The case of a male author using a female pseudonym to write fiction was relatively unheard of when Tania Carver emerged, but the explosion of female-oriented crime fiction in the last five years has led to an increasing number of male authors adopting gender-neutral names to publish their work. Last month, The Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Gamerman considered the phenomenon, interviewing a number of writers who fessed up to being men: Riley Sager (Todd Ritter), A.J. Finn (Daniel Mallory), S.J. Watson (Steve Watson), J.P. Delaney (Tony Strong), S.K. Tremayne (Sean Thomas). The trend is ironic, Gamerman pointed out, because the history of fiction is littered with women writers adopting male or gender-neutral pseudonyms to get their work published, from the Brontë sisters to J.K. Rowling.

This shift in fortunes can be attributed to a handful of factors. While exact numbers are hard to source, women readers have come to dominate fiction, where they’re widely touted as representing as much as 80 percent of the market. And while crime fiction and psychological thrillers are often associated with male readers, women read most of those, too—between 60 and 80 percent. Dr. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, a lecturer in publishing and book culture at University College London, told me that women also prefer to read books by women, citing a Goodreads survey that found 80 percent of a new female author’s readership is likely to be female.

The last few years, in other words, have seen a significant reorientation of the crime-fiction landscape, to the point where male writers might consider themselves at a disadvantage. The news that some are choosing to disguise their gender was met with triumph by some commentators, who interpreted it as proof that the literary tables had turned. It prompted eyerolling by others, who noted the irony of men trying to enter a genre of stories about “dead or missing women” that women authors and readers had only recently reclaimed as their own.

But the success of writers like Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins and Karin Slaughter isn’t just due to the fact that they’re women. Rather, it’s that the books they write often interpret the world through an unmistakably female lens. Waites quotes an adage that the difference between crime writers is that a male writer will note what a crime looks like, whereas a female writer will explore what it feels like. Finding success in contemporary crime fiction, then, isn’t just about adopting a gender-neutral name. It’s about writers comprehending why women are so compelled by stories about brutal, graphic violence in the first place.

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One of the earliest examples of a crime story was told by a woman, Scheherazade, who staves off her execution in The Arabian Nights with “The Three Apples.” In the tale, a fisherman finds a locked box that contains the dismembered body of a young woman, and a vizier is tasked with finding the murderer. The roots of the first female detective novels, the scholar Adrienne E. Gavin has written, are in Gothic novels like Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 work The Mysteries of Udolpho, where women are “victims of crime and held captive, but also escape through proto-detective methods to triumph in the end.”