This is a guest post by Sandra Block, author of The Secret Room.

I was late to the mystery game.

I didn’t even publish suspense until age forty, let alone read the genre until my thirties. Back in grade school, I loved mysteries, lapping up Jupiter Jones, Great Brain, and Encyclopedia Brown books. They spoke to the inner (and okay, outer) geek in me. I didn’t even notice the leads were all little boys. But by college, I had gone literary with a capital L, which essentially meant a TBR stocked with dead white males.

When I rediscovered mystery, it was still on explicitly masculine terms. Henning Menkel, shall we say, rocked my world. And when my Prozac was running low, I turned to the sunnier mysteries of Alexander McCall Smith or dabbled in Ian Rankin.

But one day, I picked up a book with a blade on the cover, and everything changed.

Reading Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, I heard something different – my own voice. (Well, not exactly my own voice, I don’t self-harm and my mother is actually quite nice). But anyway, I could relate. This was not a hard-boiled MC, but a soft-boiled one. The new hero in town was a heroine. And she was little messed-up, and a lot bad-ass.

Right then, I realized not only that I could write suspense, but that I had to.

Let’s fast forward to my Zoe Goldman series, featuring an overly tall, ADHD-laden psychiatrist with a lot of baggage and a few mysteries to solve. Not your typical protagonist, to be certain. Could I have written her twenty years ago? I don’t know. But I could now. I had models to show me the way. But, there was a catch.

I would have to cubbyhole myself into a category. Why?

Because apparently, women require labels.

“Women’s fiction” for instance…what is that? Can you imagine strolling into your local indie and asking where the men’s fiction is? The suspense genre is no exception. Women = different = label.

Take domestic thriller. Again, what does this even mean? Every family has its secrets and dark sides, even moments of violence. Is this subject matter any less relevant than a spy thriller or detective story? But stories of families and relationships are considered the female purview, thus the domestic label. But, aren’t they really just…thrillers?

Chick noir is yet another category, perhaps personified best by Sarah Gruen’s distrustful, tattooed and half-addicted Clare DeWitt (my standby to the “which fictional character would you like to take to dinner” question.) And of course, we can’t forget Amy from Gone Girl, the perky, little psychopath who doesn’t give a f*&$ about you or your happy ending. The feminine, gasp, anti-hero.

People are still getting used to us, and our voices. At last year’s International Thriller Writer’s convention (okay, I just worked that in because I was a best first novel finalist,) I heard a male writer scoff at the “unreliable narrator fad” and how many publishers were “sick to death of it.” I sensed in his comment a note of condescension as well as disquiet. The unspoken narrative was this: let’s get back to the real narrator. The default one, the male one. And if not, at least make her comfortable for me, packaged in a way that I can recognize: likable.

Ah, the likable landmine. Which is another essay altogether…

Yes, there are still battles to be won, but we’ve come a long way. Women don’t have to sneak or bludgeon their way onto best-of mystery lists quite as much. Meg Abbot (writer of high school chick noir, which is truly terrifying), Laura Lippmann and Tana French are regulars on there now, as well as the perennial Joyce Carol Oates – who was doing domestic thriller before it was even a thing. We’ve come a long way.

And when people can stop labeling my writing as “women’s fiction,” “domestic suspense,” “chick noir” or any other “other” out there, then we will have truly made it.