ABSTRACT
The two "standard" histories of British crime fiction are Bloody Murder and Colin Watson's Snobbery with Violence. Both books manage to suggest that all the important detective stories were written by men. Many women wrote crime fiction between the wars, and there is a relation between the dilemmas facing feminists and the plots of the crime fiction written by some of the most popular authors of the period. The three authors - Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham - were young adult women when feminism was facing a novel dilemma: how to live with men but not abandon autonomy. Feminism went out of fashion and stayed that way till the sixties - and while it was out of fashion Sayers, Marsh and Allingham started detective sagas with concealed feminist strains. The existence of Harriet Vane, Agatha Troy and Amanda Fitton in the detective fiction of the Golden Age is not entirely unparalleled in the writing of other authors.
