Keli Masten begins with an analysis of Anna Katharine Green’s use of sentimental conventions in her detective stories to elicit powerful emotional responses to grotesque, violent crimes which are solved by the interjection of Post-Enlightenment Reason, often by a female investigator. Green’s melodramatic mystery, The Mayor’s Wife (1907), is framed through the logical eyes of Miss Saunders, a hired companion who hopes to discover the secret cause of her employer’s recent anxieties. As a liminal visitor to private domestic spaces, Miss Saunders learns that her new home is connected to at least three tragic backstories, and is rumored to be haunted as well.
By creating her women’s detective fiction from earlier popular literary traditions like the sentimental novel, Green asserts the value of femininity and elevates her lady detectives above the level of male investigators. Miss Saunders calmly deduces each logical step in her investigation, highlighting both her dissimulation and cleverness in connecting present clues to reveal hidden sins of the past. Green presents Miss Saunders as someone with agency and perhaps a secret history of her own. While other women scream, faint, and behave in incomprehensible ways (as in some sentimental narratives), Miss Saunders remains a stalwart female representation of the unaffected investigator who relies only on fact, not emotion: a different kind of woman for a different time.
Jennifer Schnabel’s paper underscores and extends Leonard Cassuto’s argument that “stereotypically masculine hard-boiled crime fiction and stereotypically feminine, evangelical, and domestic sentimental fiction are two branches off the same middle-class tree” through a cast study that links Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), a British sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, to Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall (1947), an American hard-boiled thriller written by a woman (2).
Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World focuses on the titular character’s defense of her chastity during her introduction to London society. A teenage girl’s chastity and reputation is also a concern at the beginning of The Blank Wall, but so is murder and its consequences, as a mother and daughter try to preserve their family in the face of threats by the underworld and police.
In Evelina, Burney shines a spotlight on the precarious social position of a respectable country girl wholly dependent on the guidance of navigating the pleasures, temptations, and opportunistic rakes of London. A century and a half later, The Blank Wall has a suburban mother and daughter both grappling with predatory criminals from New York City infiltrating their domestic sphere. Sanxay Holding’s infiltration of a predominantly male-dominated subgenre in WWII-era fiction and juxtaposition of a hard-boiled world with what Stefania Ciocia calls a “soft-boiled” female protagonist, tightens Cassuto’s link between sentimental novels and hard-boiled crime fiction.
Erin Smith explains how the lonely, alienated noir aesthetic of Cold War crime fiction calls into question both individual agency and the possibility of community. The noir hero (although often not heroic) is beset by despair and existential emptiness. He (always a “he”) is a loner in a world of ruthless people pursuing personal (but meaningless) profit.
American women crime writers during this period self-consciously wrote against noir, re-writing the genre as a celebration of family, community, and love, making it easy to dismiss as trivial and sentimental. In this paper, I examine Home Sweet Homicide (1944) by Craig Rice (Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig). There are three murders in HSH, but it also features laugh-out-loud dialogue and two weddings. In place of the loner detective are three children who solve the murder of the nasty blackmailer next door while their mother is pounding out her next murder mystery on her typewriter.
These stories are a continuation of the “domestic detective fiction” discussed by Catherine Ross Nickerson and a critique of noir. Leonard Cassuto argues that “Inside every crime story is a sentimental narrative that’s trying to come out.” Many women crime writers of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were out as over-the-top sentimentalists and celebrators of love, family, and community. Far from being saccharine or silly, these crime stories offered emancipatory narratives, ways to imagine alternatives to modernist pessimism and the capitalism that gave rise to it.
Together, these papers expand upon our understanding of how sentimental traditions continue to influence the generic development of American crime stories, including the value of feminine perspectives and domestic knowledge.