The Lady Killers

Anyone who’s ever attended a crime-fiction convention can tell you that women make up the largest segment of attendees. “Initially, I believed that it wasn’t that women were greater crime addicts than men, just that they were more likely to want a book signed or felt less inhibited about discussing what I had written,” remarks British journalist-turned-novelist Alexander McGregor (Lawless) in The Scotsman. “But when I recently enrolled in a college evening criminology course I discovered I was the only male in the class.”

McGregor goes on to observe, with some astonishment, that

Not only do women dominate book-signing queues by some margin; most also have expert insights into life-extinguishing techniques and are eager to discuss the forensic lapses which have trapped killers. Mild-mannered mothers can recite with ease why they believe Ted Bundy escaped capture for so long, or the basic errors that helped convict the likes of Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. And they’re not just reading books. The same women admit that they cannot get enough of television programmes about crime, whether true or fictional.

Why this fascination for crime and punishment among the distaff set? McGregor quotes novelist Natasha Cooper (née Daphne Wright, author of Evil Is Done), who he says “believes the shift in female reading habits may just be part of the continuing process of women breaking free of their stereotyping, much like the growing success of women who write about crime. ‘Crime fiction provides a wonderful outlet for all the unacceptably violent impulses we are not otherwise allowed to express,’ she says. ‘We are allowed to be miserable or ill but still not allowed to be angry.’”

Read the whole Scotsman essay here.