Ruth the Betrayer

Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy, by Edward Ellis was the first fictional female detective story.^[1] It was published as a penny dreadful in 52 parts in 1862-63^[2] by John Dicks, and the British Library's single-volume compilation copy was acquired on 28 February 1863.^[3] It therefore predates Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective and W.S. Hayward's The Revelations of a Lady Detective, both of 1863/4.^[4]

Ruth Trail, the protagonist, is "a female detective – a sort of spy we use in the hanky-panky way when a man would be too clumsy".^[5]

See also

• Barry Ono
• List of female detective characters