Remember the Golden Age of detective fiction? Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham ... Well, yes. But the person who sold more books back in the 30s than all of them rolled together was a poisonous Little Englander called Sydney Horler whose books were badly written, brutish, nasty, antisemitic, homophobic misogynies that sold by the barrowload. They've since fallen into obscurity, known only to keen students of the darker corners of the genre.

So what's my point? Well, I have two. One is that quality lasts and rubbish meets its deserved fate. The other is that there have always been books that rely on something other than quality to make their mark.

The world of books has its share of wannabes who see the success of others as an invitation to jump on the bandwagon. The trouble is that, lacking the talent of the gifted writers, they have to find a way to attract attention.

Likewise, publishers know that every book they publish isn't an exceptional narrative that will excite its readers and engage with their brains and their emotions. So they have to find a way to attract attention.

Right now, according to crime writer and critic Jessica Mann, the attention-seeking behaviour is manifesting itself as graphic, sadistic misogyny that disfigures the genre of crime fiction to a degree where she refuses to review anything she fears may be this sort of book. What she claims is most disgusting is that this (fictitious) violence is being perpetrated by women writers.

This isn't the first time in the history of popular fiction where the attention-grabbing mechanism has been to shock or to disgust. It happened back in the Victorian era, when Wilkie Collins's success with the novel of sensation was seized upon and used as a template for dozens of writers who lacked his skill but had no shortage of lurid imagination when it came to novel ways to degrade, disinherit and destroy young women. It's happened many times since.

What concerns me about this particular cycle is the way that the phenomenon is being used as a stick to beat up women writers. It's not like we invented explicit writing about violence against women. When I wrote my first serial killer novel, The Mermaids Singing, back in 1995, it was partly as a reaction against a slew of novels coming out of the US in which hideous violence was meted out to female victims whose only role in the books was to be raped, mutilated, dismembered and strewn across the landscape.

Those books were all written by men. I wanted to do things differently, so I chose to write about victims who had a hinterland, who had personalities and who were men. And yes, I wrote clearly about the violence done to them because I believed it was necessary in the context of this book. To write about a clinical psychologist who reads the message of a crime scene without allowing the reader to see what he sees seems to me to be perverse.

At the time, nobody was questioning the motives of the men who wrote those books. Nobody was asking them at literary festivals or in interviews, "How does it feel, as a man, to be writing such extreme violence against women?" But as soon as women – who, after all, are overwhelmingly the victims of sexually motivated brutality and homicide – decide they want to explore the same territory, gender becomes an issue. And not just an issue, but a stick to beat all of us women who dare to want to examine a society that has produced so many people who are interested in reading such fictions.

And that's the misogyny. Yes, there are horrible, schlocky crime novels that turn the stomach. But there are also talented female – and male – crime writers producing dark, intelligent and thought-provoking novels that deal with terrible crimes. There are also many badly-written, weakly-plotted cosy mysteries filled with dull stereotypes where the unlikely crime is solved by the village dry-cleaner or the postmistress's dog. I find those just as offensive to my reading sensibilities, but I don't advocate that we should stop reading writers who do that sub-genre well. Throwing out babies with bathwater has never been my preferred option.

Jessica Mann is a respected critic of long standing. I'm sorry she's turning her back on what is, at its best, some of the most demanding and exciting writing around. I'd rather have her as a guide to what we should read and what we should avoid. Most of all, though, I wish we could get over this pointless gender squabbling and address the really interesting question of why we are so fascinated by the threat, the fact and the consequences of violence.