The Female of the Species

Women take the lead in the latest collection in Belanger Books’s Great Detectives series, including the first female detective in English fiction, Ruth Trail, who stars in my story The Red Ledger.

Although not well known now, for 52 weeks in 1862 and 1863, Edward Ellis’s accounts of Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy thrilled penny dreadful readers. While Holmes was still a child, she was catching criminals for both the police and Eneas Earthworm at the Secret Intelligence Office.

Ruth’s story appeared to end in the final installment, in which she was left disfigured and locked away in a convent. However, such a tragic ending was not fitting for this trailblazing investigator. So, the Grande Dame of Detection returns in The Red Ledger, older but still just as formidable, to settle scores and right wrongs with a little help from her young associate, Sherlock Holmes.

You can find out more about the return of Ruth the Betrayer and some of the many female sleuths who followed her in Sherlock Holmes and the Great Lady Detectives. The collection is available to pre-order now on Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1606726313/sherlock-holmes-and-the-great-lady-detectives-0.