Eve Zaremba and the Canadian Lesbian Detective Novel

Toronto writer Eve Zaremba passed away last month. She was a major figure in Canadian writing and social justice. Her fictional sleuth Helen Keremos, who made her debut in 1978 in A Reason to Kill, is generally acknowledged to be the first lesbian private eye. (An American book I haven’t yet read, M.F. Beal’s Angel Dance, featuring private investigator Kat Guerrerra, may precede Zaremba’s first novel by a year, but it’s less well known.)

I’m re-reading Work for a Million (1987), Zaremba’s second Helen Keremos mystery, and the first to be published by Amanita, the small press that she and her wife, Ottie Lockey, created and ran for some years. The first book in Zaremba’s private investigator series had been published by PaperJacks, an imprint of General Publishing, for the airport book sales market. The queer content of the novel seems not to have fazed the publisher, although Zaremba points out in her memoir that it was the only one of her books to receive mass market publication.

But it’s with Zaremba’s second novel, Work for a Million, that the private investigator’s own lesbian identity becomes more central to the mysteries. When Helen’s introduced to her potential new client, a gorgeous singer who’s being harassed by escalating threats, she quickly succumbs to Sonia’s vulnerable appeal and agrees to act as her live-in security/investigator. Helen takes a jaundiced view of Sonia’s lawyer, manager, agent, and ex-husband alike, sussing out that one or more of them has an excellent motive for trying to extort the lottery fortune that Sonia recently won and has been successfully keeping out of their greedy hands.

Zaremba’s trademark style is the extensive use of dialogue, with brief but memorable passages of description that offer a vivid glimpse of Canadian locales ranging from Toronto to California to Vancouver and small town B.C. across her series. Her depiction of Toronto in Work for a Million highlights the potential of downtown malls, with their labyrinthine underground passages, as creepy hiding places. A sprint across the city by TTC, the public transit system, makes nice use of various subway stations and neighbourhoods, from the Annex to Cabbagetown.

Helen is not a particularly introspective character, and her personal life tends to be sketched in fairly briefly. These are quick, action-driven books, with much less infusion of feminist politics than in American writer Barbara Wilson’s fiction, for instance, even though similar themes, such as the creation of feminist collectives, are treated in her series. Zaremba’s novels don’t get bogged down in (or elevated by, depending on the reader’s perspective) lengthy debates about ideology or political action. But they do touch on crucial feminist issues, including, in Work for a Million, the sexual exploitation of children by family members and the need for women’s financial autonomy.

A graphic novel adaptation of Work for a Million, written by Zaremba and Amanda Deibert, and illustrated by Selena Goulding, was published in 2021.

Zaremba was deeply involved in a range of projects, from publishing and small bookstore ownership to feminist activism. She was a co-founder and long-time contributor to Broadside: A Feminist Review. The creators worked hard to make it available online and it’s well worth a look, offering an important sense of feminist activism Canada-wide through the 1980s. The paper depended on distribution through a network of women’s and other small independent bookstores that would be difficult to reproduce today.

Other lesbian private eye series worth noting include Lauren Wright Douglas’s Caitlin Reece in Victoria, B.C. and, more recently, Liz Bugg‘s Toronto-based mysteries featuring Calli Barnow. Both authors share Zaremba’s gift for making Canadian locations a vivid part of the action.