What I will address in this article is a particular, one might even say peculiar, aspect of recent British feminist detective fiction. I want to explore some issues which arise from the narrative and symbolic importance of the female detective's male sexual partner and their domestic arrangements in novels by Val McDermid, Sarah Dunant, Michelle Spring and Gillian Slovo.

I am aware that feminist detective fiction is a difficult object for textual critics. Critical writing about feminist detective fiction so often amounts to a catalogue of disappointments, where the critic expresses frustration and anger at the failure of a range of texts to express or develop a coherent and effective version of feminist subjectivity.[1] Feminist detective fiction seems to disappoint its critics in a number of ways: by relying on liberal versions of individual agency; by portraying female detectives as amateur, as taking on cases only for family and friends rather than seeing themselves fully as players in the public world of crime; by failing to sustain the (fantasy of) autonomy for its female protagonists. Finally the genre seems to risk disappointing because its need for formal resolution creates a reactionary tendency to reinforce the status quo.

To understand the force of these criticisms, and to avoid simply restaging them, it is important to consider the historical emergence of feminist detective fiction in Britain in the eighties, and its relation to the feminist movement. The texts within this sub-genre share the following characteristics: they have a female detective; they 'challenge the gender norms of detective fiction'; [2] they engage broadly with aspects of women's social position; they investigate the institutional and personal bases of oppression; and they also market themselves in relation to the sub-genre, either under imprints such as Virago or The Women's Press, or through publishing blurb which stresses terms such as 'fearless', 'feisty' or 'unconventional'.

Suggestions concerning the emergence of the sub-genre tend to connect it rather generally to political and cultural manifestations of the women's movement, including the Equal Pay Act or the Sex Discrimination Acts[3], and in this sense to see feminist detective fiction as reflective of the emergence of cultural critiques of gender relations and of the modification of gender relations at work and in the home. What such accounts fail to address, however, is why detective fiction might be a particularly appropriate cultural form for the exploration of such transformations.

The emergence of detective fiction as a genre in the nineteenth century has been widely theorized. Walter Benjamin reads the genre in relation to the experience of the urban[4]. He sees detection as an expression of the fear of anonymity in the urban crowd. In the minute attention to detail, the forging of connections, the interpretation of individual dress, habits, or speech, Benjamin argues that the detective story is both reflecting and alleviating social anxieties. This point is developed by Carlo Ginsburg, when he explores the relation between the methodology of a detective such as Holmes and late-nineteenth-century developments in techniques of medical inquiry or in forms of social theory[5]. In each field he sees a tendency to privilege the minute detail, the unconscious or the ephemeral as revealing greater truths than can be understood by totalizing systems of knowledge. Gillian Beer stresses the anxiety about origins which dominated scientific and cultural discourses of the nineteenth century, and argues that detective narrative emerged as a cultural response to the unsettling and fearful experience of living with a vastly extended sense of historical and evolutionary time[6]. In Beer's account, the crucial aspect of detective fiction lies in its capacity to posit an origin for the action of its story, an event which grounds its narrative and which can be resolved. As one of Wilkie Collins's detectives says, the problem is to be 'sure of beginning far enough back':[7] to identify the salient aspects of a narrative which has a definite shape, and a series of comprehensible causal connections.

All of these theorizations see detective fiction as a response to, or as an expression of, the social relations of modernity. If we see the women's movement as part of the history of modernity, with the struggle for women's suffrage emerging at the same historical period as the genre of detective fiction, we might expect to find something in these theoretical models to illuminate more precisely the emergence of feminist detective fiction as a sub-genre.

The fear of anonymity has particular resonances with the social and cultural roles and experiences of women, who for so long lost their property as well as their names on marriage and who always had a more difficult relation to the forms of public identity available on the streets of the modern city. One response to this loss of individual selfhood has been the construction of collective forms of identity, signalled through choice of dress, or of political badge: this was as true of the suffrage movement as it was of feminism in the seventies or eighties. Feminist detective fiction dwells crucially on habits of dress, on the details of the detective's house, her musical taste, her leisure pursuits. These all enable the reader to construct a sense of shared identity through style. The threat of anonymity is lessened by the staging of the marks of a collective sense of urban style.

Beer's argument can also illuminate aspects of feminist detective fiction. Her interest was in the sense of futility and fear generated by the experience of the vastness of an evolutionary time-scale in the nineteenth century, but eighties feminists too were grappling with the vastness of historical categories, particularly with the longevity and the pervasiveness of the category of 'patriarchy'. The containable, and resolvable, struggles staged in detective fiction thus had a powerful appeal.

To capture the intensity and impossibility of readers' investments in feminist detective fiction, however, it is necessary to turn to a theorization that addresses the role of detective fiction within postmodern culture. Fredric Jameson's analysis of Chandler's work evokes many terms that will be central to his subsequent theorization of the culture of postmodernity, including fragmentation, socially distinct urban spaces, and pastiche. The term which is most revealing in relation to feminist detective fiction, however, is nostalgia. Jameson argues that enthusiasm for Chandler 'is generally characterized by an attachment to a moment of the past wholly different from our own which offers a more complete kind of relief from the present'[8] In her study of feminist detective fiction, Sally Munt notes that feminist detective fiction emerges in a moment of crisis for the Left and for the organized women's movement, observing that 'certainly feminists of the 1980s spent more time reading than marching.'[9] This gap between the staging and resolution of problems in the fiction and the experience of political fragmentation and powerlessness may go some way to explain both the fascinations of the sub-genre and the disappointment that these novels seem always to provoke. Feminist detective fiction is perhaps always a poor substitute, addressing a community already nostalgic about the possibilities of effective collective identities.

The readers of feminist detective fiction, including myself, bring impossibly contradictory fantasies to the reading of these texts: they seek a narrative of effective autonomy and a sense of community, but also are committed to replaying the elegiac recognition of the failures of feminist collectivities. In addressing my own disappointments about the representation of the detectives' sexual partners in a number of novels, I am not suggesting that these novels could or should have done things differently, but rather trying to understand the reasons for a particular imaginative redundancy concerning issues of the domestic.

The detective and the domestic have long been in tension. Sherlock Holmes's domestic arrangements are both unusual and impersonal, while Dupin's preferences are for isolation and darkness and he chooses to live in a house which is 'long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire.'[10] Raymond Chandler was clear about the antithesis between detection and the domestic, insisting that 'a really good detective never gets married' while Dorothy L. Sayers suggested that 'the less love in a detective story the better.'[11] Chandler's objection is not the same as Sayers's: he sees marriage as disturbing the fantasy of the detective's autonomy and self-reliance, while Sayers fears that love interest might move a story from the realm of detective fiction into the merely novelistic. Nonetheless, marriage and sustained emotional and sexual relations are both seen as barriers to the construction of a true detective narrative. One might expect the writers of feminist detective fiction to heed such warnings, both because it is notoriously difficult to create narratives of romance or of the erotic which do not simply repeat existing power imbalances, and because the domestic has been a space of confinement and containment for women socially, economically and imaginatively. We might therefore conclude that a form of fiction which explores female agency in the realm of the public might be likely to avoid the domestic and its entanglements.

In fact, the novels I will explore insist on constructing a domestic space and identity for their female detectives, though they rather carefully avoid marriage. The texts themselves acknowledge this departure from the classic detective tradition. Sarah Dunant has her heroine, Hannah Wolfe, remark:

At the foot of the bed the TV was droning on quietly, yet another detective drama, the lone hero putting the world to rights while his own internal landscape fell apart. I knew how he felt.[12]

Since the remark is made while Hannah is being comforted by her lover, the identification with the lone detective is at best strained. Dunant, McDermid, Slovo, and Spring do not want to abandon 'the internal landscape', and they do not want to catalogue a series of sexual conquests. Equally, they cannot risk the enclosure of the nuclear family. Their narrative solutions are strikingly similar, as the following quotations suggest:

Richard was my lover next door, a funny, gentle divorce with a five-year-old son in London.[13]

This was Nick's Saturday for not having Josh and we had agreed to spend the evening together.[14]

Sonny and I have always aimed for separate but parallel lives. A shared life during the week, when Dominic and Daniel are at their mother's. And lots of separate time around weekends and vacations, when Sonny fulfils his fatherly commitments and I hang out with my friends.[15]

Similarly, Gillian Slovo's heroine Kate Baeier has a lover called Sam, whose son Matthew is 'at his mother's in the week and Sam's at the weekend.'[16]

These male lovers share some crucial characteristics: they are divorced; not particularly successful in their careers nor particularly ambitious; and they are fathers of sons. They also share charm, infantilism and winning smiles:

Richard Barclay, rock journalist and overgrown schoolboy. ...when he saw me his face lit up in my favourite cute smile.[17]

He's a nice guy with a well-developed sense of humour.[18]

The third, tall and lean with a smile that would melt your heart - did still after all these years melt mine - was Sonny.[19]

The repetition of these characteristics suggests that they do not simply emerge from particular plot demands, but that they address something quite fundamental about the constraints of feminist detective fiction as a genre. The figure of the divorced, chlidlike, dependable father of boys is overdetermined in these narratives. Firstly, these men allow the detective to be sexualised without threat. As divorced men they are sexually experienced, but also have demonstrated their capacity to establish committed and long-term relationships, even if these ultimately failed. In feminist theory and fiction, female sexuality is a crucial marker of power and of agency and the detective thus must be sexually knowledgeable and active. Sexual passion, however, risks disturbing the judgment and the control of the detective. Chandler, of course, ran this risk, but had his detective walk away from sexual desires and fantasies at the end of his novels. For Slovo, McDermid, Spring and Dunant, such a resolution is not possible, since they want to challenge the power and exploitation inherent in the fetishistic figure of the femme fatale. The uneasy solution lies in containing sexual passion within the bounds of the habitual and the humorous: less erotic than cuddly.

Secondly, these male figures offer no challenge to the narrative centrality of the detective: they are insufficiently interesting to do so. All the novelists thus heed Sayers's warning rather more rigorously than she did herself. It has been frequently observed that Sayers's female detective, Harriet Vane, is disabled by her passions, and always resolves her cases with the authority and experience of Lord Peter Wimsey. Contemporary novelists do not want to risk such swamping of the female detective.

Thirdly, all of these novels evade the representation of the mother-daughter relationship and only hint in the most ironic terms at a maternal relationship between the detectives and their lovers' sons. The oedipal relationship is thus played out to the side of the female detective, who never has to confront the impossible social and cultural expectations of the mother as bearer of femininity.

Finally, these male characters and their episodic relations to their lovers allow the writers to displace conflicts in time, over power, autonomy and agency, into conflicts over space. The different flats and houses in these novels contain different forms of subjectivity, and separate the public and the private whose contradictions can thus be evaded. This separation is most clearly marked in McDermid's novels, where Kate Brannigan and her lover live in separate houses which are joined by a shared conservatory. The device certainly leaves the detective with more time and energy for detection, but also feels like an evasion of many of the issues concerning power and control to which these novel so insistently allude.

The representation of the male lovers in these novels seems, finally, remarkably safe for a genre that explores fear, conflict and danger, and a certain dissatisfaction with these figures is clear in the most recent works by the novelists I have been discussing. Thus, for example, having featured his arrest in Crackdown (1995), in Blue Genes (1996), McDermid stages the death of Richard Barclay. The death is fake, a plot device to enable Kate Brannigan to investigate fraud aimed at the newly bereaved, but the murderous intentions might nonetheless be real. Gillian Slovo sees these intentions through and kills off Kate Baeier's lover, Sam. In Catnap (1994), Kate has to come to terms with this death, which turns out to have been partly her fault, and also has to establish a sustainable relationship with Sam's son. In neither is she entirely successful, and she moves through the novel in a driven craze of anger, revenge and denial. But these developments do suggest that as fictional women detectives become increasingly assured in their negotiation of the public world of crime, they can be represented as less predictable, less contained, and pehaps as more fun in their construction of the domestic.

1 For examples of this 'disappointment' see Glenwood Irons (ed.), Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

2 Maggie Humm, 'Feminist Detective Fiction', in Clive Bloom (ed.), Twentieth-Century Suspense (London: Macmillan, 1990), 237-254 (p. 237).

3 See, for example, Nicola Nixon's article in Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction, 29-45.

4 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), pp. 43-48.

5 Carlo Ginzburg, 'Morelli, Freud And Sherlock Holmes: Clues And Scientific Method,' History Workshop No. 9 (1980), 5-36.

6 Gillian Beer,' Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative', in Arguing with the Past (London: Routledge, 1989), 12-33.

7 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 9.

8 Fredric Jameson, 'On Raymond Chandler', in Glen W. Most and William W. Stowe (eds.), The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 122-148 (p. 135).

9 Sally R. Munt, Murder By the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 27

10 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 141-168 (p. 144).

11 Raymond Chandler, 'Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel', in D. Gardiner and K. Sorley Walker (eds.), Raymond Chandler Speaking (london, 1962), p. 70. and Dorothy L. Sayers in Howard Haycroft (ed.), The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Bilboo and Tanner, 1975), p. 104.

12 Sarah Dunant, Fatlands (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 67.

13 Val McDermid, Dead Beat (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), p. 15

14 Fatlands, p. 40.

15 Michelle Spring, Running for Shelter (London: Orion, 1995), p. 6.

16 Gillian Slovo, Death By Analysis (London: The Women's Press, 1986), p. 48.

17 Dead Beat, pp. 11 and 71.

18 Fatlands p. 42.

19 Running for Shelter, p. 205.