An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

At 22, Cordelia becomes the sole proprietor of a failing detective agency after her partner’s suicide. She was trained as a secretary but has a keen intellect and an instinct for asking questions when events don’t make sense. Cordelia was orphaned by the death of her father, with whom she had been traveling as a secretary. Her mother died at Cordelia’s birth; Cordelia’s relationship with her parents is paralleled in other parent-child relationships of the novel.

Cordelia has many of the characteristics of the traditional private detective: She is dogged, she follows her own moral code, and she uses logic and reason to follow clues where they lead, without letting emotion interfere. But because she is young and a woman, she also subverts many of the expectations of this archetype. This would have been unusual and surprising at the time the novel was written, in the 1970s.

Cordelia is a hero and an antihero: She solves the case of Mark’s murder but prevents his murderer from being arrested or tried in court, essentially invoking her own justice for him. She is a conundrum: well educated though she was forced to leave school early, and capable of poetic thoughts but a realist.