Are Women Too Often Prey?

I was pleased last week to congratulate Selina Walker, editorial director at Transworld Publishing, on one of her charges, Swedish author Johan Theorin, having walked away with this year’s John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award for his poignant thriller, Echoes from the Dead. I first met Theorin at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival in 2008, and have followed his work since. It’s good to see his talent recognized by the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA), which chooses the annual Dagger winners.

Joining Walker for Wednesday’s Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards presentation, during which the winners of the Dagger awards and others were named, was her Transworld colleague Sarah Turner, who edited Inger Ash Wolfe’s “debut” novel, The Calling. For my money, it seems the Transworld folks are particularly adept at spotting raw talent in crime fiction. Yet some would argue that this Random House UK imprint is also among those responsible for turning out the genre’s darkest works. Reports today’s Sunday Observer:

Crime fiction has become so violently and graphically anti-women that one of the country’s leading crime writers and critics is refusing to review new books.

Jessica Mann, an award-winning author who reviews crime fiction for the Literary Review, has said that an increasing proportion of the books she is sent to review feature male perpetrators and female victims in situations of “sadistic misogyny”. “Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive,” she said.

“Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me,” said Mann, who has written her own bestselling series of crime novels and a non-fiction book about female
crime writers.

She said that when a female corpse recently appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague’s new book, the author pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Mann said the publisher replied: “Never mind that. Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics.”

Mann said the most disturbing plots were by female authors. “The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women,” she claimed. “They are, one author explained to me, best qualified to do so because girls grow up knowing that being female is ‘synonymous with being prey’.” The British market for crime fiction is worth more than £116m a year, with almost 21 million books sold. Women account for almost 60% of the genre’s market, with females aged over 55 the most avid readers.

In that same article, Selina Walker took issue with Mann’s assertions. “Readers like to be vicariously frightened by stories of what’s going on in the wicked world outside but closure is always a total given,” she said. “The sales figures of authors such as Tess Gerritsen, Mo Hayder, Karin Slaughter and Kathy Reichs would indicate that female readers enjoy reading scary novels--and in impressive numbers.”

The issue of sexism and violence is nothing new; even Ian Rankin was drawn into this debate a couple of years ago. I guess a genre that tries to peer into the darkest corners of human behavior will always court controversy. But could there be a commercial motivation for female wordsmiths to commit violence against their own kind in crime fiction? As author and former CWA chair Natasha Cooper, siding with Mann, told The Observer: “There is a general feeling that women writers are less important than male writers and what can save and propel them on to the bestseller list is if they produce at least one novel with very graphic violence in it to establish their credibility and prove they are not girly.”

READ MORE: “Getting Re-sensitized to Violence,” by Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind); “Book Reviewer Quits Over Increasing Sexist Violence,” by Amy Willis (The Daily Telegraph); “Violence in Fiction Has Reviewer Saying No” (UPI); “‘Dead, Brutalized Women Sell Books,’” by Kate Harding (Salon).