Hannah Furness
The British Library is working to bring forgotten male crime writers back into print, after they were eclipsed in their own Golden Age by women who were simply better.
The British
Library's classic crime
project, which sees long-lost novels rediscovered and published for a new
generation, features a disproportionate amount of men, the managing editor
behind it said.
But the discrepancy is not down to modern day sexism,
but a rare quirk of publishing history which made 1930s Britain arguably the
only time and genre where women firmly ruled the roost.
As such, the best-selling and most-acclaimed writers of
the day were women, leaving their male rivals swiftly falling out of print and
the public consciousness.
The British Library project is now
helping to correct that imbalance, bringing lesser-known works back to readers'
bookshelves.
The works, which are designed with
vintage covers and have been bestsellers, are sold by the library, with profits
ploughed back into its archival and exhibition work.
Speaking at the Emirates Airline
Festival of Literature in Dubai, Robert Davies, who is responsible for the
project, said he had previously been challenged over the number of men on the
classics list.
The current catalogue shows just three
out of 38 books written by a woman, and all of those from one author, Mavis
Doriel Hay.
But, he said, the reason was simple:
those male writers were "next tier" in their own day, overshadowed by
the so-called "crime queens" including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L
Sayers, Marjorie Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and Gladys Mitchell.
"It's something I've been
challenged about in the past, that so many of the writers we publish are
men," he said.
"That's not because of sexism,
that's because the women's writers were often still in print and retained their
popularity.
"It was actually their male
contemporaries who dropped out of view.
"It might be unique in this genre,
that the women writers are the ones who survived."
He added: "I think the brutal truth
is that the top four or five writers in this period were women. They're in a
league of their own.
"I don't think there was a weird
sexism against male writers in the period. It was just that the best had been
kept in print and the next tier had been forgotten about for too long."
Martin Edwards, author and president of
the Detection Club, said the success of British female writers in the 1930s was
exceptional, with even the United States at the time still largely dominated by
male authors.
"In those days, once you were out
of print you're out of print," he told an audience. "Books
sank out of sight pretty quickly.
"Really, it was the quality of what
they were writing. There are clear reasons as to why those books [by women]
found fame, why they had high sales and why they deserved it."
The British Library's next project,
called "Foreign Bodies", will see them republish forgotten
international works of crime fiction.
Some of the classics may go on to
television adaptations, Davies added.
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