Others decided to barge right in and join the men, creating female private eyes who were as hard-bitten as the men they sought to replace. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky proved irrefutably that a female p.i. would be accepted by an audience of both men and women readers, and a score of other female writers began to follow in Grafton and Paretsky’s footsteps. Thus, the arena widened in the United States as well, offering women another outlet for their creative energies.

Creating crime fiction offers writers a vast landscape as broad and as varied as crime itself. Because there are no hard-and-fast rules and because those few rules that exist exist to be broken (witness the uproar over The Murder of Roger Ackroyd when it was first published in 1926), the writer can choose any setting on earth which she can then people with: teenagers as sleuths, children as sleuths, old ladies as sleuths, animals as sleuths, shut-ins and agoraphobics as sleuths, teachers as sleuths, doctors as sleuths, as-tronauts as sleuths, and on and on as far as the imagination can carry her. With this as a basic tenet of crime writing, the real question should be not why do so many women write crime stories? but why doesn’t everyone write crime stories?

This volume doesn’t attempt to answer that question. What it does, however, is present for your entertainment a century’s collection of crime and suspense stories by women. What you’ll notice about this collection is that it includes names closely associated with crime writing — Dorothy L. Sayers, Minette Walters, Sue Grafton, and others — but it also includes some names one doesn’t normally associate with crime writing at all: names like Nadine Gordimer and Joyce Carol Oates. I’ve tried to come up with as wide a range of female authors as possible because a wide range reflects my primary belief about crime writing and that is this: crime writing does not have to be considered genre writing. It is not confined to a few moderately talented practitioners. And most importantly, it is indeed something that can stand, will stand, and has already stood the test of time.