In October 1928,

1928, the novelist Virginia Wolf gave two lectures to literary societies at women's colleges at Cambridge University. Her subject was women and fiction and she

ranged throughout history to build up her case for how for century structural

inequality had systematically excluded half the population from literary work.

The lectures were later published as an extended essay, which has been so popular in the decade since that it's never gone out of print. Detective

fiction in the 1920s had no shortage of successful women writers, but they were

still subject to all of the same intellectual and economic oppressions that Wolf laid out.

Dorothy El Cées, for instance, had a university degree and a great talent for writing,

but she still struggled with the feeling that she didn't fit into an intellectual sphere and an economic system designed by and for men

That's what we're going to look at today to paraphrase from Virginia Wolf

If a woman needs a room of her own and 500 pounds a year

to write fiction, what does she need in order to write crime fiction? Welcome to She Dunnet, I'm Caroline Crampton.

I'm Caroline Crampton. Four of the most popular authors from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L

Sayers, Madria Allingham and Naya Marsh, are often referred

to as the Queens of Crime.

I have yet to track this phrase back to its source, so I'm not sure exactly when or why this moniker attached itself to these writers in particular,

but I'm sure their popularity and ubiquity had a lot to do with what was originally probably a publicity ploy.

The phrases lasted though because it represents a truth.

Against the example of other literary genres, some of the highest profile crime writers from the 1920s and 30s were women. The title and

premise of this very podcast is an allusion to that fact. To put it another way

there aren't any kings of crime.

Which is not to say that there weren't successful male crime writers.

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