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Little Old Lady Investigates: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being [[Obfuscating Stupidity|little old ladies]]."''|'''Miss Marple''', ''[[Miss Marple]]''}}
There's a subgenre of [[File talk:Mystery Fiction]] called "Cozy Mysteries", a prevalent trope of which is the little old lady investigator. She is an older lady, usually retired, usually a [[Cool Old Lady]], who has a knack for solving mysteries and who is [[Always Murder|always solving murders]] [[Busman's Holiday|wherever she goes.]] She's usually an [[Amateur Sleuth]], but occasionally she works for an agency or is a registered [[Private Detective|PI]]. The fact that people seem to keep dropping dead around her often makes her a [[Mystery Magnet]]. This sub-genre is also known as the "tea cozy mystery".
This trope makes a perverse sort of sense. Old women are '''supposed''' to be nosy, and attract little attention when they are. A grandmotherly type may be a lot better at prying relevant but embarrassing details from suspects than the gruff policeman. Finally, she is frequently protected by [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: who would dare to off the nice old lady?
More realistic takes on the concept have her solving minor misdemeanors and crimes which the police are too busy to solve. The most famous '''Little Old Lady Investigates''' character is probably Agatha Christie's [[Miss Marple]].
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{{examples}}
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* ''[[Detective Conan]]'' has one episode where Kogoro is invited to a gathering of other famous detectives in the adult category as opposed to Shinichi's teen detective peers. Numbered among them is a little old lady detective who seems to have worked frequently with the two-fisted man of action private detective perhaps because their opposite strengths combine effectively. This ends up becoming a [[Subverted Trope]] since {{spoiler|the little old lady uses her status as being [[Beneath Suspicion]] to ''murder'' her partner, and plan to do the same to everyone else}}.
* Part of Saki's backstory in ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' is that her grandmother is the "legendary housemaid" Kijima Rei, who, among other things, has been known to solve mysteries and prevent assassinations.
* An episode of the 1998 anime series ''Master Keaton'', "A Case for Ladies", has the titular hero team up with an elderly English woman to solve a murder. The elderly woman displays quite a bit of genre savviness, as she unfavorably compares Keaton to Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen.
== [[Comics]] ==
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== [[Literature]] ==
* [[Agatha Christie]]'s [[Miss Marple]] is the [[Trope Codifier]]. In one book she explains her success like this: "Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being little old ladies."
** Dame Agatha's Tuppence Beresford of the [[Tommy and Tuppence]] books uses many aspects of the Little Old Lady Investigates, but isn't a pure version because she prefers to work on instinct, has a partner in her husband Tommy, and often works under the auspices of an official branch of the government. In ''N or M?'', though, she essentially plays this straight while undercover as a doddering housewife and acting essentially as an independent agent.
* [[Dorothy Gilman]]'s Mrs. Pollifax is a little old lady investigative ''[[CIA]] agent''. It's a bit more believable when you learn that she was originally hired by the CIA as a decoy courier by accident when her file was inadvertently placed in the "people we can use for this decoy run" stack instead of the "people we've reviewed and rejected" stack, but her [[Nosy Neighbor]] and [[Weirdness Magnet]] tendencies, combined with a very no-nonsense common-sense approach to whatever trouble she landed in, led her into more and more active assignments—this while still being essentially a part-timer who works for the CIA to keep her retirement years from being boring.
** There's been two movies made featuring Mrs. Pollifax, the second was a made-for-TV movie in 1999 starring... you guessed it... Angela Lansbury.
** Mrs. Pollifax isn't quite the normal little old lady either, as witnessed by the not more closely described "karate chop", which she delivers to many a foe, who is [[Tap on the Head|invariably rendered unconscious]].
* [[Dorothy Gilman]] also wrote a novel entitled ''The Clairvoyant Countess''. The title character, Madame Marina Karitska is Russian and uh, clairvoyant. Her talent leads her into many investigations with a member of the police department Detective Lieutenant Pruden.
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* Charlotte Dickens-Johnson, one of the playable characters from ''[[Guilty Party]].'' She's a crime-solving maverick, a [[Badass Grandpa|serious kung-fu threat]], and one half of a crazy [[Battle Couple]] with her husband Butch.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
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[[Category:Seekers]]
[[Category:The Exotic Detective]]
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