A Celebration of Sleuth-Mothers

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Mothers are like the Roman god Janus, one face looking to the past and one to the future. They exist in a duality because motherhood is temporal, themselves transitioning from maiden to crone while ferrying their charge from infancy to adulthood. That duality and journey make them delightfully complex characters for authors. And dare I say the perfect amateur sleuth.

In Nursery Crimes, the first of Ayelet Waldman’s Mommy Track mysteries, the reader meets Juliet Applebaum, a public defender with a preschool-aged daughter and another on the way. Waldman illustrates Juliet’s Janus status in this passage from chapter two. “Awash in ambivalence, alternately bored and entrance, full of both joy and despair, I joined the ranks of stay-at-home moms. At least for the time being.”

So, what is a woman who has trained her brain to look for details and is familiar with crime and criminals to do? Well, it certainly isn’t singing another verse of Wheels on the Bus, as we see in this exchange between Juliet and her ex-colleague.

“What do you want me to say, Al? That I’m playing private eye because I’m bored with the daily grind of motherhood?”

“Well, are you?” He asked.

I considered for a minute. “Probably. Is there anything wrong with that?”

No, there is everything right with it and one of the reasons why Waldman’s seven-book Mommy-Track series (2000-2006) was so refreshing. The admission that motherhood could be both joyous and mind-numbing validated what many readers experienced in their own lives. The series explores and exploits that temporal in-between. It uses Juliet Applebaum’s skills as a lawyer and the constraints of being responsible for a small human(s) to add layers of authenticity to the stories.

Society often overlooks and even erases women caring for children. Their caregiving task is considered devoid of valued skills. That invisibility and discredit allow the sleuth-mother to observe and investigate in the shadows. It provides a cloak of anonymity that a law-enforcement badge will never possess.

Waldman’s series is not the only example of the mother as sleuth. Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway is an archaeologist as well as a single parent. Both series influenced me in my choice to create a main character that was highly educated and responsible for the well-being of a child. Miriam Quiñones-Smith, the protagonist of my Caribbean Kitchen mystery series, has a Ph.D. She puts her academic career as a food anthropologist on hold to care for her four-year-old son as the family transitions from NYC to Miami. Miriam struggles initially with being a stay-at-home parent. The life of the mind is difficult to achieve when there is a child requiring attention. But the skills developed in pursuit of that advanced degree demand to be exercised. Research, observation, and the testing of theories put her a step or two ahead of the police investigation.

Other examples of the sleuth-mother are Leslie Meyer’s Lucy Stone series, Katherine Hall Page’s Faith Fairchild series, Joanna Campbell Slan’s Kiki Lowenstein series, and Wendy Corsi Staub’s Lily Dale series. The series main characters, each in their own way, take advantage of the dialectical nature of motherhood. Like Janus’s two faces, motherhood can mean two identities within one person-the tender caregiver and the careerwoman. Over the course of a series, as the child grows into independence, the protagonist moves from a bifurcated identity into a unified one.

In Page’s Faith Fairchild series (1990-2019), the reader hears maternal truths throughout the series. Like in this passage from The Body In The Piazza (2013), “Yes, Faith could honestly say that most of the time she not only loved her children but liked being with them. That said, she was joyfully anticipating the almost two weeks stretching out before her sans the cries that made up her everyday life:” the author goes on to list domestic duties from science projects to mean girl drama to laundry. The honesty of that sentiment makes Faith Fairchild relatable. The character’s self-awareness that ability to validate two oppositional feelings/thoughts within herself is what makes her a credible investigator. In a cozy mystery, the killer is a community member. The mother-sleuth must be able to see that two things can exist at the same time. The kindly shopkeeper can also have a dark secret that has festered into a murderous rage.

In book one in Joan Hess’s Claire Malloy series (1986-2015), we meet the widowed Claire and her fourteen-year daughter, Caron. By book twenty, the daughter is entering college. Over the course of the series, Claire expressed her love for and her frustration with her snarky teen many times. This line from Busy Bodies sums it up nicely. “In spite of –or at least in the intervals between—her bouts of emotional turbulence, I loved my daughter…” Hess’s version of the mother-sleuth turns the 24/7 caregiving obstacle into an advantage. The difference between a child and a teen is that a teen (and her best friend) can become sidekicks to the sleuth. They can be sent on fact-finding missions even if, at the time, the mission is unbeknownst to them. One of the charms of the Malloy series is its intergenerational banter. The teen years phase of mothering is all about listening and holding one’s tongue until the whole truth comes out, which again are valued skills for a sleuth.

Readers of amateur sleuth/cozy mysteries come to a series because of the setting, but they stay because of the story arch. The sleuth-mother’s arch gives the author heartstrings to pluck while providing the reader a relatable character to cheer on. While not everyone is a mother, everyone knows one. The ones in mystery series are smart, talented, and daring. They can solve a whodunit puzzle while running a bake sale or chaperoning a school dance. Don’t mess with the mothers. They have mad skills.

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