Women chasing justice
THE BEST FEMALE INVESTIGATORS LIVE ON LONG AFTER THEIR CASES HAVE BEEN SOLVED
You know what Easttown is from the first shots of HBO’s latest crime drama. There are the leaning wooden houses and the skeletal woods. There is the smoke of industry and a cluttered graveyard. In the midst of it, there is Mare Sheehan, the town detective, best known for a remarkable basketball shot made when she was still in high school. Easttown needs all of the heroes it can get.
Mare is right at home in this corner of Pennsylvania. She hobbles resignedly between callouts, with a defeated posture and a limp left from volleying a fence in pursuit of a burglar. Mare volleys a fence the way most of us would: inelegantly, with injury. She is enclosed by her responsibility to her family. After a recent tragedy, she cares for a grandson alongside her teenage daughter. Her exhusband has moved into the house next door, enamoured with a new fiancee. When she returns from a one-night stand, her mother waits in the kitchen, armed with caustic inquiries.
We’ve seen the weary, dislikable detective before, of course. Mare is even haunted by that one unsolved crime, the disappearance of a schoolfriend’s daughter, which she combs through at night. But this is where the tropes end. Winslet’s performance is immaculate. Beneath her gruffness is a defensive spite, coiled and poised; beneath that, still, is a terrible vulnerability. She is wounded by her family’s decision to attend her ex-husband’s engagement party, in place of the memorial basketball game at her old high school. She storms from a new lover’s party, incandescent that he would fail to greet her at the door. Mare Of Easttown is dominated by the murder of a teenage girl in the town, but in Winslet’s performance is the weight of Mare’s whole career.
This is when female investigators are at their best, of course: when they are not just a gesture made to even out an old genre, but alive outside of episodes and pages. The women below might be best known for certain of their cases, but I like to think of them living on, with many more crimes to solve.
GRACE RASMUSSEN AND KAREN DUVALL Unbelievable (Netflix)
They’re included together, here, but Rasmussen and Duvall are very different women, united to hunt a serial rapist. Unbelievable is too nuanced for any good cop/bad cop dynamics; instead, Rasmussen and Duvall simply have their own ways of surviving the gruelling investigation. Rasmussen exercises her demons trail running, while Duvall heads to church. One of the great pleasures of Unbelievable is watching their relationship – stilted, suspicious – beginning to thaw. Rasmussen and Duvall also buck some tired detective tropes. They’re each happily married, and dedicated to their work. They are gloriously ordinary heroes.
MARGE GUNDERSON Fargo (Stan)
Fur-hooded, seven months pregnant, and a friend to all of Fargo: few characters are so much of a joy to spend time with as Marge. She is charming and devoted, whether she’s investigating a triple homicide or rooting for her husband in a duck painting contest. Marge has a heart of gold, sure, but no time for William H. Macy’s hapless schemer, Jerry Lundergaard. You don’t get snippy with Marge.
DANA SCULLY
The X-Files (SBS On Demand, Amazon, Disney+) Sure, it’s Mulder who wants to believe. But let’s be honest: Scully was saving him from the second episode of The X-Files. Scully is insistent that the answers the pair are seeking are right there, in the science she’s spent her lifetime studying: “You just have to know where to look.” Her cynicism – and Mulder’s manic enthusiasm – set up one of television’s greatest chemistries. But Scully herself is conflicted, caught between medical pragmatism and devotion to her Catholic faith. She is brave, stubborn and cynical, as skilled with a comeback as combat. All while sporting some of television’s most iconic haircuts.
CLARICE STARLING, The Silence of the Lambs (Foxtel)
When we first meet Jodie Foster’s Clarice, she is still fighting her way through FBI training, scrabbling between obstacle courses and the bemusement of her male peers. That initial impression is one of steadfast professionalism; when summoned from jogging to an assignment from the Behavioural Science team, she is too keen to take time to shower. But in her interviews with Hannibal Lecter, we discover the real Clarice: crippled by a childhood of loneliness, and distracted only by the longstanding ambition of “getting all the way to the FBI”. From Clarice’s fascination with the serial killer comes recklessness, obsession, seduction, visible in the ever-wilding of Foster’s eyes. No wonder she is so sympathetic. Just like us, she is drawn to Lecter like a moth to a flame.
SAGA NORÉN The Bridge (SBS On Demand, Stan)
Saga drives a vintage Porsche, won from a colleague who bet that she wouldn’t graduate from the police academy. More fool him. Saga is an obsessive, entirely dedicated detective. Asperger syndrome prevents her from understanding her colleagues’ humour, but she is able to unpick the most tangled of cases, plucking political links and connections between The Bridge’s vast cast of characters. The most tender moments in the show come from her relationships with her Danish colleagues, for though Saga is blunt and unsmiling, she cares about them and her own reputation, deeply. She is also devastatingly stylish, clad for four seasons in the same leather trousers, olive jacket, and killer boots.
Abigail Dean’s thriller Girl A is out now through HarperCollins. Mare
Of Easttown is now streaming on BINGE with new episodes dropping every Monday