1960s

Let's track down some of the first female detective characters, in literature, film and television.

Although Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help, came out nearly a year ago, it remains to date on the New York Times Top 10 Bestselling Fiction list… Forty weeks of its shelf life in fact, it has spent jostling with other titles on the list, still sitting comfortably at No. 4 as of January 11th. In this list-watching way, I waited patiently, patiently for my copy to move to number 1 on the library holds list. When I finally had the massive 444-page, hard bound copy in my hands, I grabbed a blanket, made cup after cup of tea and spent nearly two days on the couch plowing through Ms. Stockett’s tale of black domestic servants in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, and the white privileged woman who wants to write about them.