For TTBOOK host Anne Strainchamps her only encounters with guns happened in the pages of crime fiction — usually, stories featuring women. Give her a woman and a gun and she was there for 200 plus pages.   Kinsey Milhone, VI Warshawski, Miss Marple, Nancy Drew…She could name dozens of fictional female crime fighters — but not one real-life woman detective.  

That was until she picked up historian Erika Janik’s latest, “Pistols and Petticoats.”   It’s the story of how women moved from crime solving in fiction to the real world.