“Ian Rankin is talking a ‘wheen o’ blethers’ with his contention that women crime writers, and lesbians in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. … Firstly, the notion that a malevolent coven of hardboiled dykes is threatening men’s supremacy over the genre, or polluting it with their hardcore imaginings, seems to me marginally paranoid.” But there is this, too: “Women are simply more used to living with fear than men.”