Lauren Wright Douglas’s The Rage of Maidens

My fall research task was drafting a chapter on lesbian private investigators in Canadian crime fiction. I’m only about halfway there, but it’s been a lot of fun. I discussed Eve Zaremba‘s fiction recently, and I’m reading Liz Bugg, Jackie Manthorne, and Marsha Mildon.

Naiad Press was a lesbian publishing house headed by the formidable Barbara Grier. During the press’s active years they published a vast amount of genre fiction, mostly romance and mystery novels, and a shorter list of literary works and important reprints by authors like Patricia Highsmith. Their output included two series by Lauren Wright Douglas: the Caitlin Reece novels, set in Canada, and a second Pacific Northwest series that takes place in Oregon.

Caitlin Reece is a Victoria, BC-based private investigator and former Crown Attorney who became disillusioned by the legal system’s inability to protect women and children. I discussed the first novel, The Always Anonymous Beast, a while ago. In the sixth and final novel in the series, The Rage of Maidens, readers learn about Caitlin’s own childhood, which makes it clear that her crusading impulses started early.

Caitlin is asked to help the younger sister of a sexual abuse survivor whose assailant she prosecuted several years earlier, when Caitlin still worked for the Crown. The girl believes that her sister’s attacker, who has recently been released from prison, will come after her because she was a witness to the assault and testified in court. She and her sister are estranged, because the older girl blames her, rather than the culprit, for the shame and pain she experienced in the aftermath of the attack.

As Caitlin investigates, she learns that the man, who now works at the local community center, has continued to groom young girls. One recent victim’s mother is willing to speak to Caitlin, but not to the police; she fears that drawing attention to her daughter’s experience of molestation by her swimming instructor may imperil her custody rights. As she reminds the private investigator, as a lesbian mother she is vulnerable to critical scrutiny and claims of unfitness.

This is a well-paced mystery, with Caitlin first seeking to collect enough evidence to persuade the police to arrest the man again and then, after a murder, investigating the circumstances of the death. As in all six books in the series, Caitlin is accompanied by a motley group of friends and assistants who are sketched in briefly but vividly.

The Caitlin Reece novels feature a fair amount of violence, some of it quite graphic. Unusually for Canadian crime fiction, Caitlin is adept with handguns, which may be one of the ways in which this series seems designed for both Canadian and American markets. Serious crimes, for instance, are referred to as felonies and capital crimes, which are American legal terms.

In this series Wright Douglas has captured a vivid sense of Victoria in the late 1980s and early 1990s, from the downtown Empress Hotel to the Oak Bay tearooms catering to the tourist trade, and including the university campus, a hub of feminist activism (of a sort) in The Daughters of Artemis, the third novel in this series.

Caitlin is an engaging protagonist, and while these are relatively short novels, which leads to some rapid untangling of plots and occasional dropped subplots, they share a vision of social transformation and justice. The final novel in the series calls for attention to those who have experienced victimization, imagining the collective impact of their pain and anger:

“I often fantasize,” muses Caitlin, “that if every molested child, and every adult who was molested as a child, were to cry out at exactly the same time some dark night, the sound of their rage would deafen the world” (23).