Why are there so few adventure heroines, and even fewer female adventure authors?
I’ve always adored adventure stories from Rider Haggard’s classic novel She and Dumas’ The Three Musketeers to more modern proponents of the genre such as Wilbur Smith’s The Seventh Scroll and Alastair McLean’s Ice Station Zebra. It’s a strange contradiction that despite the huge success of adventure movies Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Last Samurai, Kingdom of Heaven etc It’s a literary category that’s fallen out of favour, is seen as a little old-fashioned maybe, but still I knew I wanted to write the sort of novel lots of jeopardy, lots history, lots of battles and sword fights that I most enjoyed reading. Sometimes, books choose their authors, I think, rather than the other way round. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that many of the traditional characteristics of top class adventure writing strong lead characters, action, peril, quest, challenge, a cliffhanging climax and final showdown, the defeat of the baddies by the goodies have actually been appropri
