The Queens of Crime
46 pages • 1-hour read
Marie BenedictThe Queens of Crime
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Chapters 1-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of gender discrimination, graphic violence, and death.
Chapter 1 Summary: “February 1, 1931—London, England”
Dorothy Sayers, an English mystery writer, meets with Agatha Christie, the country’s most revered mystery writer. Dorothy hasn’t seen Agatha since her mysterious disappearance five years ago. After Agatha’s ex-husband asked for a divorce, her car was found near the edge of a cliff. Agatha was found 10 days later, and she had no memory of the incident. Dorothy worries that the tough, charming woman she knew before the incident is gone. Agatha reluctantly agrees to join the Detection Club, a new organization Dorothy founded for writers of mystery fiction.
Chapter 2 Summary: “February 1, 1931—London, England”
Dorothy argues that the Detection Club can help raise the profile of mystery fiction, which she considers unfairly maligned among the mainstream literary community. She reveals that some male members of the Detection Club, including President G. K. Chesterton (known as Gilbert), have been fighting the inclusion of female authors besides herself and Agatha. Agatha is infuriated. Dorothy proposes that she and Agatha recruit their friends to form an exclusive club for female writers to protest the exclusion of women from the Detection Club. Agatha agrees.
Chapter 3 Summary: “February 10, 1931—London, England”
Agatha welcomes mystery writers Emma Orczy, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham to a private room at the University Women’s Club, where Dorothy has arranged a murder mystery game. Posing as the victim, Dorothy silently observes how the women work together to unravel the mystery she laid out for them. She notices some tension between Emma and Ngaio but is pleased when Agatha helps bridge the gaps between them. Together, the women find the supposed murder weapon, which is marked with a red ribbon. Dorothy congratulates the women and offers them champagne.
Chapter 4 Summary: “February 10, 1931—London, England”
Dorothy is relieved to find that the women worked well together and feels confident that they can be an effective team. As she watches the women celebrate, she wonders about their private lives. Although the women all come from disparate backgrounds, they seem to be developing a solid rapport. They all express their delight at having solved an actual mystery. Dorothy tells the women about their exclusion from the Detection Club and proposes that they join together to infiltrate the club. Dorothy suggests that they call themselves the Queens of Crime, and the others agree.
Chapter 5 Summary: “March 20, 1931—London, England”
At the Northumberland Avenue Hotel, Dorothy sits in a place of honor at the Detection Club’s initiation ceremony. She receives dirty looks from fellow members when she inadvertently recites the club’s oath (which she wrote) along with the president, Gilbert Chesterton. As she watches the club’s members recite the oath, she imagines the detectives that each of them became famous for. Unbeknownst to Gilbert or the other members, Emma, Ngaio, and Margery join the queue. As Agatha and Dorothy hoped, Gilbert is too stunned to act, and he allows the women to recite the oath and join the Detection Club.
Chapter 6 Summary: “March 20, 1931—London, England”
At the post-ceremony party, Dorothy discusses plans to secure a clubhouse for the Detection Club with the profits from a collaboratively written mystery called The Floating Admiral. Although the other members of the Detection Club are willing to socialize with Dorothy and Agatha, she notices Emma, Ngaio, and Margery sitting on their own. They joke that they have the plague, and Dorothy feels guilty about subjecting them to such immediate rejection by their peers. She takes them to Agatha and Gilbert, hoping that if the president talks to them, other members will too. Gilbert walks away, leading Agatha to chastise him.
Chapter 7 Summary: “March 20, 1931—London, England”
Agatha storms out of the party with the other women in tow, shocked at the behavior of the male writers. Dorothy insists that the benefits of the club should be accessible to them, especially since she helped found it. Dorothy proposes that the women try to solve a real-life murder to prove their expertise in mysteries to their male colleagues. She suggests that they investigate the death of May Daniels, a young woman who disappeared from a train station bathroom and was found dead months later. Dorothy plans to join her husband, reporter Mac Fleming, as he investigates the murder in Boulogne, France.
Chapter 8 Summary: “March 22, 1931—The English Channel and Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France”
Dorothy sails to France with Mac, hoping that the trip will bring them closer together. Because of Mac’s job as a reporter, the two have been living apart for several months. Mac’s drinking and difficult experiences in the war also cause tension sometimes. Upon their arrival in Boulogne, they’re greeted by reporter Frank Routledge, who takes them to a small bar called the Vole’s Hole, where other English reporters covering the May Daniels disappearance have gathered. Dorothy listens quietly as the reporters discuss everything they’ve learned about the murder.
Chapter 9 Summary: “March 23, 1931—Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France”
The next morning, Dorothy accompanies Mac to a police briefing for the gathered reporters. The local police, known as the gendarmes, announce that May Daniels’s purse was found near her body with only her identification inside. Dorothy is suspicious of this but notices that none of the male reporters comment. The police also announce that a syringe with traces of morphine was found near the body. The male reporters are swept up in the excitement of the briefing, and Dorothy is shocked by their callous treatment of the victim. She vows to remember that May Daniels was a real person while investigating.
Chapter 10 Summary: “March 23, 1931—Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France”
As Mac and his fellow journalists share their theories, Dorothy quietly leaves to meet up with the other Queens of Crime. The women have gathered at a fancy café that Dorothy is confident none of the male reporters would enter. She proposes that the women try to solve the mystery by understanding who May Daniels was in life, rather than focusing on the morbid details of her death. Ngaio suggests that they follow the itinerary for the day that May spent in Boulogne before her disappearance, as laid out in the police report.
Chapter 11 Summary: “March 23, 1931—Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France”
Dorothy and the other women walk to the ferry station where May Daniels and fellow nurse Celia McCarthy arrived for their day trip to Boulogne on the day that May disappeared. Dorothy imagines the women deciding to go to Boulogne spontaneously while on leave, not caring that the ferry schedule allowed them only a few hours. She realizes that May and Celia belonged to a generation of “surplus women” who remained unmarried after two million men died in the Great War. Dorothy and Emma question a ferry ticket agent, who treats them rudely.
Chapter 12 Summary: “March 23, 1931—Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France”
Agatha, Ngaio, and Margery are nearly ticketed by security officers, who accuse them of trespassing in the ferry building. Dorothy gets them off with a warning and chastises the women for acting as if they had the authority of detectives. She encourages them to use their special talents and instincts as women in the investigation. They stop in a nearby café, posing as tourists, and ask their waitress, Madame Brat, about May Daniels. Madame Brat reveals that the girls patronized the restaurant the day of the disappearance, and she gives Dorothy the name of a hat shop she recommended to them.
Chapter 13 Summary: “March 23, 1931—Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France”
Dorothy and the others follow the route from the restaurant to the hat shop that Madame Brat recommended, stopping in every store along the way and asking about the missing English girls. None of the shopkeepers remember seeing May or Celia on the day of their disappearance. At the hat shop, Dorothy and Emma chat with a shopkeeper as Emma tries on hats. The shopkeeper reveals that May tried on several hats but bought nothing. Later that day, however, May returned without Celia and bought a simple grey hat, which she put in her bag. The police took the shopkeeper’s testimony but didn’t include it in the official report.
Chapters 1-13 Analysis
The novel’s opening chapters suggest that the female writers at the heart of the novel are particularly suited to investigate the disappearance of May Daniels because they’re women. The protagonist Dorothy Sayers suggests that her fellow investigators rely on the tools they “have at [their] disposal” (62), including their empathy, nonconfrontational appearance, and unique perspective as women. While discussing the case with her husband’s journalist friends, Dorothy is shocked when one of the men “refers to May Daniels as ‘it,’ not ‘her’” (46). As a woman, Dorothy naturally has empathy for May that her male counterparts lack in their quest for a sensationalized story to publish. Dorothy’s perspective on the problems facing “surplus women” (58) like May and Celia enables her to see May as “a girl, discarded and forgotten” (49) rather than a mere prop in a mystery.
In addition, Dorothy notes that the group’s nonconfrontational appearance as middle-aged women makes them a less threatening presence than the male investigators for Boulogne locals. She correctly assumes that the “townspeople might be more willing to share with us” (63) if they see Dorothy and the others as “a group of ordinary English women tourists concerned about what happened to a poor English girl” (63). As a result, Dorothy and the others glean more information from key witnesses than the police or male journalists because of their gender.
The novel likewise suggests that the women’s perspective allows them to see the details of the case more clearly than their male counterparts. When the waitress at the restaurant near the ferry building shares details about May and Celia’s clothing, Dorothy takes these details seriously. She realizes that while “May had taken great care with her appearance” (67), her friend “Celia’s fashion choices seem more serviceable, even dowdy” (67). This detail helps shape Dorothy’s understanding of the two girls. She believes that “the police were fools to dismiss” (67) the waitress as frivolous because of her gender and focus on fashion.
Later, Dorothy realizes that the official police record doesn’t include the testimony of the girl at the hat shop, who stated that May returned alone later on the day of her disappearance. Dorothy suggests that the police “chalked it up to the frivolous nature and changeable mind of a young lady” (73) rather than investigating what Dorothy immediately saw as “strange behavior” (73). Her early investigation of the disappearance in Boulogne indicates that her perspective as a woman enables her to notice important details that the men ignore.
Despite the novel’s interest in the perspective of female investigators, the novel reflects an awareness of the societal prejudices against women, which introduces Challenges Facing Women in 20th-Century Europe as a theme. The genesis of the Queens of Crime is the fact that male writers often exclude their female peers. In particular, the male members of the Detection Club, a professional and social organization for mystery writers, believe that the admission of female writers “lowered rather than raised” (27) the club’s standards. Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie recruit three other female writers to ensure that women “have a place among the pantheon of preeminent mystery writers” (8) by “infiltrating the ranks of the Detection club as a group” (19). The novel suggests that the exclusion of women from the literary community was a serious problem in the mid-20th century.
The initiation ceremony in chapters 5 and 6 dramatizes women’s exclusion from the literary community of mystery writers. Although Dorothy has “a special place of honor as a club founder” (21) during the ceremony, she isn’t allowed to participate in the initiation rites, which are instead run by the male president she was forced to install. Even though Dorothy “painstakingly crafted” the initiation oath, she receives dirty looks from the club’s male members when she becomes emotional and recites it along with the president. Dorothy and Agatha manage to trick the president into admitting three other female writers to the club, but the male members “alienate them” during the post-ceremony party, refusing to stand “anywhere near them” (26). The dismissal of female achievement and the isolation of those women allowed into the club reflect the challenges facing women in the early 20th century.
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