A Suitable Job for a Woman by Val Mcdermid

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A Suitable Job for a Woman by Val Mcdermid

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A Suitable Job for a Woman by Val Mcdermid

But down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished or afraid. When Raymond Chandler wrote these words in his classic The Simple Art of Murder, he drew a blueprint for the male private eyes who descend from Philip Marlowe to populate the world of crime fiction.
But what if the private eye is a woman? And what if she is not a character in a novel but a real, working investigator testing not only the meanness but the absurdity of life on seamy streets? Who will tell her story?


Enter Manchester's Val McDermid, herself a skilled writer of the P.I. novel but for years a professional journalist. In an effort to plumb the real world of working women--and throw new light on her own craft--she has interviewed women private eyes from both sides of the Atlantic and assembled their stories with an eye for the absurd and a keen grasp of the gritty nuts and bolts of the profession.


As fascinating as fiction, A Suitable Job for a Woman is, in the words of Edgar-winning author Nevada Barr, a concise and eye-opening trek through the competence, humor, and humanity of women.

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into forty languages, and have sold over seventeen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011.

In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She writes full time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781890208158
ISBN 10 1890208159
Title A Suitable Job for a Woman
Author Val Mcdermid
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Poisoned Pen Press
Year published 1995-12-01
Number of pages 320
Prizes Short-listed for Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Critical/Biographical) 2000
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable