Equal Opportunity Crime© Catten Ely
Apr 25, 2001
You may not know this, but Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and John D. Macdonald — those big names in mystery fiction from the '30s and '40s — were all outsold by Agatha Christie, an impressive anomaly in the good ol' boy network.
Today, not only are female authors producing top-quality crime novels, girl gumshoes are gaining popularity as well. Sue Grafton, Kathy Reichs, and Patricia Cornwell lead the market with their tough-girl crime solvers. We who grew up reading Nancy Drew mysteries are now following the adventures of V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone, who lead much more complicated lives than Nancy and her rather boring guy-pal Ned. Our new heroines are busting those manly bad boys and doing a fine job without the help of a virile, hairy chested partner, thank you very much.
Women are also writing just as well as men about male crime fighters and readers, as Kate Miciak, executive editor at Bantam Dell, points out, are breaking out of the "men write this and women write that" box.
Want a good dose of female authors? Don't miss Naked Came the Phoenix,a 16-authoress, serial mystery counterpart to Naked Came the Manatee, one of my favorite books.
Look for:
In April
Ruth Rendell’s Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories, a collection of seven stories and two novellas
P.D. James's Death in Holy Orders, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (in paperback), and The Skull Beneath the Skin (also in paperback)
Laura Joh Rowland’s Black Lotus
Kyle Mills’s Burn Factor
Sarah Lovett’s Dante’s Inferno
Denise Mina’s Exile
Kathy Lynn Emerson’s Face Down Among the Winchester Geese
Mary Higgins Clark’s On the Street Where You Live
In May
Marcia Simpson’s SoundTracks
Elizabeth Peters’s Lord of the Silent
Gail Bowen’s Burying Ariel
Deborah Crombie’s A Finer End
Jeanne M. Dams’s Green Grow the Victims
Kate Ellis’s An Unhallowed Grave
Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark
Irene Marcuse’s Guilty Mind
Margaret Maron’s Uncommon Clay
Cynthia Riggs’s Deadly Nightshade
In June
Janet Evanovich’s Seven Up
Sue Grafton’s P is for Peril
Elizabeth Gunn’s Six-Pound Walleye
Patricia Cornwell’s Isle of Dogs
Anne George’s Murder Dirty Boogies With Elvis
Nancy Pickard’s Ring of Truth
In July
Naomi Rand’s The One That Got Away
Elizabeth George’s A Traitor to Memory
Barbara Neely’s Blanche Passes Go
In September
Sara Paretsky’s Total Recall
J.A. Jance’s Paradise Lost
Magdalen Nabb’s Property of Blood
Suzanne Chazin The Fouth Angel
Christopher Chambers’s Sympathy for the Devil
True Crime:
Julie Salamon’s Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation
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