What could be better for Agatha Christie whodunit fans than an old-fashioned, Scottish country house murder on New Year’s Eve? Barrister and sometimes sleuth Rex Graves and his bride-to-be Helen d’Arcy are hosting a holiday party for their friends at his lodge in the Scottish Highlands. Due to severe winter weather conditions, only 13 guests are able to make it. Before the party ends, the lights flicker and die, and so do two of the guests...murdered by an unusual poison.

Before the bumbling Chief Inspector Dalgerry of the Scottish police is able to make it through the snow, and before the lights come back on, Rex conducts his own investigation to discover how the murders were committed and who had the best opportunity and motive. His questioning of each guest in the candlelit semi-darkness ends up providing the vital clues to the eventual discovery of the murderer; even though, after the electricity is restored, the police and Rex are still in the dark as to the identity of the culprit. It is not until tragedy strikes again that Rex is finally able to figure out the who and the how and the why, and pass that information on to Inspector Dalgerry.

This is the seventh book in the Rex Graves series that began with Christmas Is Murder (2008) and it’s well worth the time of discerning devotees of traditional British mysteries.

Unraveled Visions is a mystical mystery in which author Nina Milton has conjured up a whodunit with supernatural undertones. Sabbie Dare is an English shamanic counselor who uses New Age broadening-of-consciousness techniques to help her clients. She resides in the Somerset town of Bridgewater, which is shaken when the drowned body of an unknown woman is discovered and the detective on the case is subsequently shot to death at the town’s local festival.

On the night of the shooting, a Romany woman read Sabbie’s palm, and foretold danger. When the palmist goes missing, her sister enlists Sabbie’s assistance in lieu of going to the authorities. The Romany are immigrants who fear and distrust the police. Sabbie employs rituals to find symbolic clues—but also turns to more down-to-earth sleuthing by taking an undercover job at the shady Bulgarian restaurant where the palm reader and her sister worked. Employee abuse is rampant at the eatery and the owners are engaged in illegal activities that present dangerous ramifications for Sabbie.

Running parallel to this plot is a thread concerning a former client of Sabbie’s who has fallen into the clutches of a shady minister. As with her involvement in the gypsy sisters’s troubles, injustice motivates Sabbie to take action.

It’s impossible to refrain from rooting for such a plucky protagonist. Sabbie is the product of a troubled interracial couple and she grew up in foster care. Courage runs through her veins and an impassioned nature rules her heart—something Detective Sergeant Rey Buckley knows from experience with the attractive young shaman whom he finds as intractable as she is curious.

Nina Milton skillfully integrates the shamanistic elements into her mystery making this sequel to last year’s In the Moors an absorbing tale. The return of Sabbie Dare is awaited with interest.

In crime pulps of the ’30s and ’40s there were also plenty of dicks who were actually janes, defiantly holding their own.

Cleve F. Adams’ foul-tempered Violet McDade is generally considered the first hardboiled woman detective. This illustration originally accompanied “Flowers for Violet” in Clues Detective Stories, May 1936.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman… especially when they’re also private detectives.

Oh, those poor gals. They seem to get it in the neck from both sides these days, misrepresented on the one hand by ivory tower feminists who overpraise characters like Kinsey Millhone, V.I. Warshawski, or Sharon McCone—for all the wrong reasons. They seem to believe these female gumshoes sprang out of nowhere, wholly formed, a mere 20 or so years ago, a revolutionary shot fired across the bow of some male chauvinist conspiracy.

On the other hand the same characters are sneered at and scorned by the knuckle-dragging traditionalists, with their trench-coat-and-fedora fetishes, who claim these detectives are actually about as hardboiled as afternoon tea, and that true hardboiled women never did and never will exist. I mean, come off it guys. What sort of slippery sliding scale of boiledness allows Lew “I just want to understand you” Archer to be classified as hardboiled, while V.I. “Take no prisoners” Warshawski is considered “softboiled”?

I’m not sure which group is more misguided or more in need of deflation, but they should both do a little more actual reading in the genre, and a little less huffing and puffing.

Truth is, the female eye goes back a hell of a lot further than Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes—a fact that Muller herself has eagerly pointed out several times over the years.

The standard rhetoric goes that from the start of the P.I. genre, women were relegated solely to background characters or clumsy stereotypes—long-suffering secretaries (available in either plain and efficient or stacked and stupid), virginal victims, or drop-dead gorgeous femmes fatales (as though even a hint of sexuality, combined with just a drop of intelligence, was a sure sign that murder lurked in their hearts). This tunnel vision serves both camps nicely, for different reasons, but it conveniently sidesteps a few facts. Such as that the female characters created by Chandler, Hammett, and the better male writers of the genre were often just as well-developed, and their motives every bit as varied, as their male characters—they just weren’t always nice.

And, more importantly, it ignores the fact that in crime pulps of the ‘30s and ‘40s, although male detectives did indeed rule the roost, there were also plenty of dicks who were actually janes, defiantly holding their own. Each month, readers eagerly plopped down their dough to read the pulp escapades of these strong, tough, and, yes, even occasionally hardboiled janes.

One of the first, way back in 1933, was T.T. Flynn’s Trixie Meehan. Make no mistake—big, rugged Mike Harris of the Blaine Agency was supposedly the lead here, but his “pert sidekick,” a fellow op, was what made these occasionally screwball stories, which appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly, so special.

In the meantime, Grace Culver, created by Roswell Brown, was appearing regularly in The Shadow. Grace worked for the Noonan Detective Agency as a secretary and sometime-op, and while she wasn’t exactly hardboiled, she was certainly smart, brave, and independent. Cleve F. Adams’ nasty, foul-tempered Violet McDade is generally considered the first hardboiled lady eye. She and her long-suffering partner, Nevada Alvarado, slugged and bickered their way through a string of stories in the pulps.

Possessed of the charm and build of a NFL linebacker, D.B. McCandless’ Sarah Watson was another lovely piece of work. She didn’t have much patience for her young male assistant or for men in general—she gruffly admits she’d like to “beat up a man proper, for once,” and then proceeds to describe it in loving detail.

Then there’s Theodore Tinsley’s Carrie Cashin, certainly the most popular of the female pulp eyes. Attractive, smart, and determined as hell, she appeared in over three dozen pulp stories. Although she often posed as her male assistant’s secretary (Remington Steele, anyone?), there’s no doubt who the real boss was here.

And in a time when there were very few regular women writers in Black Mask, Katherine Brocklebank not only managed to sell them seven stories—she also created possibly Black Mask’s only female series character: Tex of the Border Service, who saw that justice was done along the Mexico/U.S. border.

Roswell Brown’s Grace Culver. A woman, a bad hair day, and a gun. Can you spell trouble? This illustration originally accompanied “Hit the Baby” in The Shadow Magazine, February 15, 1936.

Not that all the lady dicks were confined to short stories in the pulps. Rex Stout’s pistol-packin’ Dol Bonner showed up in the 1937 novel The Hand in the Glove, possibly the first book-length female shamus. Although there were no sequels, Dol later showed up in several of the Nero Wolfe tales.

Hot on Dol’s heels came Zelda Popkin’s Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938), which introduced Mary Carner, a smart and tough, crisply efficient detective who works at Blankfort's swanky, upscale Fifth Avenue store in New York, and would go on to appear in four more popular but now almost forgotten novels, making her—as far as I can tell—the first book-length series female private detective.

The next year, A.A. Fair (actually Erle Stanley Gardner) let loose Bertha Cool in The Bigger They Come, the first of what would become the longest series featuring a female gumshoe ever (and will still be, even when Grafton finally cranks out Z Is for Zero). Like Sarah Watson before her, Bertha Cool is one big, unpleasant chunk of detective, and nobody’s doormat. The books are an absolute treat, easily surpassing most of Gardner’s Perry Mason books for sheer entertainment.

And in 1947, skip tracer/P.I. Gale Gallagher appeared in I Found Him Dead, purportedly written by Gale herself (actually Will Oursler and Margaret Scott). It was followed a few years later by Chord in Crimson. Gallagher is arguably the missing link between the good girl amateur sleuths of the past and the tougher modern female P.I.s of the present. In the “tag end” of her twenties, she’s smart, well-dressed, and seems pretty self-assured and independent for that era. She goes to bars and jazz clubs alone, and enjoys the company of several men. She has a license to carry, though she rarely does, but she speaks with a dry wit and a casual toughness that is completely believable.

Some may sneer and declare these characters not “real” women because most were created by men, a sort of rebound-sexism. But that doesn’t subtract from the fact that these characters (and there were plenty of others) were all strong, tough and smart, and every bit as independent and as enjoyable to read about as their male contemporaries. Sometimes even more so.

And don’t get me started on the women who wrote for the hardboiled pulps....

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Hard-Boiled Dames: Stories Featuring Women Detectives, Reporters, Adventurers, and Criminals from the Pulp Fiction Magazines of the 1930s. Bernard Drew, ed., preface by Marcia Muller, St. Martin's Press, 1986.

Top of the Heap. Erle Stanley Gardner, Hard Case Crime, 2004. A Bertha Cool and Donald Lam mystery reprint.

Kevin Burton Smith is the founder and editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #89.

It’s always hard to know how to best honor someone who has died. Do we send flowers? Set up a fund? Hold a memorial service? What is the best way to honor that person, acknowledge our grief, and also do something that will allow that person’s legacy to continue.

Jeremiah Healy’s death on August 14, 2014, left many people mourning him and also wanting to do something. Jerry took his own life at age 66, following a long battle with depression.

He left behind his fiancée and fellow author, Sandra Balzo, tons of friends, colleagues, and fans.

To honor Jerry Healy, his fellow mystery writers and friends, Brendan DuBois, Andi Shechter, SJ Rozan and her sister Deborah, and Balzo found a way to commemorate Jerry's work and life that they feel he would have loved.

So a memorial fund is being set up at Hero Dogs, a service dog organization that trains dogs to assist wounded veterans.

“Besides his work as an attorney and an author, Jerry was a U.S. Army vet, and was also a lover of dogs. [Hero Dogs] will be thrilled to receive donations in Jerry's name,” said DuBois in a press statement.

The idea for the fund began several weeks ago when the friends began to ask themselves what they should do.

“My first thoughts were things that were on my mind—depression, suicide prevention, or maybe literacy. All worthy causes, but not . . . very Jerry,” said Balzo in the press statement.

“If you knew Jeremiah Healy for any length of time, you might have heard him talk about the military and refer to somebody as ‘the real thing.’ ‘The Real Things’ are men and women who served our country heroically and selflessly, often at the expense of life, limb, or emotional health. In fact, the only time I saw Jerry cry was as he recounted an air mission in which the pilots took off knowing that, once the mission was achieved, they didn't have the fuel to return,” she added.

And that is where dogs come in.

“As for the canine component, I can't tell you how many strolls were doubled in duration because Jerry had to stop every passing dog walker with the question "Is he (or she) friendly?" and give 'em a good scratch. Even depressed, it was the one thing that seemed to help him, so I can only imagine what it does for wounded vets,” she added.

Hero Dogs is based in Maryland. It is an IRS approved 501(c)(3) organization and operates entirely on donations. You can donate via their website, or by sending a check to Hero Dogs, P.O. 64, Brookeville, MD 20833-0064. But please ensure either by writing on the memo section of your check, or using the form on their website, that you're making this donation in Jeremiah Healy's name.

That way, Hero Dogs can track how many donations come in, so that they can be used in some way to keep Jeremiah Healy's memory alive in years to come.

And if anyone wants to have their donation acknowledged by Balzo, or send her a personal note, she can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

And after honoring Healy through Hero Dogs, remember his novels.

Healy’s first novel about Boston private investigator John Francis Cuddy was Blunt Darts in 1984. His novel The Staked Goat won the Shamus Award, given by the Private Eye Writers of America, in 1986. He wrote 13 novels about Cuddy, the last of which, Spiral, was published in 1999 and took place mostly in Florida.

He also wrote three novels under the pseudonym Terry Devane about lawyer Mairead O’Clare.

A troubled protagonist, gritty language, and a pair of bare buns changed the way America viewed TV cop shows forever.

L-R: David Caruso as Detective John Kelly and Dennis Franz as Detective Andy Sipowicz in the 1993 premiere season of NYPD Blue.

ABC’s NYPD Blue ended its 12-year, 261-episode run with new homicide squad commander Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) sitting alone at his cluttered desk, facing an uncertain future, wondering perhaps how he ever wound up supervising the conduct of others after so much trouble supervising his own.

It was a fitting final image for the acclaimed police drama, which ultimately had evolved into a show mainly about Sipowicz. He had become a metaphor for the contemporary urban policeman who, after conquering his own demons, still has to face the daunting challenge of a bureaucracy that seems programmed to thwart justice at every turn.

In the fall of 1993, when NYPD Blue began its run, it seemed most like a natural extension of writer-producer Steven Bochco’s experiments with Hill Street Blues, the most innovative and groundbreaking police show of the 1980s. Like Hill Street, it had a unique visual presentation—darker, busier and real. The handheld camera style gave us the feeling we were visiting a real New York police precinct where each frame seemed crammed with suspects in handcuffs or anonymous uniformed officers in blue.

Steven Bochco

But television had undergone a major sea change since the run of Hill Street from 1981-87. Cable TV networks like HBO and Showtime were now doing weekly series—and doing them without the inhibitions of regulated broadcast networks. Doing a conventional police show built around a star name no longer seemed practical. Pushing the envelope did.

I remember grinning broadly when I first sat down to preview the pilot episode of NYPD Blue in the spring of 1993 and realized Bochco and partner David Milch had punched holes in the envelope in less than five minutes. Detective Sipowicz had just infuriated prosecutor Sylvia Costas (Sharon Lawrence) by ruining her case against a mobster with contaminated evidence. On the way out of the courthouse, she mumbles her displeasure and Sipowicz rather flagrantly expressed his own.

“Ipso this,” said Sipowicz, clutching at his crotch, “you pissy little bitch!”

Well, that was certainly something you didn’t hear on broadcast television in 1993, even after 10 pm.

As the pilot rolled on, things got even more envelope-punchy as Detective John Kelly (David Caruso) and Officer Janice Licalsi (Amy Brenneman) made love for the first time—and we saw parts of their naked bodies never before seen in a commercial network prime time program. Though little publicized at the time, it eventually came out that NYPD Blue had required all its actors to sign “nudity clauses” in their contracts, guaranteeing no disputes over being asked to appear in such scenes.

After the ABC affiliates convention that year, a furor began that quickly equaled and surpassed the one over ABC’s raunchy comedy series Soap in 1977. A large number of ABC stations complained they wouldn’t show that episode unless significant changes were made. Some warned they wouldn’t clear the series at all for their stations.

Eventually, a new pilot was produced, trimming 15 seconds of nudity from the bedroom scene. As producer Bochco explained when I asked him about it, they didn’t cut what we saw, just how long we saw it. In a rather testy press conference that July, Bochco blamed the press for blowing up the controversy.

“We’re not doing anything that’s going to bring down the fall of the Republic,” he said. True enough, but what NYPD Blue did do was revolutionize broadcast television standards. By winning the battle to include nudity, a major step was taken that other dramatic shows cautiously followed. By getting ABC to agree to a list of profane words that were acceptable—if not used to excess—Bochco hastened the rush of commercial TV producers to compete with the booming popularity of HBO and its fellow cable networks. The result was enormous publicity, immediate hit status for NYPD Blue and overnight fame for its lead actor, David Caruso, who quickly began to receive tempting offers for lead roles in movies. His requests for special scheduling, so he could go off to star in movies, were deemed unacceptable by Bochco and Milch, who knew they had a tiger by the tail. When negotiations failed, Caruso decided to break his contract and leave the show early in the second year.

That calamity changed the course of NYPD Blue forever. It forced the writers to re-focus the show onto Sipowicz, who was the partner to Detective Kelly. He was a most unlikely fellow to be the central character in any show. He was a drunk, a racist, an adulterer who frequented prostitutes and was played by a balding, overweight, middleaged actor whose face would never appear on a Wheaties box.

But Bochco and his fellow writers had transformed a Dennis Franz character from heel to hero before. In Hill Street Blues, Franz had played a bad cop so well that Bochco decided to bring him back as a series regular, playing Lt. Norman Buntz (1985-87), a cop very much like Andy Sipowicz. The Buntz character was so popular in fact that he briefly starred in his own quasisitcom, Beverly Hills Buntz (1987-88) after leaving the force and becoming a private eye in L.A.

Franz is a funny, loveable guy in person—so it must have been a special treat for him to tackle a character like Sipowicz, so dark at first meeting. He eventually romanced and married Sylvia, the “pissy little bitch” from the series pilot, and even played his mandatory nude scene with her in a sequence in which the grossly overweight Franz and shapely Sharon Lawrence took a memorable shower together.

Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits

Even after actor Jimmy Smits—from Bochco’s L.A. Law—was hired to play Detective Bobby Simone, Sipowicz’s new partner, the Sipowicz character remained central. When Smits left the series a few years later, the subsequent new partners were clearly subordinate to Franz’s Sipowicz. The series remained a big ratings winner for ABC until the last few years when Bochco and Milch concentrated on other projects and the remaining writers turned the show in a new, lighter direction. The trend in television was toward the even more realistic forensic and police procedural shows like the CSI and Law & Order franchises while NYPD Blue remained a character-driven series. Interest in Sipowicz waned and none of the newer characters really caught fire with the public.

After 12 seasons, however, the legacy of NYPD Blue seems solid. It was the program that turned the police show in a much more reality based direction and made the large ensemble cast almost standard for the genre. The influence of real-life former New York police detective Bill Clark as adviser and, later, an executive producer is undeniable.

In the course of those 12 seasons, Andy Sipowicz was very nearly rehabilitated for good. No longer a self-destructive force, he became a mentor and, in the final episode, the leader of his squad. Naturally, though, his history haunts him and it’s not too big a stretch to imagine him losing it completely one of these days and punching out one of those arrogant chiefs above him.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see it in a NYPD Blue reunion movie.