Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor

Author:Helen Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192562678
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

Killer Women and Cozy Crime

As I’ve discussed in relation to romance and erotica, in recent years the issue of violence against women has become a major moral, political, and cultural issue. The fact that domestic violence and the murder of women are overwhelmingly committed by male partners, and that the vast majority of murderers and murdered are male, raises fascinating questions about why female murderers and victims have become so central to crime novels and especially films and TV series. The Killer Women Crime Writing Collective (motto, ‘Criminally Good Writing’) is a group of twenty-one women writing predominantly for women readers with a focus on female victims. They organize an annual Killer Weekend in London, run a book club, and hold crime fiction debates and workshops, as well as Murder Mystery nights with cocktails. The Collective’s Melanie McGrath became angry at the idea that they are writing about sexually motivated murder: ‘There is only power and hatred.’ She points to the considerable amount of casual sexism in crime novels (with stereotyped gender roles) and misogyny in TV and film crime: ‘torture porn’. Crime writer Jessica Mann wrote—as George Orwell did in 1944 (so plus ça change)—of the rising violence in crime fiction. Receiving an increasing number of books for review featuring male perpetrators and female victims in situations of ‘sadistic misogyny’, she described the explicit details of young women who are ‘imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or burned alive’.10 Mann argued that some of the most disturbing plots came from women writers, and Natasha Cooper conceded that the more graphic violence a novel contains, the more sales it attracts, and the more it can help ‘establish their credibility and prove they are not girly’.

As I’ve suggested, the category of ‘cozy’ (girly?) crime—though not limited to women writers—is usually associated with them. Women in the interwar Golden Age of detective fiction excelled in procedural crime associated with small English towns, protected communities, neatly despatched murders, and tidy plots that tie up loose ends. One of Britain’s best-loved and commercially successful writers is the original ‘Queen of Crime’ Agatha Christie. So revered is she that an annual crime writing festival is held in Harrogate’s Old Swan Hotel, where she was found eleven days after her mysterious disappearance from her Surrey home. Although crime has moved on since her day, the works are still in print—now with retro covers capturing a nostalgia for simpler criminal tales—and she has been reinterpreted by a contemporary writer. Sophie Hannah is publishing four volumes featuring Hercule Poirot. Another female crime great (and one who shared an agent with Christie), Ngaio Marsh, has attracted the attention of novelist Stella Duffy, who completed an unfinished Marsh novel, Money in the Morgue (2018). Michelle Kirkby has returned to Conan Doyle, focusing this time on Mrs Hudson and the other forgotten women characters who were important to the stories but got left behind. All these writers reject the

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