New Ladies of Mystery Find Intrigue Behind the Scenes : Fiction: More women are writing crime stories, but they focus less on adventure and more on characterization.

The question hung in the air, hauntingly, tickling the morbid side of the imagination the way the wail of a police siren on a quiet night conjures up fanciful visions of crime.

What weird twist of the psyche, the inquisitor wanted to know, would turn an ordinary woman into a pyromaniac?

From the floor of the lecture hall, the guest speaker supplied the answer: Women pyros suffer from the Electra complex, he said, but their sexual desires for their fathers lead them to set fires during only two periods of their lives--adolescence and menopause.

What kind of course is this? Continuing education for villains? Electives for the depraved?

No, just another field trip for Sisters-in-Crime, an organization for women mystery writers, which on this night has gathered in New York City to collect material they can weave into the darkest corners of their shadowy plots.

Founded seven years ago by Sara Paretsky, the author of the V.I. Warshawski mystery series, the stated purpose of the organization is to promote women mystery writers so that more of their books will be published, reviewed, awarded and, most important, sold.

But not all of the 2,258 members in the organization’s 18 chapters across the United States, Canada and overseas are writers. There are booksellers among them, as well as editors, agents, librarians and just plain mystery buffs, the women said.

To all appearances, the Sisters’ efforts are paying off--albeit slowly. The share of published mysteries written by women has inched up from 35% to 40% since 1985. And newspapers that reviewed five times as many mysteries by men as by women seven years ago nearly doubled the number of women-authored mysteries they reviewed last year, said Pat Carlson, the group’s outgoing national president.

As for prizes, the first American women to win the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award were given the prestigious prize after Sisters-in-Crime was formed.

But like a good mystery, there’s more to Sisters-in-Crime than meets the eye; more, that is, than the groups’ bylaws suggest. That “more” includes the field trips some chapters, such as the New York-based “Midlantic” one, go on every month or two.

September’s trip was one of the more memorable ones, the Midlantic Sisters said. Focusing on the scene of the crime, it featured a pair of police detectives and their gory slide show, which included shots of bodies.

“Some people had to leave,” said Lita Lepie, the Midlantic chapter president. “It was gruesome.”

But gruesome as it may have been, some of Lepie’s Sisters said they could not get enough. “I loved every minute of it,” said Claire Rainwater Jacobs, the author of “There Was a Little Boy,” a thriller about a missing child.

“Mystery writers are tough,” she said. “We can handle it.”

They may be tough on the inside, but on the outside these women look about as hard-boiled as a group of Girl Scout mothers. Mostly middle-aged with silvering hair and polished manners, these women attend gallery openings and host dinner parties when they aren’t spinning stories about serial killers.

It is in the spine-tingling world of unsolved crimes that their hearts lie. Their favorite field trip, several Midlantic Sisters said, was the one last year to the New York City morgue. No bodies were shown that time, but the Sisters were escorted past stainless-steel lockers where corpses are kept and brought into what looked like a “grand kitchen” where autopsies are done.

“My favorite story is of that day, because I have a Wednesday night subscription to the opera and Wednesday night is always Sisters-in-Crime,” Jacobs said. “And so that day, I got up and I said, ‘How shall I dress? I have to go to the morgue and then to the opera.’ So, I figured basic black.”

Sartorial decisions aside, Carlson, author of the Maggie Ryan mystery series, says the details women gather from field trips like these can help make the difference between a good story and an average one.

“It’s so important to go because there are these little details, like the signs in the elevator (at the morgue) reminding people that there could be contaminated blood around and you have to be sure to wear your plastic gloves,” she said.

Jacobs said she used a lot graphic details from the morgue visit--including a description of the stainless-steel grid on the floor that blood flows into when an autopsy is done--in a book she will soon publish.

While there have always been mystery writers who are women, for years only Agatha Christie managed to rise above what many considered the suspense writer’s equivalent of the second-string. After all, went the prejudice, what could most women know about violent crime or the underworld?

It was for fear of being judged with that bias that many women would publish under a man’s name, or disguise their sex by using initials. Some of the Sisters still use initials. In fact, initials have became such a common disguise for women mystery writers, that it alerts readers to the very fact the writer wants to hide: that she is a woman.

Although there are exceptions, Carlson believes there are broad-brush generalities that separate books by women from those by men. Women tend to write puzzle mysteries while many men write adventure mysteries, she said. To that distinction, some of Carlson’s sisters added another: Protagonists in books by women have a deeper and more nuanced emotional life, while protagonists painted by men tend to be more hard-boiled.

“I hate to make any generalizations because there are some very hard-boiled women and, similarly, there are men who are writing traditional puzzle mysteries,” she said.

“But it’s partly a world view. I associate it with veterans of actual action. You come back with a certain kind of psychological wound, and some books are very good at explaining this, and since so few women have even been allowed to be in combat, very few women have this point of view.”