Hivemind Help?

[chelseagirl]

So I am working on a mystery novel about a female lawyer in the 1880s. (There were a few of them in the US.)

A friend of mine is writing about a female Pinkerton in the 1870s.

If we wanted an exciting new group name for what we write, what would you suggest?

I would like New Woman Mysteries, except I think you have to be a 19th century scholar for the term New Woman to mean anything to you. There's an author with a series called Gaslight Mysteries so that is out. She wondered about something with Steam in it, but I see Steampunk as being pretty much over as any kind of market force. (I say this as someone who was active on the scene 7-8 years ago and wandered away, because nothing that interesting was happening. Though I met amazing people and lived out my fantasies of riding the subway and going clubbing dressed as a Victorian.)

Comments

[muccamukk]

I'm only vaguely familiar with the period and got New Women. I think paired with cover art making the period clear, the meaning would be easy to get.

Steampunk is largely dead.

[chelseagirl]

Steampunk disappointed me so very badly by being all surface and no substance.

Hmm, I don't think my friend likes New Woman as much as I do, but I'll keep it in mind.

[muccamukk]

There were serious arguments even at its height that it was an aesthetic more than a genre. I've read the odd good story, but mostly... yeah.

[chelseagirl]

I've actually published multiple academic articles on it. At the beginning I thought it had great potential to be a critique of both the 19th century and our views of it, as well as a fascinating exploration of alternative pasts for technology.

The pity is, it quickly devolved into yet another airship adventure featuring a female engineer who defied convention!!! There were some interesting books, but not many.

[silme13]

I get New Women, but then my alma mater is big on New Western History and has been for years -- studying history more from the muted groups rather than the dominant group's point of view.

[chelseagirl]

I don't think my friend likes it as much as I do, in any case.

[herself_nyc]

Yes. I know about New Women because I've read a lot of 19th and early 20th century English novels.

[executrix]

"Women of the Gilded Age Mysteries"?

[chelseagirl]

There are at least 2 series out with female leads identifying themselves with Gilded Age, and also my friend's is a bit early to be considered that. Alas.

Love the plot bunny -- is she one of Durer's?

[executrix]

A+ bunny ID! I made the icon for a B7 daemon AU--Aletheia was Avon's daemon.

[kore]

/drive-by love for Durer bunnies

[lunabee34]

I am not allowed to name things.

I'm also not clever or witty on the spot at all.

What about something playing on western or frontier (with the idea of frontier also meaning boundary)?

Yeah, IDK.

[executrix]

Civil Court--The Final Frontier!

[lunabee34]

See, this is why y'all are the clever ones.

[chelseagirl]

Not all of the stories are Western. My mysteries are going to take place in New York, and the Pinkerton writer is turning her focus to 19th century Edinburgh next. (She's Scottish.) So it needs a broader scope than that.

[lunabee34]

Ah. I see.

I got nothing. LOL

[kore]

I bet CSI:Gaslight is taken.

[lunabee34]

Ahhahahaah, I love it.

[chelseagirl]

Also possibly a violation of copyright? ;-)

[kore]

....my first two suggestions are unprintable and not helpful. I like New Woman Mysteries! Mysteries for/of the New Woman?

[chelseagirl]

I kinda do, too, but she and I both have to like it if it's a mutual movement.

Not a Serious Suggestion

[executrix]

If you wanted to branch out and write about England at an earlier period: "Laura Holt, the Radical." Laura knows that, as a woman, she cannot stand for Parliament, but she can pretend to be the agent for imaginary candidate, Remington Steele. But then one day he shows up...

OK, this IS a serious suggestion: you can use "New Woman Mysteries" by the simple expedient of asking the publisher to include a brief description of the phenomenon on the book jacket: "In the 1880s, respectable people were scandalized by the New Woman, who demanded freedom to work, keep their own money, be equal to their husbands...and, worst of all, to vote. [Character Name] is one of them. She's a pioneering woman lawyer in a pioneering territory."

Re: Not a Serious Suggestion

[chelseagirl]

Haha! Not fanfic, though. But what a lovely play on Eliot and 20th century television. I confess I did not own a television during most of Remington Steele's run but it sounds PERFECT. Plus at the end of Middlemarch when Dorothea married Ladislaw and he later got into Parliament, I always figured she was probably his speechwriter. Make that definitely his speechwriter, and they talked over all of the political issues of the day and the positions he would adopt, after the children went to bed at night.

That's actually quite good. Perhaps I can use it as my own series title even if my friend doesn't want it for our Exciting New Genre.

Re: Not a Serious Suggestion

[executrix]

Will Ladislaw, unfortunately for him, lived before the age of mass pictorial media. He's just like Robert Redford's character in The Candidate: pretty and empty-headed. At least, as you say, he could be puppeteered by the high-minded Dorothea rather than a proto-PAC.

In my re-imagining, after Casaubon basically exhausts himself to death exercising his marital rights, Dorothea and Lydgate enter into a discreet affair and leave Will to Rosamond. They deserve each other.

[herself_nyc]

Bustle mysteries? Heh.