The Big Book of Female Detectives Quotes

“SOME WOMEN HAVE SAID that Mrs. Pym was never young, that even in her initial stages she was probably an elderly baby. Obviously, such women should drink milk out of saucers; still, it is a fact that Mrs. Pym was somehow stolid, enormously capable, and frequently harsh, even in the early 1920’s when she must have been around thirty. She affected the same ugly tweeds, the same enchantingly insane hats, and the same air of magnificent omnipotence as she does today. But her hair was brown then, with only the faintest touch of her current greyness. Her speech was as biting, and her contempt for authority and inefficiency as ready as on that notable day when she crashed the shocked portals of New Scotland Yard, the first woman ever to hold rank in Central C.I.D., where, in these present jittery times of nuclear fission and H-bombs, she is Mrs. Assistant-Commissioner Pym.”
― Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Female Detectives