Until quite recently, the story of the development of crime fiction was most commonly told as a movement from man to man, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, then Arthur Conan Doyle, followed by Dashiell Hammett and so on. Fittingly enough, critics of the genre most concerned with mysteries, secrets, and deceit thus misrepresented its true story by writing women, both writers and detectives, out of its history until they appeared, seemingly from nowhere, first in the Golden Age and then again with the rise of feminist crime fiction in the 1980s. That distorted and partial history began to undergo revision in the late 1980s, as feminist critics discovered lost women writers such as Seeley Register and Anna Katherine Green and also began to look at gothic and sensation fiction for the roots of the genre. It is now widely acknowledged that the woman writer and the woman detective have as long a history in crime fiction as do their male counterparts.