It's hard to believe, when these days the mystery section is filled to overflowing with Graftons, Mullers, Paretskys and Evanoviches, and all their disciples, that hardboiled writing used to be an almost totally-male profession. Sure, there were women writers in the pulps, but they were few and far between, and, like most pulp writers, are now almost totally forgotten. Some of them even wrote hardboiled stories, contributing to Black Mask, although far more wrote more traditional mysteries, appearing in such pulps as Street & Smith's Detective Story.

Hardboiled Women Writers in the Pulps

• Frances Beck
• Leigh Brackett (New Detective, Thrilling Detective, Flynn's Detective Fiction, Argosy)
• Wyona Dashwood (Black Mask)
• Miriam Allen deFord (AKA Miriam Allen)
• Tiah Devitt
• Marjorie Stoneman Douglas (Black Mask)
• Elizabeth Dudley (Black Mask)
• Dorothy Dunn (Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Tales, Thrilling Detective)
• Eliza Mae Harvey (Black Mask)
• Helen Holley (Black Mask)
• K.M. Knight (actually Kathleen Moore Knight; Black Mask)
• Kay Krausse
• Marian O'Hearn
• Florence M. Pettee (Black Mask)
• Sally Dixon Wright (Black Mask)

The Hardboiled Queens

• Dail Ambler
  Creator of Danny Spade, New York dick of the first pulpitude. One of the longest-running series of Spillane imitators was not only British, but a woman!
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• Leigh Brackett
  Responsible for the classic No Good from a Corpse (1944), featuring Ed Clive, as well as the screenplays for The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. She also wrote a handful of well-regarded tales for such pulps as New Detective and Thrilling Detective, although she never did crack Black Mask.
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• Dorothy Dunn
  Dunn was a St. Louis schoolteacher who published over sixty short stories in such hardboiled pulps as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and Thrilling Detective in the forties and fifties, with such juicy titles as "Senora Satan," "Dead-End Darling" and "Morphine Alley." She also wrote a novel, 1950's Murder's Web. Her writing's marked by "strong characterization, offbeat situations, and evocative and distinctively gritty prose," according to Bill Pronzini in a short essay in Deadly Women.
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• Patrica Highsmith
  Her brooding psychological studies of immoral sociopaths, such as her most famous character, Tom Ripley, are among the most disturbing in crime fiction. She also wrote Strangers on a Train, which was brought to the screen by Raymond Chandler (script) and Alfred Hitchcock (director).And the 1999 film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon, is definitely worth a peek.
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• Dolores Hitchens
  Wrote numerous mystery novels, but peaked with her two Jim Sader books, Sleep With Strangers and Sleep With Slander, which Bill Pronzini tagged as "the best private eye novel written by a woman -- and one of the best written by anybody."
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• Dorothy B. Hughes
  Dorothy Belle Hughes published fourteen novels, all but two within a ten-year period, from 1940-1950. Her first novels feature "upper class crime," with elements of international intrigue. With The Fallen Sparrow (1942), she turned more toward criminal noir psychology, and both Ride the Pink Horse and In a Lonely Place were successful enough to be filmed. H.R.F. Keating prefers her later The Expendable Man (1963) in his Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books. Hughes also reviewed crime fiction extensively, published an authorized study of Erle Stanley Gardner, and received the Grand Master Award in 1978 from the Mystery Writers of America.
  (Contributed by Bill Hagen).
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• KT McCall
  Actually two Australian women, Audrey Armitage and Muriel Watkins, they wrote the Johnny Buchan series for Horowitz, the Australian pulp publishers, who proudly proclaimed KT McCall "Crime fiction's best selling woman author" and described her on the back of her books as blonde, beautiful and with brains. Not that the photo was of either of the authors -- actually, it was of a model from a local agency.
  
  
• Helen Nielsen
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• Craig Rice
  Wrote the screwball antics of hardboiled, hard-drinking lawyer John J. Malone, and countless others.

FOR MORE INFO

• There's a great little essay entitled "Women in the Pulps," by Bill Pronzini in Jan Grape, et al's Deadly Women.