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Nine out of 10 UK fiction stories this week have one thing in common: a woman gets killed.
Books, which appear this week’s Sunday Times trade listsuch as Secrets of Secrets, The Divorce, NamesFamily Friend, Widow, Impossible Chance, A Famous PersonMy Husband’s Wife is a Boleyn Traitor.
While the themes range from historical fiction to domestic and police affairs, each revolves around the death of one female character.
Only The Reporter, a book about the art of letter writing, breaks the mold.
This was revealed on Instagram by writer Wendy Jones, who wrote: “So 84% (sic) of the books people bought and read in the UK this week are about a woman being killed for entertainment.
The proliferation of popular books today about femicide may be interesting but it is not a new story to write. From Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic suspense to Gillian Flynn’s psychological thrillers, the slaying woman has become one of the most iconic works of fiction.
Flynn is The girl is gonepublished in 2012, it helped propel books about the murder or murder of vulnerable women into one of the most successful genres in the industry, with publishers spending the next decade looking for the next “girl”.
But why does commercial fiction keep coming back to the same story? Critics say that repeatedly turning women into victims can lead to violence against them. Yet the paradox of the brand is that women are also the biggest consumers, with some arguing that its appeal may be a solution to real fears.
Crime writer Mel McGrath wrote that the genre, in some ways, carried over from the era of male writers like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane to killing women in particular to heroize the men who investigate their deaths. She said: “Reading crime fiction written by women is very empowering when it comes to women.
A crime writer is critic Laura Wilson explained that domestic noir is popular at the moment because it shows “some real horror”.
“Women who are killed are those who are killed by people they know, such as close friends or relatives, as opposed to men who are killed by men, who are often killed by strangers,” Wilson said. “Every industry survey that has been done on this topic shows that women are the biggest sellers of fake news.”
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Novelist Denise Mina traced the desire to 18th-century London blog sellers, who discovered that fabricated crimes sold copies as long as the victim had a certain reputation. “The story of a dead woman, especially a beautiful white girl, has sold news for centuries,” he said. “Fiction often has such a character.”
But Mina refused to read the wish as bad. “That’s what people want to read, but maybe not because they want to hurt the characters in the story, as much as they want them to survive.” Narrative only works if the reader cares deeply about what happened.
American criminologist Scott Bonn, author of Why We Love Serial Killers, said he argued similarly about actual crime. Bonn said many women have told her they consume true-crime podcasts and articles about “tips on how to protect yourself from being attacked by strangers” and “how to spot social red flags” in potentially dangerous men.
For crime writer Lori Rader-Day, this kind of work is closer to therapy than cultivation. He said: “Crime books are the stories of our time. Even though violent crime is at an all-time low in recorded history, crime books give our concerns about the state of the world somewhere we can go, safely.”
A traditional crime novel, Mr Rader-Day said, is less than 400 pages long and the mysteries are solved and brought back, “not like a real death”, so it’s very comforting. He said both art and culture explain why the victim is often a woman.
“Most readers, most consumers, are also women, so if a writer wants to express the concerns of anyone else, a woman is a good choice – the concern that they themselves may be victims,” he said.
But he didn’t know what the victim looked like most of the time. “Beautiful woman. Slim. Red or red-headed. Madonna or sex worker. A beautiful dead girl is a representation of an innocent person, without the problem of humanizing the victim. It’s a kind of shorthand that works slowly because of all the garbage we still have in our beliefs, such as racism, denigration of men.”
Not everyone agrees that the species should be protected. The Fixed rewardwhich was started by the writer of Bridget Lawless, planned to give a prize to the cheerleaders when “no woman is beaten, raped, molested, raped or killed”. But he met with anger from the writers of the genre.
Val McDermid said she “wasn’t happy to be lumped in with stupid, incompetent and violent people”, while Sarah Hilary called the award “an unimaginably low feminism”.
For crime writer Sophie Hannah, avoiding violence misses the point. Writing in the GuardianHannah said that doing violence “is not the same as writing about violence.” “If we cannot prevent people from hurting each other, we must write stories where the harm is done in a psychological and moral way, and punished,” he said.
