FD does intend to write about something other than mysteries soon. But not today.
Today, FD is thinking about a small series of mysteries written by Kathryn Miller Haines (here’s a link to her web site with lots of information). There are four so far. The protagonist is a stage actress, living in New York in the 1940s. Lots of fun period details and a fairly good homage to the “hard boiled” writing of the 1940s.
Not surprisingly for a series set in the 1940s, the protagonist, Rosie Winter, professes a love of the “pulps.” More interesting to FD is that Rosie Winter has friends. This may sound natural, but is actually a little unusual. Detectives often have sidekicks: Watsons and Archies (and here’s a link to an eye-popping Nero Wolfe site) to narrate and do some of the dirty work. But too often, and especially when the protagonist is a woman, there’s no actual friend. Oh, sometimes there are friends who serve some plot necessity: some one to die, some one to conveniently show up or have an essential skill. It seems to FD that in the majority of mysteries with women protagonists, the friends are either plot specific or absent completely and the protagonists are, like so many male protagonists in mysteries, “a lonely man” as Chandler defined his heroes. But women without friends seem unrealistic, and a woman protagonist who has only acolytes (like Nancy Drew) or a woman with a cat, or an older male friend, or her husband, but no real women friends, well, that interferes with the suspension of disbelief that is really essential to a satisfying mystery reading experience. So it was a delight to find that Rosie Winter’s world includes female friendships.