girl sleuths

If You Want Something Done Right . . .

September 9, 2022 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Nita, the Female Ferret

What do you do if you report a robbery to the police and they don’t believe you? You resign yourself to becoming a detective and solving the crime yourself. That’s how 18-year-old Juanita Henriques becomes the “female ferret” in Police Captain Howard’s 1885 dime novel, Nita, the Female Ferret.

When a plainly dressed young woman presents herself at the police station to report that she has been robbed of several pieces of diamond-studded jewelry, the superintendent and one of his detectives don’t believe her, even though she makes a strong impression on them. She tells the superintendent that if she knew who the thief was, she would not have come to him; instead, she says simply, “I would have received back my property, or else killed the robber” (2). The superintendent concludes that “she is a singular young woman . . . and has the sharpest eye I ever saw in a woman’s head” (3), and sends a Detective Mason to investigate. At the house where Miss Henriques boards, the landlady tells Mason, “She impressed me as a young lady of extraordinary strength of mind and will power. She is well educated, and as deep as the ocean” (3). In fact, Nita’s past is shrouded in mystery; the residents of the house find her quiet, well bred, and rather withdrawn. Mason is the first to admit to her, “Miss, had you been born one of my sex you would have made a first-class detective” (4). The landlady chides Miss H for not confiding her suspicions to him, but she says, “It’s a detective’s business to find a clew [sic]. If I had a clew I could follow it up myself, and would do so to save the expense of employing a detective” (4); after he’s left, she declares, “My suspicions are not a clew” (4). The next day she returns to the superintendent with a set of diamond earrings and brooch that were not taken in the robbery, and when she is told that the police detective “could see nothing to show that any robbery was committed there,” she responds, “Which shows that he was not much of a detective” (5). Enter Nita, the female ferret (“ferret” was one of many slang terms for a detective).

Her first act is to don a disguise: she tells the landlady that she will be away for a while and will send a friend, Nita Endicott, to occupy her room in her absence. Nita is very like Juanita in stature, but blond rather than dark-haired, and most importantly, lively and outgoing. In no time, Nita is captivating the household with her piano playing, singing, beautiful new dresses, dazzling diamonds, and especial kindness to the maid, Margaret. This is the first of two disguises Nita uses to gather evidence. Quite early, her suspicions fall on Margaret’s lover, Tom Nelson, and she adds a second disguise as a boy so that she can tail Nelson unrecognized and follow him into saloons. As the lovely and enchanting Nita, she dazzles Nelson, goes on carriage rides with him, and permits him to make love to her. As Randy Holland, she follows Nelson and even gets the better of him in a bar confrontation.

Mastery of disguise and role-playing was an essential trait to a dime-novel detective at a time when deceit was regarded as a serious moral failing in a well-bred young lady. Yet unlike some other female detectives who regret the necessity for masquerade, Nita quite enjoys her new persona. She tells herself, “This is the best thing I ever did” (10) and even muses,

“Oh, I wish I was not afraid of betraying my sex in a fine suit of clothes. I’d go to the theaters and operas and mash the girls just for the fun. But this detective business is fun enough just now, and it grows more interesting every hour, and I like it more and more every day.” (17)

But as if concerned that this kind of declaration might risk the reader’s disapproval of Nita, Howard follows immediately with an encounter that underscores Nita’s true sex: she comes to the aid of a weeping young woman because, we’re told, “Nita had a true woman’s heart, and this unmistakable sign of distress touched her deeply” (17). The young woman, Sadie, turns out to be one of many that Tom Nelson has “married” and abandoned; “Randy” reveals her true sex to Sadie and rents some rooms for her in his new role as Sadie’s husband. In fact, however, she plays Tom Nelson’s role of “masher” the next day when a young woman flirts with him, playfully doubting his strength, and he tells her, “I can take a much heavier girl than you are and hold her on my knee, and talk to her all the evening” (20). After a night (alone) in a hotel room, she reminds herself, “Oh, I came near forgetting that I have a wife down in Twenty-second street” (20). She wasn’t the first girl detective to discover the liberating power of cross-dressing. It permits her entry into some spaces that are generally off-limits to respectable middle-class women.

Once Nita has caught the culprit and explained all to her landlady and landlord, the landlord tells her of two “mistakes”: “First, that you were not born a man, that you might have been the greatest detective in the world” and “Second, that being born a woman, you did not go on the stage and become known as the greatest actress that ever lived” (27). The second compliment is sincere, but perhaps unintentionally backhanded, since actresses were considered of dubious moral standing at the time. Indeed, the liberties she permits Tom Nelson — embraces, kisses — are justified, but perhaps not justifiable, by the role she’s playing, and after reminding readers what’s at stake, the narrator observes: “The reader can readily understand then, the extraordinary will-power of our heroine, which enabled her to smile when Nelson kissed her in the carriage” (10). Indeed, Nita’s “will power,” mentioned here and in the previous quotation, set her apart from the feminine ideal, as does her willingness to spend time in cheap dives among disreputable company, where:

The men and women talked with a freedom of expression that made our heroine wish herself a thousand miles away.

But she stood it for the sake of her mission. (15)

As you might guess by now if you have been following this blog, Nita doesn’t rely solely on her acting skills and men’s clothing to keep her safe in dangerous places and situations. Her small pearl-handled revolver makes its first appearance in a wonderfully comic scene in a restaurant, where Tom Nelson picks a fight with Randy Holland for — wait for it — wearing his hat at the table. Insisting on his status as a gentleman, Tom menaces the offending Holland until s/he calmly draws “a tiny revolver” and aims it at him. Confident of his own shrewdness, Tom offers her ten dollars to relinquish the gun to a waiter, and when she takes him up on it and collects her cash, he springs at her again, only to be repulsed this time by “a long bright bladed dagger” (11). Slow on the uptake, Tom offers another ten dollars if she’ll relinquish the dagger, and when she does, the inevitable ensues: Tom lunges for her, only to be brought up short by “a tiny pearl-handled revolver” (12). Clearly, Nita is armed to the teeth. Later, Randy tells a gang of would-be assailants, “The man who comes up to pick a fight with me will get both steel and lead” (16), and she proves it by shooting their leader. Like other girl detectives, however, Nita also demonstrates that she has the physical prowess for the job when she pursues the escaping Tom across roof-tops, at one point leaping ten feet down from one rooftop to the next.

Nita’s “masculine” traits and abilities contrast sharply with the those of the other women characters in the story. Tom’s two female victims, Margaret and Sadie, are characterized by their tears, whereas we never see Nita cry. Both women are blinded by their love for Tom. Margaret refuses to heed Nita’s warnings about him up to the point when Nita reveals the other wife she has met. Then Margaret becomes a picture of female vengeance: “True, she thought of Tom, but only how she might avenge herself” (21). In the cheap dive mentioned above, two gin-soaked women engage in a catfight motivated by jealousy over Randy Holland. When Nita pursues Tom across rooftops later, he enters a house through a window and terrifies the women inside, who, after “raising a terrible racket,” demonstrate their panicked incompetence by running “screaming from room to room in the house, locking the doors to protect themselves, but in reality preventing him from getting out” (25). It’s difficult to see how Nita developed her strong will, her sangfroid, her intelligence, and her adventurous spirit if these were the kinds of female role models available to her. We know little about her background, except that she, like so many other girl detectives, is an orphan.

The ending of the novel is something of a disappointment, if perhaps an inevitability. Nita’s celebrity in the press makes her the talk of the town, especially after she testifies in court to the incompetence of the police, and she’s confronted by an importunate millionaire banker who wants her to investigate bank thefts and won’t take no for an answer. She cracks the case in very short order because she visualizes the theft in a dream! Delighted, the banker gives her a blank check in payment for her services, and when she threatens to take the whole bank, he insists that the banker himself would have to be included. Later, when she next shows him the check, she has filled in the amount to read “the banker himself” (29), thus strengthening our impression of Nita as a young woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. They are married immediately and live happily ever after, especially when the papers she has recovered along with her stolen jewels prove her claim to an English fortune that doubles her husband’s. So her unconventional story ends in a conventional way, and we are left to consider that it is, perhaps, just as well, since a professional detective could hardly rely on visionary dreams to solve the average case.

I’ve been unable to locate an online version of this text. According to The Dime Novel Bibliography published by the Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Library, “Police Captain Howard” was a “pseudonym used by multiple people.”

Mercedes Quero: Elusive Yet Ubiquitous

February 28, 2022 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

A queer fish indeed is Mercedes Quero, who shows up when she’s least expected and most wanted. She appeared in four novels by Gladys Edson Locke, who wrote as G. E. Locke: That Affair at Portstead Manor (1914), The Red Cavalier, or, The Twin Turrets Mystery (1922), The Scarlet Macaw (1923), and The House on the Downs (1925). Though Locke lived all her life in the Boston area, these novels are all British country house mysteries. They usually feature an unmarried male focal character, whom Bob Schneider of SpeedyMysteries.com compares to Captain Hastings of the Hercule Poirot mysteries.

Quero is a detective of considerable reputation, in spite of her gender. When a diamond necklace is stolen in Portstead Manor, a character says, “I should send for that woman detective, Mercedes Quero. All London is talking about her since the Dexter case,” to which Lord Portstead responds, “Women are not at all suited to detective work. They are illogical and carried away by sentiment.” In Red Cavalier, a character notes that she is “highly successful in her profession.” In The Scarlet Macaw, she’s described as “the celebrated woman detective whose fame was known throughout England and even on the Continent.” Of course, her nemesis Detective Burton has a different view of her, and calls her “the most devilish, provoking and meddlesome skirt that ever was wished on a man.”

We’re never told Quero’s age, only that she is young. But her background is typical for professional women detectives; in Portstead Manor, the male character who befriends her learns something of her history: “Born and bred a gentlewoman, a sudden turn of fortune had thrown her upon her own resources.” She is often described as attractive, as from the point of view of another male character in Red Cavalier: “This slim, girlishly pretty young woman with mirthful brown eyes, skin fair as a child’s and soft brown hair simply coiled in her neck was not at all his idea of the detective who had already won an enviable name in her chosen profession.” In fact, Quero’s eyes are frequently characterized as “mirthful” or “mischievous” or “mocking,” and they appear to express most particularly her opinion of the men who surround her. She is capable of gentleness toward vulnerable women, and her mirthful eyes turn “misty” with sentimentality as she watches one man’s gentleness with a crippled little girl. But these are rare moments. She does not suffer fools gladly, especially men, or challenges to her authority, telling one man, “Don’t be stupid!” and admonishing Detective Burton at one point, “You will be good enough to remember that I am conducting this inquiry.”

As for the qualities that ensure her success as a detective, she is called “devilish smart.” And when one male character, who has commented on “the paradox of a pretty woman and a logical combined,” calls her “jolly clever,” she responds, “It is my business to be ‘jolly clever.’” A woman character made rather uncomfortable by Quero’s “very unusual pursuit” calls her “quick and intuitive,” as if to reclaim her for the female gender by privileging intuition over logic. And there is something to this claim, since she has a habit of showing up on the scene under an assumed name, and sometimes, as in Red Cavalier, even before she has been sent for. In this case, like Sherlock Holmes, she has read about the case and taken an interest. In all of these cases, Quero first appears in the guise of a secretary or maid, so that the experienced reader begins to look for her in the background long before she takes center stage. These impersonations permit her to spy on the principals in the case, a most unladylike thing to do.

While she is not the most athletic of girl detectives, she is perfectly capable of subduing an angry woman wielding a knife (Scarlet Macaw) and carries a small revolver that she uses to shoot a fleeing suspect (Red Cavalier).

Only in the first book, Portstead Manor, are we given a glimpse of the drawbacks of Quero’s career. When one character tells her, “I cannot understand you,” she replies, “No one does. I am a very much misunderstood person.” At the end of the book, the narrator mentions her lonely life, and speculates on the value of her continued friendship with the focal male character, for which she was “probably grateful.”

Locke herself seems to have been an interesting figure, with multiple degrees from Boston University and Simmons College, as reported by Douglas A. Anderson in his blog on Lesser-Known Writers. She was sufficiently proficient in Latin, French, and Italian to tutor in these languages and taught high school Latin and English. She was a member of the Boston Society for Psychical Research and never married.

The books have garnered mixed reviews. Anderson cites a review by the New York Times of Mr. Locke’s The Scarlet Macaw that damns it with faint praise, calling it an “interesting mystery” delivered in “extremely mediocre prose.” The plots are intricate and convoluted, and in the last book, The House on the Downs, almost every character is using an assumed name (the names themselves are worth mentioning: Sir Quenton Rotherdene, Theophilus Elphic, Bannard Darrel, Wallington Melrose, Paul Wardle). Should you decide to go looking for the Quero books, be warned: they have recently been reprinted in dreadful editions by the Hard Press of Miami. These appear to have been scanned and published uncorrected, with Quero’s name spelled in a variety of ways, most frequently as “Queer.”

Nancy’s Grandmother: Patsy Carroll

April 1, 2021 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

Suppose I asked you to name a girl detective in her teens, Titian-haired and beautiful, motherless but dearly loved by her lawyer father, a skillful driver who travels to places all over the map and solves mysteries with her chums. How many of you would answer “Patsy Carroll”?

Yet the first Patsy Carroll book, Patsy Carroll at Wilderness Lodge (1917), pre-dates Nancy Drew’s debut in The Secret of the Old Clock (1930) by thirteen years. The number of common elements in the Patsy Carroll and early Nancy Drew books (including a clock concealing a secret) strongly suggests that Edward Stratemeyer and Mildred Wirt (Benson) — the creative duo behind Nancy Drew — were familiar with these books. They are, in fact, an intriguing branch on the family tree of the girl detective because they illustrate the gradual emergence of the girl detective from the girls’ adventure series. In her classic account The Girl Sleuth (1975), Bobbie Ann Mason writes: “At the turn of the century (after decades of Little Prudy and Elsie Dinsmore and Pollyanna) there was an evident need in girls’ fiction for action, accomplishment, exhilaration . . . . There was a growing market for female adventurers, and eventually the girl detective emerged as the most ‘liberated’ and celebrated of heroines” (10). Under the pen name Grace Gordon, the prolific author Josephine Chase published four girls’ adventure books between 1917 and 1921 that foregrounded their heroine’s travels in their titles; in addition to Wilderness Lodge, these included Patsy Carroll Under Southern Skies (1918), Patsy Carroll in the Golden West (1920), and Patsy Carroll in Old New England (1921). All included a mystery and some detective work, to a greater or lesser degree.

Three of the books involve a search for missing documents, including the missing will in the first book that ties girls’ detective fiction to Gothic fiction. Two of the books feature false hauntings, as will the Nancy Drew mysteries later. Patsy and her friends are usually motivated to do their detective work by sympathy for a young woman in trouble. Yet despite references to Sherlock Holmes — to whom Patsy twice facetiously compares her Aunt Martha in Wilderness Lodge — and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Patsy’s own declaration, “I have always fancied I would make a good detective” (Old New England 88), the girls do not make particularly good detectives. Like their predecessors in the dime novels, they often chance to be in a position to overhear conversations that give them useful information, but these occasions are the result of happenstance, not intent. And while their investigations have them searching high and low for crucial documents, in the end these documents are always discovered by chance. Patsy borrows a backpack in Wilderness Lodge and finds inside it the will they’ve scoured the house for. Her friend Mabel spends hours trying to locate a secret drawer in an antique desk in Southern Skies, but her friend Bee finds a secret drawer by accident when she bumps an antique table. And although Patsy and Bee have tried and failed to account for the haunting of an old house in New England, a puppy uncovers the mechanism responsible when he chases a feather under an old clock. Also behind the clock is an important codicil to the deceased owner’s will. Only once does Patsy find something because she went looking for it. In Golden West, Patsy’s determination to find a child presumed dead results in success when she finds the little girl in a nearby Indian village. That no one else faced with a missing, presumed dead, child and no body thought to go looking for her strains credulity, though.

That these books are firmly rooted in the girls’ adventure genre is evident in their disparate settings, which represent travels north, south, east, and west from the girls’ home in a town in New York. The girls call themselves “The Wayfarers.” The books feature extensive accounts of history and descriptions of scenery; in fact, these dominate long stretches of New England. These, too, will be echoed in Nancy Drew’s travels to exotic places. That sixteen-year-old Patsy should be the long-distance driver on at least one of these trips (Wilderness Lodge) shows her to be a pioneer that Nancy will follow in her blue roadster. In Golden West, her driving skills are called upon to extract a car from a precarious position after an accident.

However, the geographical scope of the Patsy Carroll books also provides ample scope for racism and cultural bias, as well as classism. Southern Skies is populated by untrustworthy, hostile Hispanics and credulous Black maids, as well as other benign “darkies.” The maid in Golden West is a “darling . . . little Chinese girl” (122) to whom Patsy talks baby talk. There are bad “Injuns” (232), Apaches, and good Indians, Hopis. In this, too, the books prepare the way for the Nancy Drew mysteries, in which villains tend to be swarthy, if male, and if female, gypsy. The poor orphan girl who engages their sympathies in Southern Skies, whom the girls style a “wood nymph,” is identified as Spanish, not Mexican, and is, says Bee, “as white as Patsy or I.” When Aunt Martha reacts favorably to this waif, Patsy declares, “Auntie isn’t the least tiny bit snobbish,” a statement so patently untrue throughout the series as to call attention to its source.

And here I feel compelled to add ageism and sexism to the books’ sins. Aunt Martha, the maiden aunt who will be replaced by housekeeper Hannah Gruen in the Nancy Drew books, has been caring for Patsy since she was a baby. She constitutes an important object lesson in the inconvenience of mothers and maternal figures to girl adventurers. She is most often characterized by her disapproval or outright banning of any venture she considers risky, which extends to most ventures, and her suspicion of anyone not of her race and class. She’s described in Golden West as “an energetic, elderly lady” (9). You may be surprised, then, to learn that Patsy’s father is her older brother. She is the target of much solicitude on the part of Patsy and her fellow Wayfarers, who often express the hope that their travels will provide her with an opportunity for rest. Perhaps the greatest mystery in the Patsy Carroll series involves precisely what it is that Aunt Martha needs rest from. On two occasions in the books, the group is left without a cook — a crisis of no little proportion. In Southern Skies, Aunt Martha heroically undertakes to produce a dinner. Little wonder that she’ll be retired long before Nancy arrives on the scene.

You can read these books online for free here:

Wilderness Lodge: https://archive.org/details/patsycarrollatwi00gord

Southern Skies: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53361

Golden West: https://archive.org/details/patsycarrollingo00gord

Old New England: https://archive.org/details/patsycarrollinol00gord

Here’s a reminder of the generations of girl readers who devoured mysteries featuring girl detectives: the inside cover of my copy of Patsy Carroll in Old New England.

Laura Keen, the Queen of Detectives

April 1, 2021 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

This story, which appeared in The New York Detective Library in 1892 (I won’t say “first appeared” because these stories were frequently published in several venues), is a prime example of the dime novel and a prime exhibition of the qualities that made these novels so popular. Therefore, its girl detective is a model of the young women who feature in this genre — a girl detective on steroids, if you will.

To give you a flavor of these novels, let me describe the first page. In the opening paragraphs, two slang-spouting miscreants seize hold of a woman who’s been following them and threaten her with a pistol and a knife. When they recognize her as “Laura Keen, the queen of detectives” (2), the one with the knife lunges for her throat, but after some verbal defiance, she trips the prospective knifer and:

Click! Like a flash a pistol appeared in Laura Keen’s hand.

Bang! the weapon was discharged.

Ring! the blade of the dirk-knife fell upon the pavement.

The wonderful shot had shattered the knife at the handle. (2)

And then:

Laura Keen’s clear, musical voice rang out in a mocking laugh, as she whipped out an immense bowie-knife, and while she kept “the drop” on the Englishman with her pistol, coolly picked her teeth with the point of the weapon. (2)

That was column one. Column two has Laura enjoining the villain to “give up your dreadful plot to ruin and blast the lives of innocent people, or I swear, in the sight of Heaven, here and now, that I will be a Nemesis upon your track to thwart you and hunt you to your doom” (2). Unfortunately, his sidekick takes a shot at her and ducks into a saloon. Undaunted, Laura steps into a nearby barber shop and changes her appearance from that of an Irish servant girl (in a red wig) to that of a fashionable lady (blonde wig) and follows the miscreant into the saloon, where she is again seized and de-wigged. Things are looking bad for Laura, despite a conspiratorial look exchanged with a small Negro bootblack, when she pulls a third (but who’s counting?) pistol “from some place of concealment upon her person” (2) and fires at the main villain, cutting off a lock of his hair. But then a woman (aptly named Jezebel) springs out from her hiding place and knocks her out with a slingshot. Thus endeth page 1.

The busy plot is pretty standard and involves various attempts by two criminal gangs to get their hands on a fortune by killing or marrying off the heiress against her will. The latter scheme entails framing her fiancé for the theft of some diamonds. Laura, recognized as the “detective queen” not only by the miscreants in the story but also by severable notable male detectives whose paths she crosses (she saves them or they save her), has been hired by the heiress to find her missing fiancé and clear him of the charges against him.

Laura, who is “about 22” and whose background is unrevealed in the story, displays many of the qualities common to girl detectives in the dime novels and after: she is fearless, determined, daring, cool, intelligent, courageous, and beautiful. She travels between New York and Baltimore, and even to Dakota, which introduces a Western setting so beloved of dime novel readers. Apart from her considerable skills at disguise and mimicry, she can pick a lock, row a boat, and climb a telegraph pole. And if you were impressed by the three pistols and one bowie knife she had secreted on her person, there’s more. Also stashed in her pocket are a small wireless set which she uses on two occasions to send and intercept telegraphs, and —wait for it! — a carrier pigeon. The latter is quite handy to a young woman who is captured and imprisoned as much as Laura is.

Even handier, however, are Laura’s sidekicks, who appear to be employees. In many ways, these two exhibit the racial and cultural stereotypes prevalent in the dime novels. Scud, most often referred to as “the little darky,” and Le Loup, the Dakota Indian, both speak in cringe-inducing dialect meant to provide comic relief. Yet both are portrayed as intelligent and quick-witted; Laura depends on them and gives both important assignments. In fact, Laura owes her life to their intelligence and courage on several occasions. Moreover, Le Loup has his own dramatic story and his own mission. Once that mission is accomplished, he disappears.

Another surprise is Kate Estabrook. Typically, these stories have room for only one heroine, and that’s the girl detective. The role of the female victim is to be victimized — to be terrorized, abducted, imprisoned, threatened, and rescued. Once Kate is rescued, however, she falls in with Laura’s plan for her to return to her house disguised as an Irish maid to spy on the man who is plotting her death, the man whom we presume to be her father. When she disappears again, we fear that she’s been recognized and recaptured, only to discover that she has set off for Dakota alone to free her real father from captivity.

It might be pleasant to speculate that the author of this novel, “C. Little,” might be a woman, but the Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography identifies this pen name as one belonging to H(arvey) K(ing) Shackleford, who wrote under several names. As Allan Arnold, Shackleford had published four years before Laura Keen a dime novel entitled A Diamond Ear-ring; or Nina, the Female Detective, which has many features in common with its successor. The year previous to Laura Keen, he published Belle Boyd, which has already been chronicled in this blog.

I was unable to find a full-text version of this book online. If anyone knows of a source, please let me know and I’ll post it.

Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher; or, A Son’s Vengeance

August 1, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Cover illustration for SANTA FE SAL — Sal confronts a roomful of barroom rowdies.

Detective stories and Westerns were two of the most popular genres appearing in 19^th-century dime novels and story papers, so it’s not surprising that they were frequently combined to enhance appeal. E.L. or Edward Wheeler was a prolific writer of dime novels who contributed several entries into the history of the girl detective, as you may remember from New York Nell, the first character whose exploits were reported in this blog. But whereas New York Nell is a good example of the urban detective, Santa Fe Sal is a Western figure.

The story is set in the Buckshot mining camp in Arizona. It opens in a barroom where a local tough proposes to bully a blind, elderly organ grinder into rolling dice for his organ, which is his sole means of livelihood. In the fashion of all Western heroes, Santa Fe Sal bursts onto the scene to see justice done:

“I’ll see that you ain’t cheated, old man!” cried a ringing voice — a voice that was so strange to the crowd that they wheeled about, simultaneously.

They beheld, standing near at hand, a girl of beauteous face and figure — a girl with midnight eyes and flowing dark-brown hair — a girl attired in [a] stylish, elegant-fitting gray suit of male attire, including patent-leather shoes, and a jaunty white slouch sombrero. She stood there smiling, while she twirled a light cane in her white hand. (2)

The strangeness of this apparition no doubt constituted a large part of its appeal to the reader.

Like New York Nell, Santa Fe Sal appears cross-dressed, the cane a superfluous ornament quickly abandoned by the narrator as an unworthy weapon. Later the villain will try to stir the crowd against her by referencing her male attire:

“She is evidently a desperate character; the very fact that she sports around in men’s clothing is against her, and casts a reproach on the fair reputation of your wives and daughters. I say the woman ought to be strung up without mercy!”

When another woman tries to shame Sal for her clothing, the detective nonchalantly cites economic practicality as her motive: “I’m bobbin’ around all over, and the petticoats I’d have to buy, through gittin’ ‘em tore, would bankrupt me.” Like other girl detectives, and detectives in general, Sal is also a master of disguise and enters one scene as Howlin’ Hank from Hardpan, whose true identity is exposed when an irate gambler makes to cut off Hank’s whiskers, only to have them come off in his hand. Disguise serves deception, another trait that was considered decidedly unladylike.

Like many early girl detectives, Sal invades forbidden space, the all-male space of the saloon; in contrast, the more conventional heroine of the story, the saloonkeeper’s daughter, says that she has tried to talk her father out of “that low business” and declares, “I never enter the saloon” (5). Although we hear of wives and daughters in the camp, its public spaces are dominated by men.

Sal violates feminine norms in other ways, as well. She is a practitioner of that Western art that so captivated Mark Twain: the art of the boast. Here’s her introduction:

“Who am I?” was the pert reply. “Well, if you want to know, I’m an angel without wings — a regular la-lah, you bet! I hail from Texas-way, an’ down there I’m known as Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher. Are you happy to meet me?”

After praising her own marksmanship with a gun, she introduces herself again:

“Down whar I cum from they call me Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher, ‘cause when I git inter a soiree, an’ hev a six-inch bowie, I kin carve the hull crowd, in no time!”

These are remarkable statements for a woman on many counts. They violate feminine ideals of modesty, certainly. They demonstrate an enjoyment of fame and a comfort with publicity that was supposed to be anathema to the Angel in the House, the 19^th-century feminine ideal that Sal may be referencing here. And if they paint her as a woman of action, they also evince Sal’s fluency in slang, language that carried a heavy weight of social disapproval when used by men, much less by women. Indeed, she has the nerve to chastise the villain for his own language, which includes the words “thunderation” and “the deuce”: “You’r’ a reg’lar old hoss on expletives, ain’t ye? (5).”

In spite of her sobriquet, Sal’s first weapons are a pair of revolvers, as depicted in the cover illustration. On the second full page of the story, she kills a man, one of a threatening mob, who disregards her warning to stay back. Nor does she show any remorse, saying, “That man earned his fate! . . . And if any of the rest of you want a funeral just notify me” (3). When she is later called a “murderess,” she objects: “I put a pill in that feller’s cabeza, ‘ca’se I’d told him if he come for me he was a dead man. He came, and you bet he went, quicker’n he came” (5). But eventually Sal feels forced to draw her knife and justify her moniker, addressing an angry mob:

“Ef you’re bound to crowd on me, all I ask is that you leave yer shootin’-irons alone, and draw yer carvin’ tools, an’ meet me more on terms of equality. I’d ruther not have any scrimmage with you at all, fer some one’s bound to get dissected, but ef yer bound ter all pit yerselves ag’in’ one lone girl, you’ll be pretty apt to find Santa Fe Sal right to home, and the latch-string out!”

This speech so shames her would-be attackers that they back off and we never get to see a demonstration of Sal’s carving skills.

SPOILER ALERT. It may not surprise you to learn that Wheeler’s imagination only extends so far in the matter of gender-bending. Sal’s male client tells her at one point:

“This is no life for one to lead who is so beautiful and accomplished as yourself. If I live, we will take little Bertie and go to my home in the East, where your sole business will be to act as his governess.”

The modern reader may well wonder if little Bertie is quite prepared to learn shooting and knife fighting at the hands of his new governess, not to mention why the speaker believes that this vision of domestic life would appeal to Sal the Slasher. Our skepticism is further aroused when the narrator observes:

He spoke earnestly and kindly, but not passionately, yearningly, as a lover might have spoken.

So imagine our surprise when Sal blushes and considers the proposal in language devoid of slang:

“I wonder if I ought to take advantage of it, and give up this wild, roving existence? He is a true gentleman, and offers me a home, and — and maybe —”

The color came faster into her cheeks, and her eyes glowed bright as the stars that twinkled in the blue dome above. (12)

Yes, reader, she marries him, in a single sentence that strips her of her colorful sobriquet: “And Santa Fe Sal (otherwise Sara Wilmot) came with him, and became his wife” (15). This event marks the end of “the detective firm of Santa Fe Sal & Green” (15). A disappointment, surely, but perhaps we ought to acknowledge that a writer as prolific as Wheeler knew his audience and presumed that they wanted the ending that readers are said to have wanted from many generations of storytellers: a wedding.

Santa Fe Sal is not available in full text online.