The term detective has its etymological roots in the English language. According to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), this is a private police officer who is dedicated to carrying out confidential investigations and who, in certain cases, can intervene in a judicial process.
For example: " Police detectives have not yet been able to discover what happened to the woman whose body appeared on the river bank" , "I really like detective novels" , "The businessman hired a private detective to follow his wife and, in this way, be able to prove his infidelity .
The detective's role is to detect some factor that helps clarify how an event developed. This may be a member of a security force or a self-employed investigator .
Detectives, in this framework, can contribute to solving a crime . Suppose a man is found dead in his house, shot three times in the head. To determine what happened and who the murderer was, a detective can approach the crime scene to collect clues and begin their investigation. Interviewing neighbors, reviewing security camera recordings and reconstructing the victim's last hours are some of the actions that the detective may carry out.
Several of the most famous fictional characters in history are detectives, recognized especially for their sagacity . Sherlock Holmes (created by Arthur Conan Doyle ), Philip Marlowe (by Raymond Chandler ), Perry Mason (by Erle Stanley Gardner ) and Hercule Poirot (by Agatha Christie ) are some of them.
As can be seen in these examples, history has once again left women out of the picture, since the characters considered most astute in the fiction of the past are all men. However, this does not mean that there are no detective novels starring women, whether they occupy that particular role or whether they serve as private investigators, police inspectors, commissioners, journalists or judges.
Nowadays, it is not so rare to see women in security forces or in senior executive positions, although we are still far from an equitable reality. This is also reflected in fiction, with greater effectiveness given the possibility of creating more just worlds that the typewriter offers us, and then we can find women who fight crime as protagonists of a genre that for so many decades belonged exclusively to men. .
In the 1980s, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky , two American writers, began publishing detective stories in which the main character was a woman. Both gave rise to the birth of two legendary investigators: Kinsey Millhone , a former police officer who began working in the private sector in a fictional California town called Santa Teresa , and Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski , a private investigator who after having escaped from the Mussolini's regime in his native Italy settles in Chicago.
In Spain, on the other hand, the writer Alicia Giménez Bartlett created Petra Delicado , a police inspector, when still in her country the woman had never accessed that position . It is not easy to change the mentality that was nourished by so many centuries during which men always occupied the roles of maximum power, but the strength that women have gained in recent decades is increasing, and little by little we are approaching a balance which reflects much more the contribution that each member of society makes so that the structures are sustained.
Fortunately, not only writers have put women in the role of detective, commissioner or journalist: some of the writers who have collaborated with the opening are Carlos Quílez , Juan Bolea and José María Guelbenzu .