Tinkerers vs Probers

Sarah Weinman has two excellent posts up on the subject of Tinkerers versus Probers:
"...if I take a sampling of the crime and thriller writers I read,
and try to put them in either category, the “tinkerers” will be
made up primarily of men, while the “probers” are more likely to
be women. “Tinkerers”, I would say, write big standalone thrillers, military novels, espionage, techno-thrillers, gangster-themed books, and so on and so forth. These books are heavy on action, very plot-driven, and laden with details—the more arcane, the better. They aren’t likely to be terribly introspective either, because they are too busy trying to advance the plot, even if they are character-driven.
The best examples I can come up with this are
some of my favorite male writers, like Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake,
Thomas Perry, and Lee Child (never mind a lot of the bestselling
male writers of the Grisham/Patterson/Clancy ilk, but as I generally
don’t read them, I won’t talk about them here.) All wrote—or still
write—great characters that grab the reader from the first, but they
never sacrifice the advancement of plot and don’t have too many
resting points for introspection. Thomas’s books are the archetype
because the plots are so damned twisty and the characters so
distinctive, but the blend is almost perfectly balanced.
“Probers” write the kind of books you might expect them to write—character-driven, psychologically inclined, strong sense of place and atmosphere, and while there can be a very strong plot, it’s not imperative for the story to work.
People that immediately come to mind are the Psychological thriller
queens like Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Minette Walters, PD James, and Laura Wilson, more hardboiled-esque types like Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, and Val McDermid, and in the US, Laura Lippman and S.J. Rozan. The men that come to mind that could be
included in this category—people like Peter Robinson, T. Jefferson
Parker, and Stephen Booth—are those that at least to my knowledge,
are read far more and appeal more to women and men. They have all
the requisite plot-driven devices and their stories move, but
perhaps at a more leisurely pace than would authors who
could be more tinkerer-esque."

Back in India, we don't have enough of a crime/thriller genre yet to offer a discussion of gender stereotypes--though the little that's come out so far is very Boy's Own. But mainstream fiction's gone through the usual debate, with male authors being seen as more prone to producing the "loose, baggy monsters" that Henry James and later, Amit Chaudhuri complained about. Shashi Deshpande wrote an essay on what it meant to be a "woman writer" quite a while ago, and her recent novel, Moving On, carries
this defiant epigraph:
"All the stories that have ever been told are the stories of families--from Adam and Eve onward." (Erica Jong, Inventing Memory.)