It’s the Honourable Daisy Wells’s birthday! Happy birthday Daisy! To celebrate (because Daisy loves a fuss), I thought I’d do a thread on queer detectives in classic crime fiction.

Daisy came out in #DeathintheSpotlight, making her (I think! I’m happy to be wrong!) the first out queer detective in kids’ crime fiction. Obviously not the first out queer detective:Val McDermid wrote the first lesbian detective in British fiction in 1987 with Report for Murder.

It’s not uncommon in 2020 to have out queer detectives - Anne Holt’s Hanne Wilhelmsen has a girlfriend, among others - though obviously it hasn’t always been this way. BUT I’d argue that queerness and detection have always gone sneakily hand in hand.

The idea of a detective, when the genre began, was conceptually a bit uncomfortable. A person who operates outside of society? Who sneaks around at night? Who breaks rules to solve cases? Who uncovers secrets? That’s ... well, that’s a bit queer.

The detective novel partly came from the sensation novel, a completely fantastic, overdramatic genre that it’s hard not to adore. A lot of the main characters in sensation novels behave a lot like detectives, and a lot of them are really quite queer.

There’s queer icon Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White, who has a small but glorious moustache and spends her time clambering about on balconies in the rain hunting for clues in a distinctly unfeminine manner.

There’s Robert, the hero of Lady Audley’s Secret, who spends the whole novel hunting for his male best friend George and ends up falling in love with George’s sister purely because, and I am not making this up, she looks exactly like George.

I could go on! So many feminine men and masculine women and hidden longings and subverted gender roles! But I need to move on to the OG detective couple Holmes and Watson.

Holmes and Watson set the pattern for detective duos in terms of case solving, and also for that detective relationship where they’re married but haven’t got around to noticing it yet.

Yes of course, Watson marries a woman at one point but it is literally barely mentioned in the stories, Holmes refuses to engage with the relationship and poor old Mary is shuffled off ASAP. The true couple are Holmes and Watson, loyal to each other to the end.

But if you think that relationship is as obvious as it gets, may I introduce you to Raffles and Bunny, written by E W Hornung?

Hornung was Conan Doyle’s brother in law. Hornung wrote what essentially amounts to gay(er) Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. I can’t imagine how awkward Sunday lunches were.