It is the late Victorian era and society is fascinated by - and worried about - that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides bicycles and drives those newfangled automobiles and doesn't like to be told what to do. In crime fiction as everywhere else, such women are breaking all the rules. Instead of attending tea parties and chatting about fashion, these pioneer women detectives are out shadowing suspects through London fog, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses - and sometimes committing a lesser cime in order to solve a murder.

The first-ever anthology devoted strictly to the pioneer female characters in crime fiction, the direct ancestors of everyone from Miss Marple to V I Warshawski, as well as the great female criminal masterminds. Smart, funny, and wildly adventurous tales of women who refused to sit politely in the parlor and chat about fashion.