Normally I would say, read the post but don’t read the comments. But when the comments are full of well spoken female authors, plus a concern troll, [+ others who aren’t trolls or authors] the comments really are too good to pass up.
The post is on author Tara Moss’ blog: Are our Sisters In Crime (still) fighting against a male-dominated literary world?
h/t to @mrbenjaminlaw on Twitter.
Categories: arts & entertainment, Culture, culture wars, gender & feminism, language, media
Hoyden About Town 
Along with one more conventional troll, who hit an irony mine when he talked about asinine rants.
Purely on a tangent, I stopped and thought about my favourite crime writers. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Janet Evanovich…
Possibly I’m a little biased and sexist in my preferences.
@Megpie71
I did wonder about Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers. They all put their full names on their novels, their most famous characters were male leads – did they suffer from not having their works read by men too? I wonder when the switch to using intials to hide your gender began again?
IIRC, at the time Christie was writing, there was a spike in the popularity of female writers, at least when it came to crime – enough that some male writers even took female or ambiguous pseudonyms the way some do for romance today. All part of the same bullshit gendering of genres, just that crime’s occasionally moved from one gender to the other.
(I believe in Britain, women form the majority of crime readers).
My favourite crime writers are more modern, although one sets her stories in the Middle Ages – Val McDermid and Candace Robb.
I love Val McDermid too. I didn’t know Candace Robb and Georgette Heyer were crime writers. More authors, yay!
These days, I’d guess that Christie is most popular with female readers, even if it was different during the time she was published.
My immediate response to Agatha Christie when I think of her characters is Miss Marple… and then Poirot.
I’d add Kerry Greenwood to the list of great female crime authors, and Patricia Cornwell.
Some of you might like to add Susanna Gregory to your list – she has two series. The main character of one is a crime-solving academic in medieval Cambridge (The Chronicles of Matthew Bartholemew); the main character of the other is a spy (Thomas Chaloner) in Restoration London. Great writing and very well researched.
Funnily enough, I discovered Gregory while checking which Kerry Greenwood books were on the shelf at my local library 🙂