Looking for other positive role models in mystery fiction, I did find some. Radiance profiled one of them in a wonderful article about Bertha Cool a few years ago. All the Bertha Cool books are out of print, but when I tracked down a couple in a used bookstore, I found that Bertha confesses she gained all that weight on purpose to spite her cheating ex-husband and the male population in general. The first Bertha Cool book was written in 1939, and clearly the author bought into this ugly myth as some people do to this day. One of the reasons I wanted to write about a large heroine was to combat such misinformation.
Mysteries reflect the society of their time.
In this age of political correctness, readers have grown largely intolerant of intolerance. One exception is fat characters, who may be battered at will for a laugh. The kind of casual insults still aimed at large characters and the instant villain status of large characters echo the now-unacceptable slurs once aimed at blacks, Asians, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and women by many mystery writers from the 1920s on even into the 1960s. Nowadays, any character described as fat may safely be assumed to be weak, incompetent, lazy, fundamentally disgusting, and morally suspect. I asked some other mystery fans to help me compile a list of large-size mystery characters and the titles of the books in which they appear.