Although
substantial work has already been done on the variation between men and
women in real speech, not so much has been carried out on the representation
of speech in literature. The ample presence of dialogic interaction in
the detective novel turns the genre into an extremely productive field
of research in relation to represented conversation. In this paper, a corpus
consisting of 79 one-to-one dialogues from eight different novels written
by four well-known and best-selling authors is analysed according to six
research questions. We believe it is the context, the pragmatic situation
which makes women either maintain their speech style and represent it in
fiction as it is or change it because they want to ascribe themselves and
their written representations to a specific genre and a particular profession
respectively.