Val McDermid sat alongside Stella on the Dangerous Dykes panel at Harrogate Crime Festival, to discuss how lesbian writers have come to dominate the world of crime fiction.
The UK crime-writing scene can pull together four disparate women (Val McDermid, Stella Duffy and Natasha Cooper are the other three panellists), all happy to contemplate the question of whether our sexuality is more of a bar to our progress than our gender. Although this is not what the subject is billed as, I suspect that’s what it will turn out to be. The answer will be that, no, lesbian sexuality in the author or in the protagonist of a novel doesn‘t frighten the horses any more. But – sorry, girls – being a woman is still a bit of a downer when it comes to selling books.
