Who Dares Wins

As All Three Regular Readers will be aware, Megan Abbott’s THE END OF EVERYTHING was one of my favourite novels of last year, and if you haven’t read it yet I advise you to do so at your first available opportunity. It’s a masterpiece in a minor key.
  Megan’s latest offering is DARE ME, a dark tale of ambition and murder set in the world of high school cheerleading, the film rights to which have already been snapped up by Fox.
  I had an interview with Megan published in the Evening Herald recently, during the course of which I asked her about a curious anomaly when it comes to reviews of her award-winning titles. To wit:

All three of her early novels [DIE A LITTLE (2005), THE SONG IS YOU (2007) and QUEENPIN (2008)] were written in the hardboiled noir style of the classic American crime novel, and earned Abbott praise that compared her to some of the genre’s greats, such as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.
  Did she find it odd that as a woman she was being compared to male writers rather than her female predecessors, such as Dorothy B. Hughes or Margaret Millar?
  “Writers like Dorothy Hughes or Margaret Millar -- people are shocked when they read these women, at how powerful they are,” she says. “It’s very rare still that I’m ever compared to other women writers and I don’t know why that is, because there are so many who have always been writing in this field.”

  I can’t imagine any writer, man or woman, complaining about being compared to Chandler and Cain, but it does seem a little off that a woman who writes so powerfully about young women in the crime / mystery genre should be compared exclusively to male writers.
  Then again, would I be complaining if I was lucky enough to have my books compared with, say, Dorothy Hughes or Patricia Highsmith? Not likely.
  For the rest of that Evening Herald interview, clickety-click here …