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In Allan Arnold’s Belle Boyd, The Girl Detective, a dime novel published in the New York Detective Library in 1891, our heroine is a gun-toting, cross-dressing, larger-than-life crimefighter, a former Pinkerton who is described by one miscreant as “the boss detective of Chicago and the West” (4). Full disclosure: this is a ham-fisted potboiler of a novel, complete with ghosts, demonstrating all of the racial stereotyping typical of the dime novels. But it’s useful for our purposes in its …

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  In her landmark 1979 book Murderess Ink, Dilys Winn identifies Anna Katharine Green as one of the “founding mothers” of detective fiction, and notes that up until the rediscovery of Seeley Regester’s The Dead Letter (1867), Green was credited with writing the first cozy detective novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878), which introduced many of the characters and plot devices with which we’re familiar today. In two subsequent novels featuring the same detective, Ebenezer Gryce, The Affair …

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In New York Nell, The Boy-Girl Detective: or, Old Blakesly’s Money (1880), by Edward L. Wheeler, the title character Nell Niblo swaggers onto the scene in the character of a newsboy selling papers on a street car in Philadelphia. We see her through the eyes of Redmond Blakesly, a bit of a rube who can be excused for his surprise at beholding this cross-dressed urchin at a time when cross-dressing was illegal. He strikes up an acquaintance with her to learn her story. She tells him she’s from New …

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