Overview
Real-life female detectives emerged in the mid-19th century through the young widow Kate Warne, then a Pinkerton Agency detective who helped smuggle Abraham Lincoln away from would-be assassins in Baltimore. In 1856, Kate met with Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, to make an important point: a woman detective could go places that his male detectives could not. The first true girl detective made her debut in The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915). The author, Anna Katharine Green, was an American friend of Conan Doyle's, and had a string of best-sellers featuring female detectives. One of the major selling points of those books was Green's fact-checking every legal detail in her bestselling mysteries. Green created the first famous female sleuth in fiction, the curious spinster Amelia Butterworth, in The Affair Next Door (1897), there sketching the original pattern for Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Our heroine, Mary Eliska, is a well-off young lady whose father Albert Stricklin is a newspaper publisher In Piedmont, California, who supports her as a reporter for his paper The Piedmont Star, aware that she likes to dabble in detective work. Driving "Calamity Jane", Mary Eliska joins with her best friends Jacqueline Gray ("Jax"), Marlow Ray, and news photographer Liam McAdam to solve the occasional case out of curiosity and sometimes to earn money separately from her father. Fictional Mary Eliska Girl Detective gives life to my daughter whose life was cut short. She has charming manners, oscillates between tomboyishness and a feminine ideal. She knows law and manifests moral righteousness. Often she wears enviable dresses. Mary Eliska's detective stories and unsolved mysteries I have re-written from the public domain tales by Carolyn Keene (always a pseudonym), Anna Katharine Green, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, Frances Crane, and anonymous writers about Penny Parker, Mary Louise, Nancy Drew, and others.