Honey West

She's a cross between James Bond and The Avengers' Emma Peel-a girl detective with the sleuthmanship of Mike Hammer and the measurements of Marilyn Monroe. This Girl for Hire is the first in a series of darkly funny and innuendo-laden crime novels originally published in the 1950s and 1960s. In this one, Honey finds herself playing strip poker with four murder suspects...and a deck that's as stacked as she is!|The husband and wife writing team of Gloria and Forest Fickling (under the pseudonym G.G. Fickling), wrote eleven mystery novels featuring Honey West. The character is notable as being one of the first female private detectives in popular fiction. She first appeared in the 1957 book This Girl for Hire and would appear in nine novels before being retired in the mid-1960s, with two comeback novels in 1971. Though Skip Fickling (1925-1998) did most of the writing, he said ideas from his wife Gloria (G.G. were her maiden name initials) helped make the female character more plausible and gave her a good dress sense.