Life of Crime: Feminist Crime/Life Writing in Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography and Val McDermid, A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Women Private Eyes

Abstract

This chapter presents a comparative discussion of life writing by three contemporary female crime writers: one American, Sara Paretsky; one British, P. D. James; and one Scottish, Val McDermid. All three women are established crime writers; yet, compared with their crime fiction, their life writing has received less critical and scholarly attention. However, this chapter demonstrates that the life writing of Paretsky, James and McDermid is central to a fuller understanding of their crime fictions, and forms the basis for understanding their aesthetic and creative developments and their feminist engagements with the politics of language and writing. Their books — Writing in an Age of Silence; Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography; and A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Women Private Eyes — are classed as life writing. This genre until recently found itself consigned to enthusiasts’ shelves in bookshops and libraries and was ‘seldom taken seriously as a focus of study before the seventies, was not deemed appropriately “complex” for academic dissertations, criticism, or the literary canon’ (Smith and Watson 1998:4). However, in exploring connections between female crime writers’ life writing and their crime fictions, this chapter demonstrates how James, Paretsky and McDermid’s ‘life writing includes more than just life stories, and it has the potential to cross genre boundaries and disciplines’ (Kadar 1992:152).KeywordsLife StoryWoman WriterFeminist EngagementAutobiographical NarrativeDetective StoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.