Senior Women Sleuths

By Jean Henry Mead

Because there are 87 million baby boomers nearing   retirement, some 8,000 of them a day slipping into senior citizen status, a growing market for mystery novels is in demand for those who want to read in their own age bracket. Previously called cozies, senior sleuth novels are less violent, devoid of graphic sex and the language usually lacks the F-word. My kind of mystery novel.

Senior women sleuths have been featured in mystery novels for nearly a century, but didn’t occupy center stage until some fifteen years ago when there were thirty of them solving murders. Among them Carolyn Hart with her Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins series and M.C. Beaton whose Agatha Raisin character resides in her native Scotland. Beaton, whose real name is Marian Chesney, describes Agatha Raisin as an updated Miss Marple.

Women over fifty have generally been dismissed as out of touch with the real world, with few notable exceptions, and unworthy of respect. Hart stresses the fact that “Women must be valued not only when young and beautiful but when they age. I wanted a character that didn’t have to pretend. There are more seasons to life than summer.”

I agree with her assessment that anyone who thinks “”women over 60 are fluffy and feeble little old ladies” are dead wrong. I was honestly unaware of either mystery series when I dreamed up my own senior sleuth novel, A Village Shattered. My protagonists, Dana Logan, a mystery novel buff and her friend, Sarah Cafferty, a private investigator’s widow, live in a San Joaquin Valley retirement village in central California, where dense fog hides a serial killer. While the two women sat discussing the first murder of their friend and club member, I realized that Dana resembles actress Gina Davis and Sarah looks like Shelley Winters, a distinct difference in their appearances. But together they have more crime solving knowledge than the newly-elected sheriff.

The two 60-year-old widows are in good physical shape and Dana still jogs and downhill skis. Sarah, on the other hand, loves to eat and is what she calls “pleasingly plump.” They’re not doddering old ladies, but quite capable of solving crimes. In Diary of Murder, the second novel in the series, due for release next spring, I placed both women in a motorhome in the midst of a Rocky Mountain blizzard as they make their way to Wyoming to investigate the death of Dana’s sister, a mystery novelist. Her brother-in-law says it was suicide, but Dana knows better.

I confess that I’ve never had more fun writing as I’ve had with my Logan & Cafferty senior sleuth mystery/suspense series.

About the author: Jean Henry Mead is the author of eleven books, three of them novels. A former news reporter, magazine editor and photojournalist, she now devotes her time to writing the Logan & Cafferty senior sleuth series as well as western historical novels. She’s also working on a children’s book, The Mystery of Spider Mountain.

Her mystery novel, A Village Shattered, released this month
from  Amazon.com (http://tinyurl.com/5alkkr) is also available in ebook form from Fictionwise-ePress (http://tinyurl.com/6rdzm5), where it is currently #1
on the publisher’s bestseller list. A book trailer is also available at “YouTube:  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9mVh6Z6GGg).

Jean’s webpage is: JeanHenryMead.com.