The Future of Women Thriller Novelists: Who Dunnit?

The Buzz 1: “Nobody brings the creepy better than women mystery and thriller writers. The literary world has always been a bit of a good ol' boys club, but since Anna Katharine Green, ‘the mother of the detective novel,’ published The Leavenworth Case in 1878, right up to the Gone Girl frenzy, women writers have excelled in the genre.” (Erin Enders, www.bustle.com/articles/58552-11-female-mystery-writers-to-start-reading-now-because-these-suspenseful-stories-are-too-good-to) The Buzz 2: “Women’s murder tales have always been at least a little more psychologically acute than the guys’. Even in the so-called golden age of detective stories, the 1920s and ’30s, when the emphasis was on elaborate puzzles, the motivations of the culprits in Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were usually more plausible—and nastier—than they were in Carr or Rex Stout or Ellery Queen…Later, while male pulp writers were playing with guns and fighting off those wily femmes fatales, women like Highsmith and Dorothy B. Hughes and Margaret Millar were burrowing into the enigmas of identity and the killing stresses of everyday life.” (Ashley Johnson, shereads.com/best-thrillers-by-women-2019/) We’ll ask publisher Eddie Vincent and novelists Leslie Wheeler, BJ Magnani, PhD, MD, and S. Lee Manning for their take on The Future of Women Thriller Novelists: Who Dunnit?