Tart Noir is not: dead prostitutes, women in peril, heroines who want to be men. Tart Noir is: heroines with a sense of humour and a healthy sexuality. They may be straight, they may be gay, but they share two other characteristics: they like men, but they love being women.

Tart Noir really started for me when I and my friend Caroline were complaining at a party about the lack of cool heroines in contemporary crime fiction. This was the early 90s, when the particular feminist ethos meant that all the straight heroines were either trying to act like men, or self-hating women who complained that all men were bastards. I had worked my way through every lesbian crime novel published by Virago – which, ironically, featured heroines much more assured and men-friendly than the straight ones – and was desperate for something new to read. In a moment of excitement and inebriation, Caroline and I decided to write a crime novel ourselves. It would feature a heroine like us, in her mid-20s; a heroine who loved being a girl, and had no interest in copying male behaviour to prove that she was strong, because women’s strength is equal, but different to, men’s. I know how obvious this sounds now. But believe me, a little over a decade ago, it was fairly revolutionary.

Caroline’s and my styles proved to be too diverse for us to write together, and I ended up finishing the project myself. Dead White Female, the first crime novel featuring my heroine, Sam Jones, was published in 1995, and I had no idea there were any other women out there who, like me, were trying to reinvent the crime genre, to squeeze a place for ourselves into a world still dominated by a very different ethos. But gradually, people started telling me that there were. Stella Duffy. Sparkle Hayter. Katy Munger. ‘You have to meet her! You have so much in common!’ I heard the same things about each one. And then I met them, and I read their books, and I realised that I had a community with them. Our heroines were all the kind of women who, in other writers’ books, would be the femme fatale, or the bad girl: too naughty, by society’s standards at the time, to be the central figure. They drank too much, stayed out late, had nasty sarcastic tongues, scared men simply by existing, and wore the kind of clothes that would make the heroines we were trying to supplant call them… well, tarts.

Why ‘Tart Noir’? Well, I was at a crime writer’s convention years ago, on a panel discussing noir fiction, and as a joke, each panellist made up what kind of noir they’d be. A writer who had recently been told by a lady that his books were about ‘vomit on the pavement’ dubbed himself ‘Vomit Noir’; Gary Phillips, the black US crime writer, purred in his deep drawl: ‘Well, I guess I’m Noir Noir’; and, determined not to be trumped by them, I pointed to my t-shirt, which read ‘Barbie is a Slut’, and said jokingly: ‘I’ll be Slut Noir’. And so it stayed, until Sparkle Hayter said that ‘Slut’ would be a bit too much for Americans, and ‘Tart’ sounded like something you’d really want to eat, so why didn’t we give the name ‘Tart Noir’ to the website that she, I and Katy Munger were proposing to start?

I’m a great believer in reclaiming the pejorative names women have been called to keep them in their place at home, by the sink, not out sitting in bars intimidating strange men. Tart. Slut. Vixen. And I am equally fired up with irritation for the endless amount of crime novels that sell themselves on pretty young women with dubious sexual pasts, being stalked, victimised, and tortured to death. They feed women’s fear and make them feel perpetually insecure. One of the reasons that I bonded straight away with the other Tart Noir women was that we all shared these values. We wanted to do something genuinely revolutionary: to reinvent the way women had been written about; to bring a strong, funny, sexy, sarcastic, wise-cracking heroine to centre stage of the crime novel. And, each in our own quirky, eccentric ways, we did. I am more proud of that achievement than practically anything else in my professional life.

www.tartcity.com and Tart Noir, the website and the genre, gathered steam, a fan base, and, eventually, an anthology. By 2001 Stella Duffy had joined the website. She and I, who had become very close friends, realised that we knew enough women writers in tune with our objectives to put together an anthology that would represent Tart Noir in book form. Not only that – Stella and I were equally sick of being asked to contribute short stories to anthologies which had at most 5 women writers to 15 male ones. We felt it was time to point out that we could easily assemble a fantastic collection of stories written by women. And we did. From hardcore thriller writers like Val McDermid and Karin Slaughter, to chickfic girls like Jenny Colgan and Lisa Jewell, the stories are wildly varied and rich, but each in their own way incarnates an aspect of Tart Noir. We are hugely proud of the anthology.

Plenty of changes have taken place since the early Tart years. Stella and I now run the Tart City website together, as Sparkle and Katy have moved on to other projects. Both Stella and I have extended our writing range; I’ve written four romantic comedy novels and just published a non-fiction book called Jane Austen’s Guide To Dating, based on my experiences of being single in the terrifying, Sex-and-the-City-inspired world of the New York dating scene, while Stella continues with her mystery series as well as writing novels and devising plays. But Tart Noir is where we started, without knowing each other, without any idea that there were other girls out there, attempting the same project, trying to take the same huge step forward in the dark.

And now I look around and I am more happy than I can say to see the range of female writers, gay and straight, creating heroines who are funny and tough, strong and clever, flawed, human, but, first and foremost, heroines who aren’t struggling with the very fact of being a woman. I wouldn’t for a moment claim that Tart Noir was the only force propelling this change in women writing about women. But we helped it along, we put that boat in the water, pushed it out into the current, and watched it float, and because of that, Tart Noir will always be one of the proudest achievements of my life.

Lauren Henderson's latest book Jane Austin's Guide to Romance: The Regency Rules will be published in June 2006.