I read a lot of police procedural mysteries for fun. This is the golden era for readers because there is an abundance of excellent self-published books on Kindle Unlimited. It’s great for authors, too, because they don’t need to depend on agents or publishers.
One thing I observe in the police procedural genre, be it written by an establishment or an indie author, is that the female protagonist is always the same person. She is a promiscuous, physically aggressive, socially inept, spartan slob. I’ve been reading these novels for decades, and they are all great but identical in this one respect.
This is not the authors’ fault. They have to write for a female audience because that’s 99% of the readership. This means they can’t have a male cop protagonising the series because you either make him a total eunuch or female readers will not accept him and won’t read. My favorite author in the genre, Sophie Hannah, found the perfect formula to keep female readers content. Her male protagonist is incapable of having sex because of childhood trauma. Her female heroine is extremely promiscuous but only because she’s in love with the male character who can’t have sex.
Clarissa's Blog 
Just finished reading The Punishment She Deserves on your recommendation, and I do like that about Havers: she’s not that character.
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“the female protagonist”
Is a man…. all of the traits you describe are conventions for describing the traditional male detective…
How very odd…..
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Absolutely. They are men in everything but their genitals. It’s a convention of the genre that nobody is managing to escape.
Barbara Havers, mentioned in another comment, is not promiscuous. But she’s an insensitive, socially stunted slob all right.
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LOL, damn, it is no wonder why mere “insensitive, socially stunted slob”s just might have some difficulties understanding others’ minds ;-D
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I think you have come down too hard on Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. I might agree that she comes off as insensitive but a socially stunted slob? That is striking too close to home since I like her.
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I love this character, too! But her knicker storage practices are unconventional, to say the least.
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Can you explain why? Thanks!
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Women find male sexuality as it really is icky and threatening. The only way they’ll find it acceptable is if it’s concentrated obsessively and exclusively on a female character they identify with. But how do you do that in a police procedural? Especially if you want to do a series, which is a staple of the genre.
Sophie Hannah hacked the algorithm better than anybody with her “a promiscuous woman courts a virginal man” plotline. This is the biggest fantasy of about half of all women. The second half, in the meantime, fantasizes about a virginal woman forced into sex by a rich and powerful man. 😁😁😁
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I disagree about male protagonists being unappealing to women unless they are eunuchs. I read at least two series with the male protagonists that were definitely not that, and never felt threatened by their sexuality: Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Alon series and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series. In fact, I would be uninterested in a character that was asexual. As for the female characters, to be a detective you have to be atypical woman, without family, because your job requires your total attention. The only mystery series I’ve read with the female protagonist that I liked is Sue Grafton’s Alphabet novels with Kinsey Millhone as the main female character. The early books were great and I really liked Kinsey (maybe because I saw some of her traits in me) but as the series progressed, I found her to be less believable, especially in her relationships with men. That part of her did not match the rest of the character, IMO.
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Have you noticed that Connelly swapped Bosch out for a female detective? Bosch is a remnant of the old Maltese Falcon style of mystery writing. There are no readers for that today.
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Yes, I read at least one book with the female detective but she’s not interesting. I also do not like that Connelly combined her and Bosch in his current books. I stopped reading mysteries in the last few years because they became boring and predictable. I also think that most series are way too long. For example, Silva’s Gabriel Alon series was great for the first 10-15 books (some are stronger than others) and I was impressed with his accurate portrayal of the russian characters, but I could no longer read them when he started to inject current politics in his novels. The books are political, of course, and in the past he was able to be more neutral and objective about it, but they because more woke in the last few years. I think most mystery writers should know when to end the series and maybe start a new one, but I believe it’s more about money than coming up with a new story and characters. When a publisher sees that some books sell well, they want to milk it to the max.
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I had the same experience with Richard North Patterson. He had some excellent courtroom dramas but then went all in on political propaganda. Became unreadable.
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Yeah, it is interesting, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot seem cold, even asexual, although the latter has a romantic touch. While in films, Tom Selleck, the oft played detective, is portrayed as anything else, while actually obviously being a solid husband in real life. In real life, I suspect —
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