Polly, Nancy, and Torchy Crack the Case: Those Relentless Women Reporters

Abstract

WORLDLIT.ORG 9 photo : laura rodríguez / argentina / rnw . org / flickr Features “We are neither museum pieces nor part of a distant and harmless folklore. We are a living people, we exist. We are still alive.” – from the inaugural address of Petü Mogeleiñ (Mapuche Community Radio), El Maitén Chubut, Argentina, March 2008 To read an essay and poem by Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao, turn to page 59. 10 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2018 O ne of the most implausible failures of realism that mystery readers generally accept is one posed by the series detectives, particularly the amateur sleuths in traditional mysteries. In novel one, Lord Fotheringale goes on holiday. A guest is murdered in the hotel, and Fotheringale unmasks the killer. In two, Fotheringale takes the train to London. An acquaintance is murdered in the next compartment . In three, he attends a dinner at stately Popham Grange, and—wouldn’t you know!—the heir of the estate is found dead in his locked bedroom. In story after story, the mere presence of Lord Fotheringale brings on murder like ragweed brings the sniffles. The amateur detective is an angel of death, and, not only that, the police even more implausibly put up with his or her meddling. The characters may grumble a bit to put a patch on it, but an amateur meddling in their work? No police force or prosecutor’s office of merit would in reality tolerate it. Nonetheless, the Sherlock Holmes template set the pattern, even to the point of justifying the illogical meddling by making the detective an adviser to the police. Holmes is called the world’s first “consulting detective.” Cases rap on his door. S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance is a friend of the district attorney, and James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers is a friend of a detective inspector. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote annoy the police but still nudge them to the crime’s solution. As the traditional detective evolves into the private eye from the late 1920s on, the gumshoe exceeds almost every legal limit on private investigation, even though in the real world, murder is strictly police business and meddling has serious legal consequences. At least the fictional premise justifies their role. In the late 1940s, the authenticity of the police procedural began to assert itself more powerfully, so presently most murder stories are set in the world of police work. Despite many errors about police procedure, they avoid the credibility issue—at least for the average reader. The legal thriller also regularly offers prosecutors and defense attorneys as investigators, which is totally credible, except to actual lawyers. Even Perry Mason pays Paul Drake to do the legwork. Almost from the beginnings of the modern mystery , fictional reporters have been used to provide a character whose occupation can put him or her in proximity to crime, offering a motivation and compulsion to dig up the hidden facts and the pretense to knock on doors and butt into other people’s business. In a sense, Watson and the unnamed narrator of Poe’s mystery stories function like reporters with exclusive access to Holmes and Dupin. Gaston Leroux, most famous for The Phantom of the Opera, was one of the French pioneers of the mystery and exploited his experience as a correspondent. Among other stories, he covered the 1905 Russian Revolution. When he turned to fiction, he created the eighteen-year-old reporter Joseph Rouletabille to solve Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; The Mystery of the Yellow Room) and continued with Rouletabille stories until 1922. The device of using women reporters as detectives appeared early in the rise of the mystery as well. Journalism was relatively open to women, compared to most other professions in the late nineteenth century. The first municipal female detective in New York City (and possibly the world) wasn’t hired until 1912, but reporters, particularly the legendary Nellie Bly, became the inspiration for dozens of fictional female sleuths. The fantasy of an exciting, independent life must have been almost breathtaking to many women in the decades leading up to the Roaring Twenties. Nellie Bly Polly, Nancy, and...