Women in Mystery Fiction Trivia Quiz

Answer: Joan Hess

Joan Hess was an American author who specialised in writing mystery novels. She created two different series in particular - the Claire Malloy series of twenty novels and Maggody series, which numbered sixteen books. Claire Malloy makes her first appearance in 'Strangled Prose' in 1985 as the widowed owner of a bookshop in the fictional Farberville in Arkansas. The murder of an author implicates both Claire and her daughter, until Claire's investigations uncover the real culprit.

The final novel in the series, 'Pride v Prejudice', was published in 2015 and Hess herself will write no more as she died in 2017.

Answer: Patricia Cornwell

It was Patricia Cornwell who created Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner who specialises in forensic medicine. He first appearance was in 1990 in the novel 'Postmortem' with a twenty-fifth novel, 'Autopsy', published in 2021. Cornwell is still writing, so fans of her work can expect further stories about Scarpetta.

Patricia has written other novels, but Kay Scarpetta has brought her fame and seems the character closest to her heart.

Answer: Agatha Christie

The 'Queen of Crime' , as Christie is usually described, wrote nearly 70 detective novels plus short stories, which were published in various collections. Her first published novel was 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles', which came out in 1920 in the USA and 1921 in the UK. but this 'starred' her other famous creation, Hercule Poirot. The first novel to feature Miss Marple was 'The Murder at the Vicarage', from 1930. The quiet, unobtrusive, spinster from a small village has an uncanny knack of noticing the small details overlooked by the police and solving the crime.

As well as the two characters mentioned already, Christie also created Tommy and Tuppence and turned her hand to romance novels for which she used the pen name of Mary Westmacott.

Answer: Sara Paretsky

Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski is a private investigator in Chicago whose specialty is white collar crime and murders associated with those crimes. She is often shown as taken on cases because they interest her or because she wants to see fair play and doesn't always get paid for her work. Her first appearance was in 1982, in a novel called 'Indemnity Only' and a further twenty books have been published, up to and including 2020, with at least one more planned.

Sara Paretsky is credited with creating the prototype of a female investigator, and is known for her feminist views.

Answer: Dorothy Gilman

Mrs Emily Pollifax was created by American author Dorothy Gilman, who died in 2012. The character featured in fourteen novels between 1996 and 2000, with the first one titled 'The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax'. The character is an elderly widow who accidentally (in the first book) becomes a spy for the CIA.

Her success in her first mission, despite a spell in an Albanian prison, leads the CIA to keep her on, possibly because she is the most unlikely spy on their roster. Her exploits certainly take her to unusual parts of the world, with Syria being the setting for the 2000 novel, 'Mrs Pollifax Unveiled'.

Answer: M.C. Beaton

M C Beaton was a Scottish author who wrote under various names, including Marion Chesney (her maiden name), which she used for historical romances, and Jennie Tremaine. Using the name M C Beaton she created both Hamish Macbeth, a Scottish policeman (portrayed by Robert Carlyle on British television) and Agatha Raisin. Between 1992 and 2021 thirty-two novels featuring Agatha were published, with the last two credited jointly to Beaton, who died in 2019) and R W Greer.

The first book was called 'Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death' in which Agatha has to investigate the death of a judge at a cookery competition who succumbs after tasting the quiche in the title. This sets her on a new path as a detective.

Answer: Sue Grafton

Private investigator Kinsey Millhone was created by Sue Grafton and appeared in a series of novels between 1982 and 2017. The first was 'A for Alibi' with the final one to be written by Grafton herself was 'Y is for Yesterday'. The final book was intended to be 'Z if for Zero', scheduled to be published in 2019, but the author died in December 2017 Her family is adamant that Sue would not have wanted a ghost writer to take over - she resisted any approaches to make films or television shows from her books and the family believes she would have hated the idea of someone else writing about her character.

Millhone is depicted as a former police officer who has become an investigator located in California. She specialises in unexplained disappearances and murders.

Answer: Margaret Maron

Margaret Maron, an American author who died in 2021, was a prolific author of mystery novels. She wrote two major series - the Sigrid Harald series about a New York homicide detective and the one in the question. Judge Deborah Knott made her first appearance in 1992 in 'Bootlegger's Daughter' and appeared in nineteen other stories, the final one (at least, by the original author) being 'Long Upon the Land' in 2015.

In the first book, Deborah Knott is a lawyer running for office as a district judge while simultaneously solving a crime. As the series title confirms, by the second novel she had become a judge who still found time to solve murders.

Answer: Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters was the pen name of Barbara Mertz, who held a PhD in Egyptology. When she turned her hand to writing fiction, she used her knowledge to create Amelia Peabody as an archaeologist who visits Egypt in the first novel - ' Crocodile on the Sandbank'. The story is set in 1884/5, and was published in 1975. Peters adopted a humorous, mocking, style poking fun at adventure novels written in Victorian times and at the way women were expected to behave.

Amelia went on to feature in another nineteen books - the last one was published in 2017 based on a manuscript left by Mertz on her death in 2013. It was called 'The Painted Queen' and was completed by Joan Hess, another author included in this quiz.

Answer: Diane Mott Davidson

Goldy Schulz appears in a series of seventeen novels written between 1990 and 2013 by the American author Diane Mott Davidson. The first novel was called 'Catering to Nobody' and featured Goldy as a caterer in a small town who finds herself implicated in the death of a guest at a function for which she provided the food.

She manages to clear her name by uncovering the real culprit. All the books in the series have titles involving some reference to food and include, either in the body of the book or in an appendix, recipes for the food Goldy has created during the novel.

Although Davidson is still alive, she has stated that she has no intention of adding to her literary output.