Where are all the women?

Do you need a Y chromosome to be taken seriously as a crime writer” So asks Natasha Cooper in the Times last Friday (11 July)as she prepares for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, where she is chair of the panel of shortlisted authors for the Crime Novel of the Year award. She goes on to write: “The shortlisted authors are terrific, several of them are friends of mine, and they all deserve their places on the list. But why is Stef Penney the only woman? Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The problem is not confined to any one shortlist. When this newspaper published The 50 Greatest Crime Writers in April, only 13 were women.” I’m glad to see that Natasha makes the exact point that occurred to me when I saw the winner. Yes it was a woman (Patricia Highsmith), but she was pictured naked to the waist. Natasha makes some excellent points in her article, and speculates about why this imbalance has come about.
The issue of woman writers is familiar to readers of this blog, as we had a debate on this very topic in response to a