually started wondering if they were really not at all close or if that's what she told herself. If the anger is because he died rather than what he was like in life. 

There is a detached quality to Stella, an 'I don't want to be involved', even while pursuing the case. She isn't totally upfront with the police, splits up with her ex by text and then finds it backfires. I found myself wondering again if it was grief or she was naturally a bit of a berk on occasion. 

This is the first book in the series and although it jumps around more than I'd like - we also see the killer, and the son of the first victim, and jump back into Terry's earlier thoughts a few times - and is quite long, I found the characters interesting enough I didn't mind seeing them amble about cleaning stuff and sorting through papers and dealing with their won't-take-a-hint ex's. It made me want to read the next one, which is always good.