"They Weren't All Fakes": Feminist Crime Fiction as an 'Authentic Copy' in Marcia Muller's Edwin of the Iron Shoes

Abstract

Crime fiction is, by design, a rather conservative genre, as its conventional nar-rative is built on an investigator re-establishing a ‘broken’ status quo that is deemed legitimate. However, therein also lies the mode’s subversive potential, as the initial disruption of the status quo necessarily calls into question the primacy of the normative social order. One prominent branch of detective lit-erature that has capitalised on this opportunity for genre revision is feminist crime fiction, which blossomed into a thematically cohesive, commercially via-ble subgenre around 1980 – even though its practitioners routinely have to contend with the fact that appropriating the genre’s major tropes also means reaffirming some of its more ‘unsavoury’ tendencies, most notably its long-standing history of Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and heteronormativity. In-deed, Marcia Muller’s novel Edwin of the Iron Shoes, which was published in 1977 and which is generally considered to be a pioneering work of feminist crime fiction, effectively performs and explicitly reflects on this tension: the story of empowered female detective Sharon McCone solving a murder con-nected to the San Francisco antiques market offers a pointed counternarrative to the conventionally male-dominated genre and, through its prominent en-gagement with art fraud, critically examines feminist crime fiction’s status as an ideologically charged imitation of a pre-existing form. More specifically, Edwin of the Iron Shoes positions itself as a copie conforme, an ‘authentic copy,’ of the model it appropriates, making the case that an emulative copy of a venerated original can ‘rise’ to the level of a venerable original in its own right.