Fascinating read on both history of women detecting and their rise in the police as well as their fictional counterparts. I have to say I enjoyed reading about the fictional detectives more; I was surprised that real-life women still have been so far behind in advancing. Great read in how far we’ve come yet still need to go. My only upset was wishing there was a “Spoiler Alert” note in some sections as I’d love to find some of the original novels mentioned, yet we were told the whole story about the crime and who turned out to be the villains. ( )

Pistols and Petticoats from Erika Janik is an interesting overview of women in sleuthing, so to speak, in both fact and fiction. This includes police, private detectives and even the popular unofficial detectives who seem to always stumble into murder mysteries.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive detailed history, not sure one could be done in a single volume. This is meant more as a thematically structured look at the history of women in both real life and fiction who solve crimes. While the thematic structure seems to have thrown some, it makes perfect sense when showing how there was a play between what was transpiring in real life and in fiction.

If you're looking for a detailed account of each person, writer, or character not only will you be disappointed in this volume but you will never find that information in a single volume, sorry. If all you want is "facts" isolated from sociological context, you may be disappointed also. But if you want a nice overview of the topic and a perspective from which to understand the changing nature of both fictional "lady detectives" and real life women in law enforcement, you will likely find much to interest you. Because the net is cast so wide you may well find some people or characters you'd like to learn more about. Nothing is stopping you from doing so and this book can easily serve as a springboard into such interesting topics rather than expecting this to be some kind of all-inclusive tome which would have to extend to the thousands of pages to do so. In other words, I recommend this to those who want to perhaps pick up some perspective, learn some new names to explore, and aren't expecting the impossible from a book of about 250 pages.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. ( )

I must confess this book puzzled me. 175 years of "lady" detectives in barely 200 pages. How can that be? I checked in the front for a introduction to get a feel for the author's premise, and found none. So I plowed on. It seemed to contain alternating chapters about women in law enforcement and women in detective fiction although at times I wasn't really sure which was which because I wasn't familiar with the authors discussed in the early pages and of course didn't know the real detectives.
Also missing was a bibliography, although that would have been difficult because most of the notes seemed to be from journal articles or web sites. And there was no appendix of authors/titles for future reference. I ended up using sticky notes attached to pages to create my own lists for future reading.
That being said it was an interesting book. I learned a great deal about the beginnings of the genre and found a few names I wanted to read. It got bogged down in the 1950s and 60s but of course the genre was exploding with authors and the women's movement of the 70s created Cagney and Lacey etc. which didn't leave room for the favorites I have discovered.
All in all it was a good source but not an exhaustive one which leaves the reader searching out other sources as well. But by inference that tells us that there is a wide variety of female detectives being written now and that is a good thing. ( )

I was provided a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This fact has not altered my views on the book and I strive to provide my unaltered and completely honest option, for better or for worse.

Erika Janik seems to me like the type of person who learns a fact, then gets really excited about it and learns everything possible about the subject. She is clearly enthusiastic and while I found Pistols and Petticoats interesting, it was a little too ambitious and scattered for my tastes.

There are several ways to format any non-fiction work. My experience in historical works is that they are approached from a chronological point-of-view. Janik, instead, chooses to take the route of division of subject matter. There are chapters about the first women in real life and fiction, there are chapters about uniforms and dress, job requirements, the social stigmas of being in law enforcement and so forth. If I were a researcher looking for a specific body of information, this would be quite useful. From a read-through standpoint, however, it makes the work feel scattered. Names come up time and again and are not always reintroduced so I would have to keep jumping back to figure out who she was talking about.

Speaking of names, there are a lot of them. Tackling both real-world women and fictional ones, and their authors is a fairly ambitious topic for so small a book and there are a lot of condensed facts. If anything, I would have advised breaking this work into three separate sections and tackling each angle one at a time, just for the reader’s sake. Having to go back and fact check on fictional vs. real life women definitely disrupted the flow.

Detail is something Janik offers in spades. It is immediately clear how passionate she is about her subject, and her desire to share every little bit of what she has learned. There is absolutely nothing vague about her work – you want detail? You got it.

Women in law enforcement is an interesting subject and I do appreciate how Janik has tried to offer even more illumination by wrangling the likes of Miss Marple and Nancy Drew into the mix. I think I was more interested in the history of female detectives in fiction than I was in the real life women, although the included image section in the middle of the book was a nice touch. I never knew, for example, that L. Frank Baum had written a series of adventuring women. I don’t know how thoroughly this subject has been approached before, or if there are any other books quite like this one, but Janik’s passion certainly presents an interesting subject.

I think there are about twenty pages of source material and references in the appendix of this book, and all are great for those who found this book interesting, but wanted to dive more deeply into a singular section of the material – women’s treatment in prisons, for example. Janik is very well researched.

Overall, I just wasn’t blown away by this book. I will not deny that Janik knows her source material and knows it well, and the subject is interesting… but I found the readability very difficult for me. I know this isn’t always evident from my blog and reviews on Goodreads, but I have ready a fair amount of historical non-fiction and don’t attribute the difficulty in reading this to a change in flow from fiction to non-fiction. In fact, I find that formats like this are the types that steer laymen away from history – there are so many names and dates and not a clear lineage of growth of the story (and yes, historical non-fiction definitely has a story). Pistols and Petticoats is a fine book for academics to pick up and peruse, but it may be less accessible to those unprepared to jump into a lot of scattered detail.

First posted on The Literary Phoenix ( )