Re-Imagining Family and Community in Women’s Detective Fiction: A Critical Study of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone Series

Abstract

After the Second Wave of feminism in the late 1960s, women writers of detective fiction revisioned the hard-boiled genre with a feminist agenda. One of the major conventions of the genre that was addressed was that of the hard-boiled detective hero as a loner, without any ties to family or community. The dominant ideology of liberal feminism present in the novels of these writers resulted in giving importance to personal relationships. The present paper traces the development of the female protagonist through the re-imagining of family and community in the Sharon McCone series by Marcia Muller.