Women rule the world of murder writing

Initially, it was Sherlock Holmes investigating murders by looking at cigar ash and footprints. Across the Atlantic, there were others hard-boiled detectives, flawed men with their own codes of honour or just professionalism. But while Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler dominated crime writing in the US, in the UK, women like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers ruled the roost.
Flash forward to 2012, when the biggest crime story was Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl which told the story of a marriage gone bad and sold millions of copies doing so.It's a mystery where the characters are incredibly petty, and they kill for self-validation. “This is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized. On the streets his people walked, motives were more basic--money, sex--and means were more direct,“ writes Terence Rafferty at The Atlantic.
There are still men who write crime fiction, of course. There's Ian Rankin, whose Inspector Rebus novels explore the seedy underbelly of Edinburgh. Michael Connelly, whose books featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch have been translated into 39 languages. And of course, there's James Ellroy, whose LA Confidential was made into a classic movie. But these authors are a minority. And the women who dominate the crime fiction landscape today aren't writing about gunplay. Instead, they focus on emotional violence. “Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others--lovers, neighbours, obsessive strangers--but the body counts tend to be on the low side," says Rafferty.
WH Auden once said that Raymond Chandler wrote not about detectives, but about criminals in a 'Great Wrong Place'. For the women writers of today, that place “is sometimes suburbia, sometimes social media, sometimes high school, sometimes the marriage bed--everywhere something feels missing in contemporary life... They've come a long way from the golden age, from Christie and Sayers, from the least-likely-suspect sort of mystery in which, proverbially, the butler did it. They know better. The girl did it, and she had her reasons," writes Rafferty.