Miss Marple, the old woman who solves the most complex crimes for Scotland Yard, after the image of a peaceful life in a small English town.
A century of difference since Agatha Christie created Miss Marple and became the best-selling writer after the Bible and Shakespeare, until Stieg Larsson brought Lisbeth Salander to life, seducing first Sweden and then the world, with books and the movies in the series. The role of women has evolved a lot in a century, to a point few could imagine when Agatha Christie came into the world. In the crime novel, the role of the protagonists changed even more and Lisbeth Salander is the culmination of these changes: a violent hacker to the extreme when it comes to avenging violence against women is the most extreme representation of this new generation of detectives.
Miss Marple, the great literary feminist, of the early twentieth century, She was the first woman in the crime novel who did not assume the role of defenseless victim or fatal woman, that dragged men to perdition.
Miss Marple: The role of women in the first half of the XNUMXth century.
Beneath the sweet face of an old Victorian woman, Miss Marple guarded a brilliant intelligence, knowledge of human nature, especially on the negative side, that any graduate in psychology would like, and a observation capacity exceptional trained with years of meditation and reflection. In England in the 30s, the role of women was reduced to the family and the care of the home. Miss Marple, single and with no family to care for, but with an economic position and a generous writer nephew that allows her to be comfortably independent, assumes her social role, dedicating herself to gardening, harmless gossip and tea. , until it comes across crime. So, Miss Marple grows up, and under the belief that people are the same everywhere and the bad instincts that move us are universal, she confronts any criminal who comes before her with an improper value of her condition, and his sweetness and defenselessness become another weapon to hunt down the criminal. Respected by Scotland Yard, this respect is not officially known, it remains in the background as police inspectors take credit for its brilliant inquiries.
The novel of intrigue is one of the best vehicles to portray the social reality of the moment in which it is written, and so it does Agatha Christie, with Miss Marple more than with any other of its protagonists, showing a time when a woman intelligent with a special talent in some area, in this case, the investigation and resolution of crimes, he could only develop his skill in the shadow, while the visible face and the recipient of the merits of his work was a man, in this case, the Scotland Yard policemen.
A dragon covers the back of Lisbeth Salander: The detective hacker who faces the most sadistic criminals.
Lisbeth Salander: The Vanguard of Feminism in the XNUMXst Century.
A century later, in a genre that has broken all female stereotypes, with Spain at the forefront, creating the first female police officer of the genre, Petra Delicado by Alicia Giménez-Barlett, we have detectives who have completely shed labels and maximum exponent is Lisbeth Salander, created by the deceased Stieg Larsson, protagonist of his Millennium series. With a certain punk air, very short black hair, skin riddled with piercings and tattoos (one of them, a huge dragon on the back that gives its name to the first novel) and a gothic style with the main protagonist black, this hacker from profession, bisexual, asocial and fond of boxing, is the fruit of a childhood of extreme violence, received first and returned later, when he kills his father by burning him with gasoline after he left his mother in a vegetable state with a beating. From then on, her life is a succession of foster homes and psychiatric hospitals, a journey that makes her understand that if she can expect someone to defend her, it is her own and leads her to deny the conventional social system.
Qualified as "The vanguard of feminism" Lisbeth Salander come to battered women, it defends itself like a cougar and, when he cannot avoid violence, he takes charge of doing justice.
While Miss Marple was created by a woman, Agatha Cristhie, what portrait the only way they had the women of the time to do great things, Salander was created by a man, Stieg Larsson, who, after witnessing a rape as a teenager and doing nothing to prevent it, decided imagine how would it be a new generation of women that they would defend their integrity and avenge the attacks received using violence and new technologies in equal measure.