that women who commit crimes of violence aren’t ever victims too, but our willingness as a society to default to the idea of women as victims both of their own and others’ frailties (principally men’s) is open to exploitation­ ­­­– not least by women themselves.

In a particularly grotesque case in Canada in the 1990s, Karla Homolka, a veterinary assistant who was an accomplice in the sexual torture and deaths of three women, including her own sister, successfully presented herself as a victim of her husband and partner in crime, Paul Bernado. Homolka became a poster girl for those confounded by the notion that a woman could ever actively participate in the rape and killing of other women. Commentators wrote impassioned defences, calling for her to be exonerated. Thenothers, a few, I’m sorry to say, written by women.

Over the last decade, straight whodunits have lost ground to whydunits, which focus more on character and motivation. For anyone writing female lead characters – perpetrators, victims or detectives – this subgenre raises all kinds of questions. The female protagonist of Helen Giltrow’s The Distance (2014) is both hero and criminal, but Giltrow encountered problems with TV producers. Though keen to develop her book for the screen, they felt that, while there’s an honourable tradition of male heroes operating on the wrong side of the law, TV viewers would have issues with a female hero-criminal. As Giltrow put it: ‘It seemed to boil down to an issue of motivation: okay for a man to break the law if that